The Visit

Home again after a week away in Florida visiting my parents. They were both in good health and good spirits; it was a pleasure to be around them. My mother is now officially eighty years old. I am relieved that my parents have made it this far in relatively good health and hope that they will continue this way for a while yet to come. I take comfort in the fact that they have lived full lives. I brought with me my hand held tape recorder and recorded conversations with them and I plan to do so in August when I see them again.

The retirement community had a birthday lunch for all those born in the month of March; they have birthday lunches each month and family and friends are welcome. My mother, father and I sat at a table with three other people, an unmarried couple, both widowed I believe and and a single man, also widowed. I sat between my mother and father and smiled a lot, but said little. I felt self-conscious about having neither a job/career nor a family of my own and about being mentally ill and overweight. I worried for a few moments that someone at the table would ask me questions about myself and wondered what I would say. My brother, who had not come to visit this time, would have been busy talking. He’s in his element when he’s around people because he’s a skillful and interesting talker. He puts people at ease by being attentive and humorous. Luckily for me, in this instance, the unmarried couple and my mother (and occasionally my father) directed the conversation.

They talked about how twenty percent of the retirement community were over ninety years old, most still living independently. But then they also talked about the relative prevalence of people there suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. They didn’t talk about this disease with dread and depression, perhaps because everyone at the table was in good mental health. Their attitude was practical and compassionate. Sometime in the past six months one man with Alzheimer’s disease had managed to wander outside one night and was found the next day drowned. His family had refused to put a device on him that would have alerted the staff that he had left the buildings. The result of this sad incident was that everyone with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia was now required to wear this device.

My mother then steered the conversation towards the toy sailboat race that had taken place the previous morning. We had all been there and two of the men had competed using expertly crafted three or four feet long boats that were operated by remote control. It had been a sunny day with some wind, but not enough to cancel the race, as had happened once or twice before. Only a handful of people were racing mainly because the boats had to be purchased and they were expensive, though the other woman at the table had found a boat at a rummage sale and bought it for a mere fifteen dollars (it would have normally cost close to three hundred dollars). A real bargain because it was in tip top shape. Out of the handful of people racing was only one woman and she lost sight of her boat part way through the race and had mistakenly been watching the wrong boat. This was an easy mistake to make as several of the boats looked alike with numbers on them that were not visible enough. She decided that she would stain the jib of her boat a brilliant color so that she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

We finished the birthday lunch with coffee, cake and ice cream, which I enjoyed because I rarely eat cake and ice cream, and then headed back to my parents apartment. It was the day before I was to leave and while my parents took a nap I reviewed the week. We had had a successful week. They had taken me to see an exhibit of some of Picasso’s work at an art museum in Naples; we had gone over to Sanibel Island for lunch and then spent some time on the beach; we went to Barnes and Nobles to shop, a special treat for me as there are no large book stores where I live; and we had gone to see a movie. I had spent more of my time talking to my mother than to my father as my father would more often than not retreat to his room to read, work on the computer or watch television, but I did get to tape him talking about his family for a couple of hours one evening.

My mother had very graciously given her room to me for the duration of my stay. Sometime after my father had retired, my mother had chosen to have a room of her own. When they moved into this retirement community about nine years ago, they picked an apartment with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. This way they could live together yet have a measure of independence too. My father stays in the master bedroom, which has two twin beds, a bathroom and a space for the computer. While I was there, my mother would spend much of her time in the communal space of the combined living room and dining room reading or doing the New York Times crossword puzzles. I confess that I spent a little too much time in my bedroom reading, listening to audiobooks and meditating.

*********************************************************

I had wanted to meditate more than I actually did. I found it hard to keep up the practice that I had begun at home. My need to be attentive to my parents outweighed my desire to keep my focus on my breath. I realized that this was only natural because I was a beginner and not well trained, but against my better judgment, I was disappointed. This trip had caused me to lose momentum, but it didn’t deter me from keeping in touch with the practice off and on throughout the day. At Barnes and Nobles I picked up an audiobook by Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph.D. called Full Catastrophe Living. I had meant to get it for several years. For quite a while he has run a stress-reduction clinic in Massachusetts using meditation or mindfulness practice. The program he teaches on the 5 disc set is meant for people who suffer from chronic pain or other severe stress producing illnesses. The basic practice is to meditate for 45 minutes daily for an eight week period with the ultimate intention of incorporating the practice into one’s life.

Mr Kabat-Zinn says, and I have found it to be true, that being mindful of the breath going in and out is not easy. Resting in a state of “non-doing” does not feel natural. The impulse is to get up and do something or to get caught up in thinking. I think during those restless times it’s important to do yoga or any slow stretch while breathing deeply. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s audiobook Wherever You Go, There You Are and he encourages his listeners to get down on the floor at least once a day. So, I’ve been doing that fairly regularly and it has led me back to yoga. My extra weight makes me cumbersome, yet I’m more flexible than I thought I would be. I used to be a bit of a dancer and I still know after all these years that I must proceed slowly and cautiously. Feeling the floor beneath my body and then feeling my body is another way to gently wake myself up to all the good stuff in the present moment.

Today I exercised on my stationary bike for an hour while listening to Pema Chodron. Later I did a short work out with 5 pound weights. Of course, I want to lose the weight I’ve put on, but more than that I want to stay in touch with my body. If I can open to myself as I am then I can gradually establish healthy patterns of behavior--exercise, eating right, meditation. Proper self-care.

Tonglen Meditation Practice

I’ve just about committed to the practice of Buddhism though I’m still feeling it out. I’ve been meditating every day for the past week. It’s not an easy endeavor; I feel my restlessness and my anxiety. Sometimes I settle into the meditation and my discomfort begins to disperse and other times I just sit breathing in the discomfort. I’ve been listening to audio tapes of Western Buddhist teachers and I’ve been reading books by them as well, especially Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who follows the traditions from Tibet.

