Today marks the three year anniversary of discovering my father's death, and it's the little things, really. 

I try to fall asleep the night before the anniversary. My wife types on her computer in the other room peacefully. Here, it's dark. I know, I just know, that if I roll over, face the even darker spot, I'll see the corpse there, behind me. And my body shifts uncomfortably the way it does when you just kind of want to roll over, but I ignore it. Nope. Not today. It'll be there. I know it. 

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Recently, I read The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey. It’s a great book, and it emphasizes managing your time, attention, and energy. One of my key takeaways was to stop fighting my natural sleep patterns, to shift my schedule, and go to bed and wake up a little later, like my body wanted. 

However, this meant sacrificing the hour of writing I had scheduled early in the morning, before brunch with my wife. This didn’t feel like a huge loss, though. I frequently didn’t get much done in that hour, when my body wanted to be asleep. I had to fight for every word, and it wasn’t actually when most of my writing happened. 

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Recently, I taught for my first conference. In advance of the event, an organizer posted class highlights—the details of a particular class offered at the conference—regularly on social media. The comments section was usually quiet, maybe positive.

As it happened, one day I stumbled across a class highlight where the comments section wasn't going so well. It took me a second to realize that the class highlighted was mine. 

My qualification was questioned, despite being in the post. It was a class on being an ally to alternative sexuality practitioners with schizophrenia. My qualification was being an alternative sexuality practitioner with schizophrenia. 

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(This is heavily based off my class "Schizophrenia in the Scene", on how to be an ally to alternative sexuality practitioners with psychosis. I've adapted it in written form for a more general audience.)

So: how to be an ally to people with psychosis, in several contexts, by a schizophrenic.

Psychosis 101

It can be hard to be an ally if you don't know the basics. So let's go over a few things.

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When I was fourteen, my mom and I took a trip to New Jersey. We visited family and friends, saw some sights, all that good stuff. It was a great trip in a lot of ways and I have fond memories of it. I reminisced about it to my wife recently, and I recalled two things I frequently think of from that trip that go beyond vacation memories and into Things To Ponder territory.

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The other night at dinner, my wife and I were talking about doomsday prepping, and I joked that, if caught unprepared and possibly alone, my end of the world plan would be to go befriend the nearest preppers, go full Scheherazade, and become the group storyteller. They can't just steal my supplies, they can't really have me teach them my One Useful Skill and then kill me; I can't be replaced by technology. I need to be alive and coherent, and the apocalypse is actually rather boring. And I have an endless well of material. Gonna go have a minor psychotic break. Be right back with new plotlines. 

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There's this memory that keeps coming to my mind recently.

I'm probably fifteen, and I'm sitting in my usual spot at the two lab tables pushed together, front and center, in my environmental science class, my program class/major.  We've just gotten our—I think—PSAT results, or some other big standardized test.  There are so many of them. My friends chatter somewhat nervously about their already high scores around me. 

I, sporting the ever present disheveled purple ponytail and bags under my eyes in the same color, the school fashion, am booting up my class notes on my school Google Drive account in one tab, and whatever writing project in the other. I usually work on both simultaneously, noting down the slide, then turning to my writing, evoking good natured teasing from our teacher as the others scramble to get the notes in. My overstuffed backpack beside me contains school supplies, several leisure books, a four hundred page binder printout of my latest NaNoWriMo novel, and Xanax. We're all on Xanax. The class bearded dragon settles into the hood on my jacket. 

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I had a weird revelation the other day. 

During one of my typical late night rambles—when I'm up that late—I was talking about the way I visualize and compartmentalize parts of my mind. The filing cabinets of thoughts and library of memories. "And, of course, there's Farrah's Void." 

I have long wondered why Farrah, the puppy hallucination, appears to me again and again, the one question mark amongst other recurring hallucinations clearly based in trauma or the obvious. 

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I've encountered a lot of firsts while writing the I'll Give You series, as it's been my first fiction project of any length since I started working on the ever ongoing Contrivance in 2011. I've had a lot of fun getting to really know new characters for the first time in a long time, though I had kind of forgotten about their capacity to surprise me.

Over six months into writing the series, after having published the first book, one of the four main characters (and, mind you, there were only supposed to be two main characters at first, and this one wasn't one of them) informed me, in the way that fictional characters do for me—a mix of the typical creative type and the schizophrenic—that she'd had an eating disorder this entire time. Was formerly anorexic/occasionally still struggled, specifically. 

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The thing with mental illness is that it’s all in your head and it’s not who you are. And, well, yes, it is all in your head, but your head is a pretty important place, and if we scientifically consider the brain the center of who you are, then isn’t any long term major mental illness, you know, a part of who you are?

Person first language comes up a lot, the idea that you should say, as an example, a person with schizophrenia, not a schizophrenic (person), because they are first and foremost a person, not their disorder, disability, so on. I don’t like person first language for myself, because I think it misses the point for me. I am a schizophrenic, just as much as I am a daughter, a wife, a writer, so on. You wouldn’t use person first language to say I am a person who writes or a person who is a writer, would you? You’d just say a writer. 

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