PEOPLE THAT HAVE WON -- AN ESSAY




KRISTEN HILJ'S ESSAY

What is schizophrenia? It's a window to the world of people who can't quite fit into the throngs of society. It's a seventeen year old girl skipping math class to help a Down's Syndrome girl to learn to count, to help a boy with cerebral palsy stand for a few seconds away from his wheelchair, it's getting an autistic boy to say her name. It's a realization that life needs to go forward, life will go forward and doesn't give a damn whether or not she goes forward with it. It's falling out with the friends she had and climbing into relationships with people who have walked the salt pits with open wounds. She has grown to love what society left behind.

 

What is schizophrenia? It's an eighteen year old whose time is spent as if she only lives in the present. She begins to see that one doctor is right. "No expectations," he told her, "just pay attention." Time passes and the anxiety and anger and noise persist, but she begins to see that she has a chance to break the spell of the master oppressor. She sees where she failed before and forges ahead of where the counselors ever thought she would be able to go. She can look down and see that they were just border markers of herdomain.

 

What is schizophrenia? It's a thief and a mark of the blessed. It's a nineteen year old who cries at being left at school realizing for the first time that the bandit has walked off with adolescence and dropped her square into adulthood. She talks to her doctor about the friends that have deserted her somewhere in the fog that schizophrenia laid over her life. There are no solutions, there are no answers to why the lowest point was faced alone. What matters is that she has weathered the cold and isolation of illness through some sort of grace. He cannot tell her why or even surely how it happened. In one year she is able to grow up more than she has in ten.

 

What is schizophrenia? It's a twenty year old woman who has fought the murderer/stalker/mask/loss of innocence all her life just to be where she is today. She forgets things once in a while. She has to take so much medication a day that she must use her tuition money for the pills that keep her head clear and make her heart murmur. She uses spending money on the blue tablets to fight the drug-induced muttering. She is a junior in college. She is on the Dean's List. She has found a man who loves her, and she's not afraid to be near him anymore. She has found company with people who are not the most popular or beautiful. She stands in alliance with people that have won.




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