I first encountered the teachings of Pema Chodron soon after my last psychotic break six years ago. I had gone to Borders’ bookstore and bought one of her audio tapes. It was called Awakening Compassion, meditation practice for difficult times. I was about to go on a week long trip with my family and I felt fragile and unprepared. I thought this meditation might offer me some relief, some guidance and so I listened to the tapes on that trip. Pema Chodron talked about an in depth practice called lojong or “mind training”. This includes meditation on 59 pithy slogans in conjunction with a meditation practice called tonglen. Tonglen means “taking in and sending out”; you take in pain and discomfort and you send out healing and joy. First you do this for yourself in an abstract way, then you focus on a particular pain such as anxiety or depression and finally you imagine that you are breathing in other people’s pain and breathing out or sending to them healing. So the first part is the in-breath; you take in, breath in, make room in your heart for discomfort and suffering. You get in touch with it in a visceral way.

The Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths. The First Truth is the fact of suffering. Breathing in pain is getting in touch with this First Truth. But what is also true for most of us? We want to run away from suffering, our own and others, not always, but often. We look for pleasure to mask the pain. And so, choosing to breathe in the pain, to sit with it for the span of an in-breath and then keep returning to it breath after breath is extraordinary. Instead of running away, we face the problem, we give suffering it’s due attention and respect. And then comes the out breath, the release, the healing, repeated over and over. It’s like saying--face the problems in life, embrace them and transform them, first for yourself and then for all others.

Sounds great, but the practice takes courage. Sometimes the courage is there and sometimes it’s not, either way the practice is rich. When the courage is there you can embrace the pain, love it and release it, which feels wonderful. When the courage is not there, you sit with the pain and feel it. You are the pain. You acknowledge that you are tense, fearful, angry, restless or sad and you stay put. You remember the core of what you are working on, the fact of suffering in yourself and all others. This propels your spiritual quest, to understand suffering and to end it. I’m finding that both states, those with and without personal courage, are very valuable. This may be why many teachers instruct that the point of meditation is not to feel better. The point is to wake up to your present moment by cultivating love and compassion for yourself. If you’re having a “good” meditation, then you feel a calm, deep pleasure, a cessation of suffering, which is essential to experience. But if you’re having a “bad” meditation, you are struggling to sit still and breath through the suffering. That is also essential to experience. This practice involves commitment and a gentle, lovingkind discipline.

“The Second Noble Truth is the origin, roots, nature, creation, or arising of suffering. After we touch our suffering, we need to look deeply into it to see how it came to be. We need to recognize and identify the spiritual and material foods we have ingested that are causing us to suffer.” --Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart Of The Buddha’s Teaching)

I think tonglen practice continues to echo the Noble Truths. Breathing in the pain we “touch our suffering”. Returning to it again and again we have a chance “to look deeply into it to see how it came to be.” The Third Noble Truth tells us that an end to suffering is possible by refraining from doing the things that harm us. And so we breathe out all the suffering, release it into the wide open. I’ve found that I visualize being trapped in a box on the in-breath and then on the out-breath I feel as if I am breaking into a breast stroke in calm waters, a sudden release. I am held by gentle waters, buoyant, relaxed and free.

“The Fourth Noble Truth is the path that leads to refraining from doing the things that cause us to suffer. This is the path we need the most. The Buddha called it the Noble Eightfold Path. The Chinese translate it as the ‘Path of Eight Right Practices’: Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.” (ibid)

Except for Right Speech and Right Livelihood, I think the tonglen practice can be seen as an expression of the other Right Practices--View, Thought, Action, Diligence, Mindfulness and Concentration. But I have only just rediscovered the tonglen practice and the Four Noble Truths and may be caught up in enthusiasm.

Since the onset of winter, I’ve been detached from people online and offline. I dug myself a hole I wasn’t sure that I could get out of, but now, returning to Buddhism has given me a way to reconnect with others. I start with myself, my suffering and my happiness. When I feel how I suffer, I can also know how others suffer the same way and when I feel my moments of happiness, I can know others feel the same way and wish for more of it to come for all of us. I can cultivate sympathy for myself and empathy for others, day in and day out. I continually lose my way, but then I remember my breath and the practice and I return and keep working on it.

**************************************************************

I leave Tuesday morning to go down to Florida to visit my parents for the first time in six months. My mother’s eightieth birthday is in a week; it will be so good to see them. I’ll be back by the nineteenth. Take care and stay well.

More Thoughts On Thinking

My study of Krishnamurti has led me back to Buddhism. Alan Watts, an English philosopher, who was an expert on Zen Buddhism and Indian and Chinese philosophy, tried to clarify for Western audiences the nature of Eastern philosophy. He wrote a somewhat famous book called The Wisdom Of Insecurity in the early 1950’s. I bought that book just before I moved to Western New York in 1989, got part way through it and put it down. Now, almost twenty years later, I have picked it up again. But what does he mean? Why is it wise to be insecure? Perhaps because most people think that aiming to be secure is the wisest and most logical pursuit. Watts is flipping the conformist perspective around and taking a fresh look at what many of us take for granted.

What we take for granted is the illusion that we can exist in a secure state. Life is insecure. If it weren’t insecure, it would be static, dead. No matter how much we try to make life predictable, it isn’t. The present moment is always new; we are forever stepping into the unknown: “For most of us this conflict is ever gnawing within us because our lives are one long effort to resist the unknown, the real present in which we live, which is the unknown in the midst of coming into being. Living thus, we never really learn to live with it. At every moment we are cautious, hesitant, and on the defense. And all to no avail, for life thrusts us into the unknown willy-nilly, and resistance is as futile and exasperating as trying to swim against a roaring torrent.” (p. 94-5)

When we resist the torrent of life, we become conflicted and anxious. Basic logic would indicate that if we go with the flow, like water, which takes the path of least resistance, we would lose much of our conflict. Krishnamurti said that our thoughts were the source of all conflict. If this is true, then thinking is an unnatural process and a way of resisting life instead of embracing it. Meditation is a way of acknowledging the compulsive nature of thoughts then letting them go while returning to basic awareness. Basic awareness does not rely on language. Basic awareness is greater than language. Awareness doesn’t cease just because thoughts have temporarily stopped. If anything, life becomes more vital, more in your face. I’ve been meditating and I notice when I keep returning to an awareness of my breath that my anxiety begins to diminish. This is a physiological reaction to slowing down and deepening the breath, but it illustrates how breath is connected to our state of mind. When we are anxious our breath is shallow, when we are relaxed it is deep. Sighs can be very satisfying, a release of built up tension.

