How My Brain Decided To Turn It Up To 11
Schizophrenia is a big word, it’s a scary word and one that comes with a multitude of heavy stigma. It seems almost popular these days to have anxiety and depression but when it comes to the serious stuff people still wince at the weight. For some reason or another, being fully, certifiably insane is frowned upon and i would’ve liked to have gotten the memo on that before my brain decided to say ‘fuck it, let’s wreck some shit’.
I’ve lived with schizophrenia for almost fifteen years now and in that time, I’ve learned a thing or two about what it means to be a human being and what it means to live on the fringes while everyone else tools away at normal lives I’ll never have the pleasure of experiencing.
When I was 20, my brain decided it would be fun to engage in a little bit of thrill seeking by saying to itself, “Hey, I like dopamine, let’s see what happens if i turn the dial to 11” I guess it wasn’t thinking long term though because, for some reason, that resulted in some pretty hyper sensitivity and a subsequent paranoia that simple things people did without realizing it, like vocal inflections, or innocuous gestures meant something far more profound and wide reaching than they actually did. Even certain words indicated meanings in my brain that for all intents and purposes, should of just meant what they meant.
I referred to this hyper awareness and sensitivity as ‘reading between the lines’ My brain saw these simple actions and decided to assign obscure meanings to them. If someone touched their hat, it meant yes or go. If someone tapped their foot, it meant ‘i hear you’. Colors also had meaning, blue was good and those people could be trusted, red was bad and meant that person was danger. Songs had meanings and many, it seemed, were written expressly for me. Commercials had hidden messages that only I and the person who created them could understand. I could have full blown conversations with just these meanings all I had to do was seek them out, and boy howdy they were everywhere.
I sat on the edge of my seat for months trying to deipher what all these little indications, sounds, colors, words and gestures meant. You can imagine that at some point it probably got to be a little too much and you’d be more than right. I started isolating, getting high everyday and just generally grew more and more agoraphobic as the weeks passed.
One Friday night, it all seemed to come to a head as i watching C-Span and loudly making my observations on legislation (The microphones in my apartment were a direct line to the United States Government, you see) and the congressmen were all giving their gestures of affirmation and what have you, and i switched to another channel and there advertised were Frontier flights to D.C. for $59. “Wow” I said “Are you telling me to go?” In the next commercial a man nodded and touched his hat.
Anxiety aside, this was a pretty clear indication that they needed me, and me alone, who else had the power to read these messages? the fact alone that they broadcasted them just for me to read indicated that I was a pretty fucking important person, maybe a prophet or a king?
That said, I packed a backpack with some sandwiches and clothes, drove to the airport and got a flight to New York City thinking that since the U.S. government was so messed up I’d have better luck at the U.N. What followed was a sleepless and dazed week of following obscure signs, attempted breakins and detours until I found myself in Woods Hole, MA under the impression that there would be a hole through the woods to Canada that I could take.
Rambling around backwoods Massachusetts, I was tired, my feet bleeding and full of blisters from walking so much and fully considering suicide having run into nothing but more confusion and less certainty about anything than ever before. It was at a quiet moment as I held out my thumb for a ride that an angel picked me up, for the next two days she fed me and gave me a place to stay and then capped it off by buying me a train ticket back home. When I arrived my parents were waiting for me and tears were shed as we decided the best course of action would be taking me to the hospital.
As of today it’s been fourteen years and five months since I got out of the psych ward.
In that time, I’ve had to extensively re-evaluate my notions about what is real in this world and what are the tricks my brain is playing on me? I’ve had to essentially re-learn social interaction and what it means to be a functioning member of human society, I’ve had to grasp with notions that some of the things my brain is telling me are false and that life in modern society, as a whole, is a lot less interesting and exciting than life as a wannabe prophet who conjures messages and meanings that don’t actually exist.
A lot of days I struggle, with meds, with energy, with depression and paranoia but it seems everyday I learn a little more about myself and who I am as a person. I learn about what it takes to share yourself and be vulnerable, despite crippling paranoia, and I learn that I’m free to do the things I enjoy without my brain interupting.
I’m stable now and you wouldn’t know i’m sick unless i told you, and as the years pass I’m learning perhaps most profoundly, that I’m not stuck, I have options, I can do whatever I want to do and there’s absolutely no reason to hold back out of fear. I am capable. I am smart, and I have ingenuity. If I can be a prophet for a week I can sure as hell write stories on the internet. If there’s one thing I could let people know, it’s that whatever they’re facing, they’re not alone, there is help and we all care about you.
