“What’s schizophrenia and mental illness like for you, especially before you even knew?”

My answer: I live with this illness every day now (but with medication,) so when I think back it was fucking intense without medication to dampen all the emotions. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie A Beautiful Mind, but they actually describe it pretty well. We’ve all had bouts of déjà vu, but this is more intense and wrapped in your fight or flight triggers. Everything feels super immediate, pressing somehow, and like you’re seeing something that you shouldn’t be seeing. Almost like when you’ve passed out and come to or maybe even first wake up from a dream and it’s all real life but out of order or context, things have this semi-real feel but you’re definitely not dreaming, so your mind is struggling to process this sort of jumbled real life with all the potentially real life threatening consequences and it’s dealing with all that data (sometimes hallucinated data,) as it comes in. For me, I now know the signs when an episode is coming on. Usually my mind starts feeling confused like I can’t quite make sense of everything and my timing on stuff is all off. Usually my skin starts to kind of tingle and become really oversensitive (probably from the endorphins currently surging through my system.) My adrenaline feels super high like I’m already involved with doing something really scary and very dangerous but I’m not actually doing anything. Now, I always live with this kind of background murmurs like a few people whispering (that’s just something I’ve had to learn to live with,) but they get louder during an episode and I’m able to make out things being said. It is a combination of external voices talking bad things about me and my own internalized paranoid subconscious voice telling me that people are out to get me. It’s like suddenly my subconscious has an actual voice to convince me that all the things I kinda fear but bury inside myself… are really true, and that people don’t even like me… that they hate me and wish I was dead. Once the full episode starts, I can’t trust my eyes anymore because things I actually see seem represented in a way that’s dangerous to me. A loved one’s smile becomes a sneer. A shadow behind me becomes that same loved one, trying to get behind me to do something bad. When they first started, I didn’t know what was going on. I thought my boyfriend (yes I was kinda trying to be Bi at one point,) was trying to kill me. Every sweet thing he did, took on a sinister context. The thing about my hallucinations is they are intense but sneaky. I’m not seeing aliens or Jesus or anything. I’m seeing things that are actually real but severely altered to fit my paranoia. It’s like your mind is forcing visual cues to make you think the worst of people.

[quote]I’ve heard you talking how you hate your medicine sometimes, does it even help? [/quote]

This gets complicated because medicine is a double edged sword. As much as I like not being a freak…. I hate feeling fuzzy from chemical alterations. I know you’re probably like… isn’t that what happens with the mental illness and endorphins… and it is, but it’s different. It’s mixed with my adrenaline and makes me hyper aware, physically. Everything is just… more. More bright, more intense, more emotional, more scary, more… more… more. I know I’ve told you that I hate chemicals (drinking and drugs,) but that’s not entirely true. I hate the artificial chemicals. I’ve always been an adrenaline addict. That’s why I get super emotional, why I put myself out there, why I used to perform on stage, why I was even an activist in school over a social justice issue that almost got me expelled, why I’m hyper sexual, and why I sometimes do really dumb and impulsive things. I’ve always been an adrenaline junky, it’s just how I’m wired. As much as I don’t want to be in hell, I also miss the rush of intensity that not being on my meds causes. And often the dampening of my emotions from my drugs makes me feel like I’m living life covered in plastic wrap and not really “feeling” things for real. It’s a complicated relationship that I’m not sure I can even accurately explain to anyone at all.