Each breath is real and life sustaining, but thoughts are not real. And yet we latch onto thoughts as if they were real. We are always thinking, planning, assessing, investigating, but while we do all that we often miss what is right in front of us. We stop seeing and experiencing what is. I know I am not mindful of my breath throughout the day, not mindful when I eat or bathe. Right now, I am fixated on the computer screen and the rest of the room is out of focus. I am trying to live in my thoughts rather than live in my life. I write for the same reason that teachers teach, to pass something on to someone else. But the something that I’m trying to pass on is elusive, not solid at all; it is passing memory that is fixed and objectified like a photograph. My thoughts are turned into things. These words on a computer screen are abstractions; they are symbols, echoes of an experience of thought in a particular time and place.

“Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.” ---Nisargadatta Maharaj

Mind, awareness, intelligence all wrap around each other in mutual support. Why then do thoughts attack and distort them? Aren’t thoughts the products of intelligence? The more I look into it, the more mind seems separate from thought. Mind is a presence and thought is a construct. To be in your right mind is to be in harmony with yourself and the world around you. To be out of your mind is to be ruled by delusions or false thoughts. Thoughts attach themselves to beliefs and beliefs lead to conflict. For instance, many people believe in a higher power in one form or another or several forms, but there will always be those who don’t believe at all in a higher power. These two groups generally look askance at one another, each group believing in the superiority of their position.

There really are no good people and no bad people, there are just people who have done good and bad things and have good and bad attitudes based on various thought/belief systems. Human beings are complex. Thoughts generally oversimplify, reducing the lushness of experience into it’s skeletal frame. Language can be a marvelous tool for expression, but there is always a compromise. It doesn’t represent reality; it’s an approximation, it points in a certain direction, it paints a picture. The problem is we mistake ourselves for our thoughts. We are much more than our thoughts. Mind is as vast as the universe, thoughts are a few stars with their solar systems.

Of our five senses, sight is the most dominant sense and the other senses often fall into the background, coming in and out of focus throughout the day. For those of us who can see, we rely on our sight and in relying so heavily on it, we also take it for granted. We see superficially and selectively. I know I pass by so many objects in my house and rarely stop to look at them. It’s the same with language; we rely heavily on our ability to communicate with each other. We forget that language is a by-product of intelligence, of mind. When we focus on words, we disregard our greater awareness; we divorce ourselves from our experiences.

If intelligence is “the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence” it makes sense to remain alert. Buddhist call this alertness mindfulness practice. The first step is bringing the focus of your attention on your breath during the day. If you’ve ever been to the ocean you’ll notice that it is in constant motion. Metaphorically it breathes, in and out. When you are sitting or standing, aware of your breath, it is as if you are the ocean but instead of waves there are breaths. They never stop and yet, unlike an ocean, you can slow the rhythm down. Watching the breath seems to do that. If you can watch/feel your breath while you wash the dishes, fold the laundry, eat your food, bathe or do any number of things, you will find that your awareness gets clearer and you become calmer. This calm, clear awareness is intelligence. If intelligence is like the sun and the sky, thoughts are like passing clouds. Sometimes the clouds block out the sky and the sun, become dark and foreboding and other times they are light and beautiful. They dissolve and reform and change shape. As a meditator you watch the passing display, but you rest in the expanse of the sky and the warmth of the sun.

Nature Up Close & At A Distance

I give the birds and squirrels and deer a little treat each day just after I wake up: sunflowers seeds, peanuts, corn and a few apples. Today was the first time the deer came out to greet me. From my front steps I threw the apples to them and they didn’t run away. One deer sort of danced around a little almost showing off his white behind, but not running away. So I stayed still for a while and watched them eat the apples. They are lovely animals, more graceful than the mule deer out west. Usually I watch them from my window. I noticed that there is one deer without a front leg that seems to manage to survive despite her handicap; she is accepted and therefore protected by the herd. It is amazing and reassuring to think there is a precedent in nature for taking care of the handicapped. It is also a tribute to the resilience of that particular deer that she is still relatively strong and healthy. May she live long and prosper.

The birds are not so happy that the deer have discovered my little oasis, more competition for them. Yesterday, as I put out the food mixture, the chickadees fly close by me to get to the food. Their favorite? The peanuts. These birds are so small, yet so brave. Perhaps their smallness adds to their agility which is why they are the only ones to have the courage to approach me. And there are so many of them this year. One after another comes towards me, almost landing on me. Some make their chicka-dee-dee-dee warning sound; always there is the gentle whir of their wings. These last couple of days there has been the added blessing of blue skies and sunshine and I had the thought that I should bring a chair outside to sit on after I put out the bird seed. I live in the country and yet, except for feeding some of the wildlife, I keep nature at a distance. This puzzles me because I feel a heightened awareness, a heightened sense of being alive when I’m out of doors, especially when the birds, squirrels, and deer are around.

I watched a PBS program that compared the intelligence of apes, primarily chimpanzees and bonobos, to the intelligence of children. It was fascinating to witness some of these apes understanding and responding to numbers and verbal language. It seemed so obvious to me that these animals are our relatives. One experiment, first with chimpanzees and then with four year old children, showed how our intelligence differs. A box was brought out and an adult human showed a chimp what she had to do in order to get a treat from the box: first take a stick and rub it here and put it in a hole there and then go to a different spot and pull out the treat. Well, this is what the chimp did. Cut to a room with an adult human and a child, same box and same procedure. The child did as the chimp had done following the procedure and then taking the treat. Next part of the experiment: a new box was brought out, but this box was made of clear plastic and the treat was clearly visible. The chimp cuts to the chase and goes right to the treat. When the clear box is brought out to the child, instead of doing as the chimp had done and going for the treat, he follows exactly the same procedure as in the first experiment and THEN takes the treat. The fact of the matter is that the procedure has nothing to do with getting the treat and yet the children follow the ritual because that is what an authority figure taught them to do. Who is smarter--the chimp or the child? And why do we slavishly follow what we’ve been taught without using our innate intelligence to solve obvious problems?

