After the whole finding my father's ten day old corpse thing, I didn't really sleep for about a year, until I went back on meds.

I think that this was understandable. I think there are just some things it's more dysfunctional to not be screwed up by for an extended period of time than it is to be super resilient about, and that's just one of them. 

I don't know what would've happened if I'd gone back on meds sooner. I put it off, not wanting to hop right back on chemicals when, for some amount of time, I was, simply, just going to be screwed up for a while. After about a year, though, I decided it was time. The level of functionality I wanted then, compared to what I'd wanted before, was just not going to be achieved without meds. 

Read more...

It’s been a long day. Hard to say why. 

Part of me wants to say it’s just physical health stuff, and I can’t tell if that’s strangely logical or minimizing my own feelings. It could be that my best friend, more like family, left for a job in another state today. It could just be a long day. 

I feel like I was unfocused a lot of this morning, though I also got some important things done, scheduling classes I’ll be teaching in the new year, and even almost winning a game of ping pong with my wife (getting close is an accomplishment for me and most people). 

Read more...

I’m in a dream. There was a beginning, but now I’m rapidly pacing through the private school I attended so many years ago, turning the corner at the landing like it was yesterday. But this portion of the hallway isn’t quite right—there are doors, doors, doors, on one side, and I’m throwing them open as I go, getting flashes of what’s in the room. I know I’m looking for something, but I’m not sure what. Each room seems to get me closer. They become more and more disorderly, and more and more frequently feature a bed. Then a few things happen almost all at once:

Read more...

Farrah, my recurring puppy hallucination, often appears when I’m in distress.

While I don’t qualify as something like schizoaffective, which is different anyway, the state of my emotions and the state of my psychosis usually line up in some way. Negative moods lead to more obvious psychotic symptoms than positive ones.

If Farrah appears without me being in distress, I frequently wonder if, subconsciously, I am. Sometimes the answer was yes all along. Sometimes I’m now so worried about finding the (perhaps nonexistent) source of the problem, or about the psychosis itself, that, in any case, I’m upset now. Sometimes, I accept the hallucination as random.

Read more...

There are a lot of complaints about how writers (and other creators) portray mental health, and perhaps one of the most mentioned issues is PTSD.

I’ve been writing characters with PTSD for about a decade. But I didn’t have PTSD of my own until just a few years ago.

Looking back over old works—while there are things I would do differently just because I’ve grown as a writer—I don’t find my portrayals of PTSD that inaccurate. My research was thorough, including the personal experiences of others. The insertion of fictionalized personal anecdotes of symptoms and some of the emotional charge, as in the after the fact pieces, is missing. But I don’t feel dissatisfied with a lot of it.

Read more...

This is what schizophrenia feels like,

It’s hearing a crowded coffee shop in a silent office, and hearing nothing in a crowded coffee shop 

It’s a fake flash of light here, a fake bit of white noise there

It’s an object looking upside down, wider, shorter, three inches to the left, and back again, and back again 

It’s turning down the music and realizing half the volume’s in my head

Read more...

What it says on the tin.

And it was, honestly, probably the most emo thing to ever happen to me.

Let me back up and elaborate.

I didn't impulsively and abruptly go off the med (though the occasional flush all of it! urge is strong). What happened was this:

When I started Seroquel about a year ago (the only psychiatric med I've been on in years), I was prescribed 100mg, one pill at night. It worked like a charm for several months, but then I started getting the token grogginess in the mornings. At the advice of my psychiatrist, I went down to 75mg. Except that they don't make Seroquel in 75mg tablets, so I actually took three 25mg pills at night. Okay, so that was fine. Grogginess gone, but sleep was still good, along with mood, psychosis, etc. I was told that if need be, I could go back up to 100mg and give her a call for a new prescription. 

Read more...

I've been working on my fiction novel, Contrivance, since 2011. Numerous drafts, huge changes, shifts of universes, new plots, evolving characters, and total do overs.

My goal here is this: trace those changes along with my mental health state at the time.

(Note: this post was updated to go through the current month, after the original post.)

December 2011

Contrivance is born of a massive Hunger Games fan fiction project. I'm now creating the characters who will ultimately become the main characters of Contrivance, though, at the time, they're simply original characters to play a background role in the fan fiction, the Gamemakers, who create the titular Death Game, the Hunger Games.

Read more...

When I got my first definitive sign I had a mental illness, I was writing.

I was near the cusp of fourteen and in Algebra I. December 2011. Given some time to do homework or such at the end of class, I, as I often did, took to writing.

I was writing a character death scene in which the character in question drowns. In the ultimate irony, the character in question was schizophrenic—but we won't get there for a while.

Read more...

She's here again, so I'm not having as okay of a day as I thought.

The backyard is mostly dark, but she's there in the shadows of the bushes, darting or teleporting around. Compared to what I usually see in dark shadows when my mind turns on me? I'll take the puppy.

"Hi, Farrah," I deadpan from the swingset in the AA tone. It has been a long day, I guess, and I no longer care if the neighbors can hear me. Still, I take out one headphone, still blaring Hamilton, like it matters.

Read more...