sCHIZoPHReNIa diARiES
TRUE STORIES BY REAL SCHIZOPHRENICS
PEOPLE THAT HAVE WON -- AN ESSAY
KRISTEN HILJ'S ESSAY
What is schizophrenia? It's a reserved twelve year old, a girl who cannot relate to her flesh-and-blood mortal friends while her mind rages with friends who aren't there. She cries almost every night in desperation that someone will understand the waves breaking between her ears. The boy behind her has a crush on her, yet she never can look him in the eye. There's not room enough in her brain for him. He courts her shyly, but boys are still a sort of nastiness in her cluttered judgment. There is no room for someone else in her life, and she tells him so. Her relatives say she won't feel that way when she grows up.
What is schizophrenia? It is the stalker of a thirteen year old girl who should be on the ski team and going to dances. Instead she sits meditating on the hill with the corpses, wondering if maybe she's someplace in England. Bloated images of people she knows are still alive float over her bed at night and dribble Vaseline into the air. The dead man who built the stone walls on the ancient farmland below so many years ago anchors himself onto her bedroom window to watch her all night long. Unicorns fly by and the people in the walls call her name. She knows there's something wrong, even if no one else does. Doesn't anyone see it, see that something in her is growing up terribly wrong?
What is schizophrenia? It's a fourteen year old dreading each passing moment. She now sees she has grown up enough to know that these noises and visions, anxieties and phobias, aren't like those of everyone else. She works to bury the realization, resolves to pretend it is not, has not, and will not happen. She forces herself to be with people, just because she is tired of not fitting and she suffocates. She is a fourteen year old that is being spied upon. The people who are suffocating her have tapped into her thoughts and know what she feels and hears and sees. They have clamped invisible clamps on her skull and know every impulse. She hopes that they see she needs help. These mind readers chime in agreement with the verdict of the school psychologist: She is to straighten up and fly right. She wonders how she has gotten so off course. How are her friends expert navigators through the clouds of growing up?
What is schizophrenia? It's as low as life gets. It's a fifteen year old girl who cannot stand anymore. She has given up after eight years of listening to screaming and seeing bleeding walls that hold what's left of her mind from some sick new form of mental rigor mortis. It is the relief of seeing a possible glimmer of horror in someone else's eyes (finally, finally in someone else's eyes!) and then the deflated elation of hearing the confidante say, "I was like that when I was growing up." No, no, NOBODY has grown up like this.
What is schizophrenia? It's a girl celebrating the first sixteen years of her life in a locked ward. It is a callous remark by student nurses who think she has no ears, no brain, no feelings. It's wondering if life is worth the trouble. It's seizures and over-medication and three doctors wanting to treat her condition three different ways. It's long nights in a hot room with someone who doesn't give a damn beyond his paycheck whether or not she's alive, much less asleep. It's parents trying to make things easier by saying that the ward is much like a dorm room. She doesn't care. She doesn't think that she'll live to grow up old enough to be in college.