Why? Because we are taught as small children to be conformists. And once children are taught, they proceed to teach each other over and over again. Children are very quick to point out when another child is doing something “wrong”, that is, differently from the way they’ve been taught. The child who is individualistic will too often be ridiculed by the group as not doing things in the “right” way. This pattern of group think is the pervasive pattern in the world. And it has its uses, say, in people following traffic signs when walking or driving. If we didn’t follow some rules as individuals in a group, there would be no doubt accidents and fatalities. Learning rules and following them requires patience and a basic awareness. The problem arises when a new way is introduced or a new solution. Once we’ve learned something, there is a great resistance to changing the procedure, no matter how sensible the change is. In our culture conservatives want to stick with what has worked in the past and progressives want to introduce change and this creates one of many basic conflicts in society. The old versus the new. I think most of us are more conservative than we can freely admit. We follow what we’ve been taught and don’t question.

Well, I’m going to keep questioning... So why do I keep nature at a distance when I live in the country? After all I am an animal myself. But that’s another taboo idea. It’s ingrained into the human psyche that we are greater than the animals, that we’re somewhere between animals and angels. Are angels so divorced from nature too? For me, a chunk of my belief in the existence of a higher power goes right back to nature. God is on this planet and in the universe, in space and in the atmosphere, in the soil and in the trees, and in every living creature. But there are also contradictions in nature as in human life. Nature fosters life and robs life. There are natural miracles and natural disasters. And there is the food chain, predators and prey. Did God create that and if so, why? Humans are predators to other animals (including, of course, other humans) and yet, unlike the tiger or the shark, humans seem unique in their ability to torture. The tiger or shark is hungry, pure and simple, but the human does not have to be hungry in order to kill. In fact when humans kill other humans it has nothing to do with hunger.

This has little to do with feeding the wildlife outside my house or does it? The birds and squirrels and deer look at me with a great deal of caution, as they should, for I am a human and humans are unpredictable, generous and kind one day and out to kill another day. I, too, look at other human beings with a certain amount of caution, especially strangers near my home and even my neighbors. One of the reasons I don’t stay outside is because I’m nervous to be seen by my neighbors or people passing by in cars. But that is my own hang up really and I should get over it. I don’t think anyone who lives on my road wants to hurt me. It’s not that so much as I don’t want to interact with anyone. I don’t know what to say. But it’s different with the chickadees and the deer (or my cats indoors), I don’t have to say anything. I just have to be.

Krishnamurti And Thoughts On Thoughts

“Our chief concern is the transformation, the radical change, of the human mind....Unless that radical revolution, that psychological change, comes about, there will be no end to conflict, no end to suffering and all the violence that is going on throughout the world....This change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, self-knowledge....Unless one understands one’s self, the self of every day--what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its ambitions, all its self-centered activities, its identification with something noble or ignoble, the state or some ideal--one is still within the field of the ‘me.’” ---Jiddu Krishnamurti

Yesterday I was reading bits and pieces of a book called God In All Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Spiritual Writing. I was trying to inspire myself to think more deeply about my belief in some form of higher power. Well, I wound up reading aloud into the tape recorder a quote by Krishnamurti. The quote begins: “Questioner: There are many concepts of God in the world today. What is your thought concerning God? Krishnamurti: First of all, we must find out what we mean by a concept. What do we mean by the process of thinking?....” And suddenly, I was caught up in his perspective. What is thought? After all I suffer from schizophrenia which is classified as a thought disorder and I’ve never really considered what a thought is. I promptly went to my collection of books and found a book called Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti. A while ago, I think before I got sick, I picked up this book and read through parts of it, even writing in the margins, as I sometimes do. Browsing through the pages it was obvious that I had spent some time with this book, but that I had forgotten most of it.

Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was an Indian philosopher and writer who developed a substantial following. He believed that the root of human suffering lay in thoughts. The radical transformation he often talks about (that he certainly went through when a young man) turns on self study and understanding. And so he studied himself and discovered that all thought was divisive and created conflict within him. Eventually he came to this conclusion: “The chaos in the world, the misery, the starvation, the poverty, the brutality, the violence, the mess that is going on, the madness that is going on, is created by thought.” (p.273)

It is true we are conditioned by our families and friends, by the culture we live in. It is also true that we condition ourselves with our own likes and dislikes. We are taught or teach ourselves to think in a certain way depending on our environment and there are invariably others who think the opposite way. There is conflict and the potential for more conflict. We maneuver our way around it and through it. The mind seeks security through its thoughts, but, as Krishnamurti writes, “Security is an illusion.” Security is an illusion and you have to wade through danger to get to the Truth.

Krishnamurti did not believe in Jesus or Buddha or any religious figure; he believed in Reality or Truth. For him, that was the higher power. But he saw that the very process of thinking got in the way of experiencing Truth. He saw that many people mistook words and language for Truth or focused on the messenger of Truth (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, etc...) instead of the Truth itself. But what is Truth? What is Reality? How do we distinguish day after day and night after night between what is real and what is false? I think it’s safe to say that everyone gets lost through mistaken impressions and misinformation, but most of us hold to the same basic reality. We all know that fire is hot and water is wet; we know that children grow up into adults; we know the difference between “yes” and “no”. In fact, we know so many things that if we stop to name everything we know we would lose count of it. But in that vast sea of known things I think we, perhaps out of a kind of necessity, start taking too many things for granted. We take language for granted.

How many of us can remember back to when we were children learning our native tongue? What were we taught first? Our names and the names of our family members. Language and identity became deeply intertwined. I’ve heard of the “terrible twos” when children learn how to how to say “NO!” Then language became about will and will power. But ultimately language is about naming things and thus dividing things up. This thing is not the same as that thing, just as I am not the same as you. And yet is that the Truth? We forget when we name things that everything in our world, perhaps in the universe, is made up of the same stuff. Certainly there are all kinds of variations, but the basic components are what they are. This is true for life experience. My life is not so different from your life. I have experienced sadness and happiness and everything in between; so have you. And yet we are quick to notice differences instead of similarities. And language serves to foster this divisiveness. We are human beings and we live on this one planet and yet we divide ourselves into separate nations with separate types of language and separate religions or philosophies. And those very distinctions lead to one of the most terrible human activities: war. If we worked as one unit, there would be no poverty, no starvation, no war, even disease would be greatly reduced or restricted.

