A Plan to Enjoy Life

despite having schizophrenia

     Perhaps someday I will no longer have schizophrenia/ be schizophrenic. It happens! Sanity, and remission of symptoms is something to hope for. It's 2014, and I've been diagnosed schizoaffective (schizophrenia plus bipolar) since graduating from college (UC Davis) in 1993: 21 years, so far. I'm better than I was, and my medications have helped. Maybe I'll be healthy, well, and sane sometime in the next 21 years. Maybe David will die or decide to leave me alone. Maybe there's a way to disconnect. Maybe the world will see the light, and become less aggravating.

      My 3 symptoms are a voice, headshocks, and chest pains. They are a daily reality, and some days are better than others. Mental illness can be a bitch. Most of the time, it's just annoying, and I think of it as being like an insect, a bug, a nuisance, a pest. Other times, the voice can successfully push my buttons, and make me enraged. Self-control means being able to resist hatred, hypnosis, and hell. I went off my medications at one point a few years ago, and ended up in jail for ten months, after an argument with a roommate led to me wrestling with 3 police officers. Aggravation and torment is a daily reality. Of course, I plead daily for David, my voice, to shut the hell up, respect me, stop invading my privacy, and leave me alone. I'm not sure if he also causes the brainzaps and chest pain, too: It's simpler to just blame him for the whole package. I suspect he's at least partially responsible.

     I'm not sure which has helped more -the medication, or the friction with the source. By friction, I mean replying in kind. By source, I mean David. When he voices to me, I often reply back. Presumably he's a schizophrenic, too. He calls himself a global telepath, however, and is undiagnosed, as far as I know, being regarded as sane. Once you're schizophrenic, the label “high-functioning” doesn't mean much. You are mentally ill, sick, and have a malfunctioning brain. You require medications, usually don't have employment, receive social security/disability income, remain poor, have consequent difficulty with making a family (finding/keeping a partner and raising children), and live under the threat of worsening symptoms, disrespect, and even possible homelessness or imprisonment. Schizophrenics are 8 times more likely to commit suicide. It's not fun. But David functions high enough to be a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California, and I allow myself to think that maybe David interacts with me the way he does in order to further justice, peace, sanity, and other benevolent goals (such as economic development). 

      It's like being possessed. The bible says, “do you not know that you are not your own?” Either the presence is welcome, and you “let go and let god,” or unwelcome, in which case you are being intruded upon, colonized, controlled, victimized. It is tempting to think of the situation as one of having demons, or even being possessed by the Devil. My replies are voiced internally, as vocalized thought, and presumably heard -like prayer- by David, who many years ago said he and I were vampires. David Andrew Eldridge is an actual person (unless he's dead, I haven't talked to him or inquired after him in almost a decade), and not an invisible friend or ghost. I don't believe I'm hallucinating when I hear him. I hear his thoughts (a few, anyway), and he hears mine (it seems like all of them -some of them, anyway). Is this what they mean by the holy spirit?  Auditory hallucinations, I believe, come from a source, the brain. The brain is where the mind is. And having an “open” mind means hearing other people's thought. As Pink Floyd sang, “there's someone in my head, but it's not me.” That person, for me, is David Andrew Eldridge, self-proclaimed demon, attorney-at-law, african-american, homosexual, mathematician, and “natural psychologist.” He said he had Seasonal Affective Disorder. I think it is telling that his name anagrams to both “degraded, livid” and “dag ridded evil.” When I'm fed up with it, I call him names. When I'm charitable, I ignore him. I imagine both serve his purposes (such as instigating criminals into weaker positions on the chessboard of life). I'm a different kind of SAD (schizo-affective dis.). 

     I'm hoping physical health will lead to mental health. I have a membership at the local YMCA, and I go almost daily, sometimes twice.  And I'm hoping that writing this also will be a step in the right direction, toward clarity, if not sanity.