Instead we choose through our language and actions to divide and conquer rather than unify and share. I remember when I was in high school I had a knapsack to hold my books and on it I wrote down a quote from a song by Crosby, Stills and Nash: “If you smile at me I will understand because that is something everybody, everywhere does in the same language.” That is a truism, a genuine smile can open the way to a real communion in a way that words cannot. I can say “Hello, it is very nice to meet you” but if I don’t smile when I say it much of the meaning of the greeting is lost. I’d take a smile over a word any day. A smile is from the heart and is intuitive. A smile is inclusive and not divisive. A smile welcomes instead of instructs.

A Painful Legacy And Beyond

My father had a nervous breakdown in his mid thirties; I’m not sure exactly when, whether it was soon after my brother was born, or around the time that I was born several years later. I don’t know because my father doesn’t like talking about it and I’m uncomfortable prodding him. He said to me that his breakdown had nothing to do with my schizophrenia, but I disagree. Mental illness is mental illness and is part of both of our histories, like it or not. He spent two months in a hospital and two years in therapy, all talk, no drugs. Luckily for him, and the rest of us, that was enough to keep him stable and allow him to find a measure of success as a corporate advertising lawyer.

My brother showed signs of mental illness in his early childhood. As he got older he voiced his resentment at being forced to go to therapists; he thought, and probably rightly so, that his parents were the ones who should be in therapy. The truth is we all should have been in therapy because we were a moderately dysfunctional nuclear family. I say moderately dysfunctional because my parents were not physically or sexually abusive, though on more than one occasion my mother could be verbally abusive, in a knee-jerk unthinking way. Of course, she had her reasons. It was the 1960’s and she and my father were, in many ways, still ruled by the attitudes of the 1950’s. She stayed at home with the kids while he went out into the world and worked to provide for his family. It became clear to my brother and me that she pointedly resented being the primary caretaker. She wanted him to take on more of the responsibility.

My father’s breakdown must have set the stage early on. My mother was left to take care of my brother while my father stayed in the hospital. This was not what she had bargained for, but being dutiful and stubborn was part of her nature and she stood by her child and waited for the return of her husband. What did she think and feel during those two months he was away, knowing that their future was so uncertain? Once I broached the subject of my father’s breakdown (many years later when I was finally informed of it), but she stayed loyal to his privacy and chose to remain silent. But I know my mother well enough to say that she might have been more angry than sympathetic to his plight.

I was an accident (again something I found out later), which makes sense because why would my parents even consider having another child so soon after my father’s breakdown? This was over ten years before Roe Vs. Wade made early abortions legal and my parents were nothing if not law abiding. Where my brother was hyperactive, I was affectionate. Where my brother was deemed “emotionally disturbed” and sent quickly from public school into a progressive private school, I was crowned “normal” and sent to public school. Other than the fact that I had the annoying tendency to whine, I was, on the whole, a “good” child; I did well in school and was part of a small group of friends and I didn’t get into trouble. This allowed my parents to focus more of their energies on trying to cater to my brother and treat whatever was ailing him.

What was ailing my brother was that he had an emotionally withdrawn father and a sometimes overbearing mother and a whiney sister. He felt like he was some sort of scapegoat for our personal faults, both hidden and obvious. And, in some ways, he was, which is why he turned away from his family and towards his grade school friends. By nine years old he was hanging out and getting stoned. Later he would graduate to harder drugs: downers, speed, cocaine. He was a child of the 60’s, immersed in the music and politics of the times. And he was very bright despite his spotty academic record. He learned to overcompensate for that by becoming verbally assertive/aggressive. His room invariably looked as if a tornado had struck it, but his mind had order and he prided himself on having a good memory.

What he wanted was an athletic, outgoing father. Someone ballsy and engaged. But our father was intellectual rather than athletic and more controlling than brave. But he was also smart, knowledgeable and interested in history and politics. This was the tentative bridge between them.

I was bright, but not knowledgeable, artistic rather than verbal. My brother chose to verbally compete with our parents, sucking up knowledge, but I didn’t even try to compete with any of them. I was the youngest in the family and intellectually the least confident, but I was perceptive. I was detached enough to see the family dynamic; sometimes I was the peacekeeper and other times a lay therapist for my mother and brother who had a kind of love/hate relationship. I also was the one who defended my father when my mother and brother jointly attacked him.

*****************************************************************

A few weeks ago I was talking with my father on the phone about his family and he mentioned that a first cousin of his probably suffered from schizophrenia. This cousin had threatened to harm his mother and then was hospitalized for most of his adult life. But that’s all the information that I got about him. My father then went on to paint a sensitive picture of his own Irish Catholic family where he had been, for the most part, the only child in a house full of adults. He even went so far as to talk about his father, who was both an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler. He said there was no liquor in the house, so his father would go out to drink and come home very depressed. The next day he would sleep a lot. My father and his parents lived in his father’s sister’s house along with other relatives and so there was a built in support system to take care of his father when he drank or gambled away money. My father said his family was warm and social but not overly intellectual. Still, despite my father’s obvious fondness for his family, he did not follow his Irish Catholic roots. Instead, he became anti-Catholic, intellectual and somewhat emotionally aloof. Instead of marrying a not overly intellectual woman and having a brood of kids, he chose an intellectually bright woman and had just two children. And instead of inheriting his father’s addictions, he had a temporary nervous breakdown and unwittingly may have passed on the traits that led to his children’s struggle with mental illness.

This is a lopsided portrayal. My father had his burdens to bear and he did bear them; he also did take care of his family and does to this day. My mother and brother might still argue with him over the way he takes care of us, but they can never say the his intentions were meant unkindly or that he’s a lazy, good for nothing bum. My father is a good man, just as my mother (who I have yet to discuss more fully) is a good woman. The mental illness in the family never interfered with them handing down to my brother and me a desire for honesty, intellectual curiosity and kindness. The drawbacks that we have inherited or acquired have not stopped us from being good people, thanks in a large part to our parents.

No Man Is An Island

“1. A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.” Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island, p.3

Is this what I’ve been doing? Seeking a happiness just for myself? Maybe so. I have been pulling away from personal involvement in the last couple of months, but I haven’t been happier. No, my psychotic symptoms are slowly creeping back into my thoughts. I have also pulled away from a belief in a higher power, not totally, but enough to set me adrift. And I have stopped going to Al-Anon meetings due to anxiety about driving at night, especially in the winter. In addition, I have nearly lost two online friends from neglect. It has been a subtle process, but unintentionally inconsiderate. Not like me. My heart has become numb and my prayers for others all but silenced. Is this really the direction I want to take?

It took me over a month, but I read a book called Party Of One: The Loners’ Manifesto by Anneli Rufus. Around the time I decided not to visit my parents for the holidays, I was also trying to imagine myself as some well-adjusted loner from Ms. Rufus’ book. I thought that I would like to be her kind of loner: she is married to another loner and has a couple of close friends, but spends much of her time alone, writing. But then she began railing against the stereotype of loners as being crazy and violent. The violent, crazy loners she called pseudoloners. In her view these were people who really wanted to be social and part of the group, but were outcasts and angry about it. Then she had this to say about the mentally ill: “Unkind as it sounds, the mentally ill are not as a rule enjoyable or even easy to be around. So most people avoid them. The outlook of an unsound mind is so singular that it cannot really be shared by others....Homeless or not, harmless or not, outside of institutions the mentally ill are pretty much consigned to lives of isolation. Not by choice in every case. A schizophrenic living under a bridge who murders a hapless passerby, believing it will forestall Armageddon, is not necessarily a loner.” (pp. 197-98) And suddenly, I, a mentally ill loner, was shunted aside by the author as not worthy enough to be part of her group. In using a homeless, violent “schizophrenic” as her example she proceeds to invest in the same stereotyping she says she is trying to obliterate. She is satisfied that she has vindicated herself from negative loner status in her manifesto, only to scapegoat another group, a group I undeniably belong to.

I asked my therapist this week if it was okay for me to be a loner; she said no, that I should have a few friends. For over a year I have bewailed the fact that there is no support group for people with mental illness where I live. Why? Because without a support group I sink into isolation. When I first became psychotically ill I withdrew from contact with others for several months until I had a psychotic break. Then I got my diagnosis and the voices hounded me not to stay alone. I was to find a therapist right away and support groups and I was to keep myself busy helping others from those groups. This I did for three years despite severe psychosis. And then I went back to art school. By this time the domestic violence support group had disbanded and I stopped going to Al-Anon (which were the only groups related to mental illness that I could find); I gradually stopped seeing the women who I had become friends with, had another psychotic break, began taking the anti-psychotic meds, came out of my delusions and paranoia while falling deeply into depression. I considered dropping out of school, but didn’t. It took me another three and a half years but I graduated. I will be three years out of school this May and ten years into my psychosis.

Am I being a hypocrite when I tell people on the NAMI Schizophrenia board to find a therapist and a support group? Definitely not. Except for two years, I have been in therapy from the beginning. And going to the support groups has helped me a great deal. The domestic violence support group got me in touch with women like myself who had been abused and Al-Anon with people who were friends and family to alcoholics. But neither group could address my schizophrenia. So I did what many other people living out of touch with groups and services did, I looked for online groups. I joined a group called VoiceHearers and began emailing a few of the members of that group. Eventually I left to find the NAMI site but kept in touch with one young woman. She is one of my online friends who I have been neglecting these last two months and at a time of crisis for her: she stopped taking her meds and had a breakdown and was forced to go into the hospital. I have not been a good friend to her.

And I wonder, have I lost the capacity to be a friend? Recently I have been emailing someone from the NAMI site. He said he could tell that I have trouble making and keeping friends and I can’t deny it. Despite my good intentions, I am not consistent or dependable. And lately it feels as if I have dug myself a hole that I can’t get out of, which is why I am writing here to reach out and try to make contact with others by sharing my story. My tale is a cautionary one. Too much of anything, including isolation, is not healthy for most people. I have chosen the wrong way and am now at a crossroad.

Hiatus

Just about four weeks since I last posted. Wow. I’m still okay, just going through some changes in perspective. I’ve been having trouble writing for this blog. I keep starting and stopping, second guessing myself. Still, I don’t want to abandon it, so I’ve decided to take the bull by the horns and write whatever I write: I’m 150 days into being cigarette free, but I’ve put on weight. Not a surprise. It means I have to start walking. Ah, but will I? I saw my psychiatrist yesterday and told him I had raised the Abilify by a quarter tablet. He had no problem with that. I saw my therapist ( after a six week break) and told her that I had been talking into a tape recorder in the interim as a form of talk therapy. I have half a shoe box full of 90 minute tapes and you know what? it helps, it really does. I am going to continue with it even though it will leave me with a shitload of tapes. I’m thinking about making some identifying notes to put into each case, so they’re not just an amorphous mess. I want to write a memoir and these tapes might help me to do that.

What is it about talking into a tape recorder and then listening to it? I think it’s harder to lie to myself when I talk out loud and it’s easier to spot inconsistencies in my thinking. Of course I get repetitive, but sometimes making myself aware of what I keep going back to is useful, either in getting something done, or in remedying some particular problem. Making a spoken record of myself gives me a reality check. And I find myself befriending myself; I like the person I hear, she’s not perfect, but she’s good enough. When the voices are telling me that I’m evil, I feel dark, closed up, even ugly and so I speak into the tape recorder and then listen to myself expecting to hear negativity, but that’s not what I hear. I hear a woman trying to be honest with herself and succeeding. I think the tapes work because they get that sticky stuff inside, out; they objectify the problem and make it more visible. Once you can look at a problem clearly, then solutions seem possible, even probable. Listening to the tapes is listening to a living past; I think I take my life less for granted as I document my patterns and progress. I know that all this is temporary, that change is the rule. And thank God (or whatever) that a negative perspective can’t stay forever, that pain can blossom into pleasure.

So I’ve been getting into solo talk therapy but what else have I been up to? For a little while I was exploring the writing sites, Helium and Associated Content. I was excited by the prospect of being in the company of other writers and challenged by the wide variety of topics to write on. Soon I published an article. The problem was that I realized, after the fact, that the article was more of a first draft than a final piece. Be that as it may, that piece cannot be taken back and reworked. Welcome to the world of publishing, where final means final. A new concept to me, but then so was the idea of competing with others or trying to earn money from my writing. I write because I enjoy it and because it helps me, but here I was trying to take it to another level. I didn’t post another article and stopped going to Helium and AC, but I also stopped blogging. I was in transition and I veered off into yet another direction: looking for work from home. I thought, “people are earning some money from writing at these sites, but what else online could bring in income?” So I did some research and came up with three things: taking surveys, word processing and proofreading. I chose to pursue proofreading. I ordered a For Dummies book on it and then enrolled in two inexpensive online classes at another site called Universal Class. I chose Proofreading and Copyediting 101 and a refresher course in punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc... And so I’ve been studying these subjects for the past three weeks.

I think I might actually be able to learn the skills of proofreading and copyediting, which has given me a push of confidence. It suits me because it’s all about writing and reading, all about language, the art and craft of it, the sheer work of it. So I’ve committed to this, I’ve bought several essential reference books: The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition), the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) and The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B.White. And I’ve bought two workbooks, one for proofreading and one for copyediting. In addition to this I’ve been picking out useful books from my own collection, such as: The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists by Arthur Plotnik; Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss (a very popular book on punctuation); Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2nd edition), and Index to English (6th edition) by Wilma R. Ebbitt and David R. Ebbitt. I have been skimming through the last two books, but reading the first two. The Elements of Editing, in particular, has given me a distinct impression of what it’s like to be an editor. My latest find for reading is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: An Informal Guide To Writing Nonfiction (4th edition). Ultimately, what I want to do is to write essays on subjects that interest me and then enter contests and/or try to get them published. I have been impressed with several writers, especially Joan Didion and Annie Dillard. My pile of books around the couch is expanding to include their works and essays by Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. L. Mencken, Lewis Thomas and Tom Wolfe, amongst others. I am moving away from watching television and films (though I would still like to do some of that) and into reading and writing instead. I think it is a good change. It reminds me of my college days at Barnard when my head was mostly in a book or writing a paper.

And I have been listening to recordings of my songs, writing down the lyrics and trying to relearn them. Most of the songs I never typed up or wrote down the chords. It’s led me to write a few new songs. All my songs are simplistic. My practice is erratic and so the quality of my voice and playing is likewise uneven, but I continue with it nonetheless. I think I see it as a spiritual practice; it lets me focus my thoughts and feel my feelings. Despite being a recluse or because of it, language and communication mean a lot to me. Songs and singing and writing are part of what keep me relatively healthy. They are therapy that might benefit others somewhere down the line. I hope so anyway. Where has this energy come from? Maybe the increase of the Abilify, I honestly don’t know, but I am pleased with it. May it last.

It was the I Ching that warned me not keep myself “aloof from people” and encouraged me to return to this blog. Every comment that’s been posted in the last month has meant a lot to me. It’s drawn me back here. The hiatus is over and it’s time to stay in touch.

Peace all, stay safe and find some joy.

Happy New Year

May 2008 be a good year for all of us.

I hope everyone had a safe and relatively happy holiday and New Year’s Eve and Day. I spent Christmas and New Year’s on my own and it was okay. I did a lot of cooking for myself and for my friend Richard and his family. Richard said that he prefers people cooking for him over giving him presents, so this year that’s what I did. I made carrot cake, a cocoa banana nut bread and a spinach lasagna using Edam cheese and ricotta. For myself I made vegetable paella and lentil soup with turkey kielbasa. Also Richard’s wife had him bring me some cookies, a plate full of food and on New Year’s day stuffed shells. Also Richard and his son did me a big favor and got rid of my old and decrepit couch and brought over another couch from my brother’s house that is in much better condition. No longer do I have a couch that is an eyesore. Maybe this year I’ll actually invite people over to my house.

I haven’t seen my therapist for over four weeks and I won’t see her until the end of this month when she gets back from her mid term vacation but in the interim I’ve been talking into a tape recorder and then listening to myself. It has been a surprisingly effective form of talk therapy for me. Though I talk to myself about my illness and reflect on my past, I’m reassured that I sound fairly stable. For the most part, I like the person I hear on those tapes; and so I also keep myself company.

I’m amazed at how much time I can spend alone and not fall apart. I’m still reading a book called Party Of One: The Loner’s Manifesto by Anneli Rufus. Ms. Rufus asserts that there is a sizable minority of loners and that these loners play an important part in society but are often disparaged. I’m not going to review the book till after I’ve finished it but suffice it to say that this author has made me feel less freakish for my reclusive tendencies. She’s made me realize that there are others like me, many writers or creative artists, who can go for days without seeing another soul and be content on their own. I know before I became psychotic some of my best times were when I was alone.

My schizophrenia complicates matters because there are times when I know I should be around people mainly in a support group setting. But the only way that is going to happen is if I take the steps to make it happen. For now, I go online to the NAMI message boards for schizophrenia and try to offer support. I also need support but I’m not very good at asking for it. It takes practice. So I’m trying to be a regular there, someone people can trust.

I’ve decided that I have to earn some money this year but I want to see if I can do it from home over the computer. There are some proofreading and copyediting jobs available and I’ve decided to try to learn that trade. I’ve ordered a For Dummies book on it which should arrive next week and I’ll study that and see if I have any aptitude for that kind of work. There is training also available for word processing work and medical transcription work. I’d also like to learn something about web design. I am so woefully ignorant about using the computer and it is high time that I get down to learning the basics.

While I was ordering books on Amazon.com, I saw an ad. It said something like: earn money writing short articles. The site is called Helium . I recommend any writers out there check it out. It’s a large site with a message board and if you’re diligent it seems you can actually earn some money. It’s competitive and there’s a rating system. There are tons of topics to write on and I’ve been having fun checking it all out. It’s a good place to meet other writers and possible employers. The articles that are written are not long, between 400 and 1,500 words an article. I’m not real familiar with the site yet but I have posted one article. I’m hoping it will spur me into a practice of regular writing. If I could earn some money too, I would be very happy but I’m not counting on it. What I want to do is to improve my writing to the point where I’m willing to submit some work to various publications. As it stands I’m a beginner, a newbie. More on this site as I get to know it better.

Doing Better

Thanks Christina for being concerned about me. I’m doing better now. I increased my Abilify by a quarter tablet. I did it without consulting my psychiatrist because I felt self conscious but I will call him tomorrow and let him know. I wish I knew him better but our relationship is pretty superficial. I see him for about 10 minutes every three months basically in order to get new prescriptions. He’s the only psychiatrist I’ve ever had. In fact, he’s the one who diagnosed me when I was in the hospital overnight in 1998. He’s a short but dapper looking Indian man, polite but firm and sometimes I can’t understand what he’s saying because of his accent. Before I got insurance he was very generous about giving me free samples of Zyprexa and Risperdal and I was grateful to him for it. My impression of him is that he knows his stuff but I don’t really know him. All I know is that his wife is also a doctor and that he has a son who is a senior in high school and was a key player on the high school soccer team coached by my friend Richard. I also know he is one of the few psychiatrists in this area and that he travels to several towns each week. Richard says Dr. N. is a workaholic and he might very well be but I don’t really know. Still I wish it was my therapist who did the prescribing of medicine for me because she’s the one who actually knows me and my story.

When I started experiencing some psychotic symptoms right around Thanksgiving, what I really needed was a support group to go to but there are none close by. In fact, I’ve never been to a support group specifically for mental illness since I became psychotic over nine years ago. The closest I’ve come is Al-Anon but that’s only a partial fit. This is because I live in a poor, rural area. And now my anxiety has become bad enough that I don’t want to drive at night which means I’ve stopped going to Al-Anon. I realized that I will have to move to some city/town with public transportation, good therapists, support groups for mental illness and possible job opportunities. I’ve started doing some research online and so far I’ve found two possible places but moving is something that I know won’t happen for 2-4 years. And I need a support group now. I’ve written about beginning a support group before but never got motivated enough to actually start the process. Ideally, I would have personal experience with a NAMI support group and then get training from them to start a new group but then if I had access to a support group in the first place I wouldn’t need to start a new group.

I really believe that a support group in my town would benefit not only my town and the schools here, but this general area. Yes, I think it’s a great idea but can I be the instigator? I’ve picked out where I’d like the meeting to be but I’d have to get permission from the local minister. I got her email address online and I’m planning to contact her after New Year’s Day. I’ll have to sell my point to her which is no mean feat for a recluse. And part of selling my point is telling her my story and then meeting with her.

This Fall I learned that at least one student here has been hearing voices. I also was very saddened to hear that a teacher committed suicide by jumping into Niagara Falls. A simple support group could help lessen people’s suffering and might have prevented that teacher’s death. But I have to be willing to not only ask for help but to follow through and put myself out there. And I feel shy and afraid to do it but if I’m going to be here for a couple more years I’m going to have to at least try mainly because I need the help to remain stable and recovering. I can’t keep up this self-isolation, it’s just not healthy and I know it and it’s just too easy to do it living where I live.

Speaking about self-isolation, I cancelled my trip to visit my parents in Florida for the holidays, so I’ll be on my own for about a month (my brother’s staying with them till mid January) and without a therapist till the end of January (it’s her mid term break). Why did I cancel? Mainly because I felt I couldn’t leave my cats alone for two weeks, especially the oldest one who is around 17. I should have realized this early and adjusted my plans to visit my parents for one week instead of two but I didn’t. Then I began feeling more psychotic and anxious and just wanted to stay home this year. My parents were not happy when I told them. For one thing, I don’t get to see them that often and for another thing, they don’t like the idea of me being alone for Christmas. But they’ve resigned themselves to it and I will go visit them in March for my mother’s 80th birthday.

Since I raised the anti-psychotic I’ve been feeling a lot better. Being alone isn’t getting me down right now. We had some really bad weather but it didn’t hit us as badly as some other places. I was expecting two feet of snow, a blizzard, but got more freezing snow and Richard came and snow blowed my driveway. He came inside afterwards and had a beer and we talked. That was real nice because I haven’t talked to him for a while and I do like him a lot. He’s always been kind to me and a really good friend to my brother. He and his wife have left an open invitation to dinner in the next couple of weeks. I really should go but my instinct is, as usual, to stay home. But, I’ll see, I might change my mind. I baked Richard a bunch of chocolate chip cookies because he said he prefers people to cook for him than to buy him presents, but I would like to make a spinach lasagna for him using Edam cheese, ricotta and parmesan. I used to have the recipe but I think I can figure it out.

Now, to get myself out of the house this week. I did some online shopping for my family and they should be getting those presents in the next few days but I’d still like to do some shopping for Richard’s family. I’d like to send something to Pam and J.P. (J.P. where are you? how are you?).

I’ve been listening to my old songs from 1995 to 1998 and writing down the words. I joined a song writing forum online but haven’t yet posted a song for a critique. Time to go back there. And I’ve been playing guitar and singing. I’m gradually improving. I have this one song I wrote about Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and I keep going back to it but it’s kind of a mess. The rhymes are a bit off though they sing okay and the music is too repetitive but I have to do something with it. Actually, many of my songs are just fragments of a song and need reworking, but I’m more connected to them than I have been in a while.

I hope all of you have been doing well, staying safe and relatively happy. I’d love to hear from you.



(106 days without a cigarette.)

Belated Update

The reason I haven’t been writing here is that I’ve been posting on the NAMI schizophrenia message board a lot. But what I need is to find a balance between posting on message boards and writing this blog. I think my psychotic symptoms may be getting worse. I’m starting to feel a little paranoid and just uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to explain. I see my therapist on Thursday, so I will talk to her about it then. I think my symptoms started getting worse when I began distancing myself from my belief in a higher power. I think for my mental health that I personally need to foster my faith. I haven’t been praying lately, so tonight before I go to sleep I will start praying again for family, friends, people in general and the voices too. I’m not sure why I stopped because I always feel better when I pray for others. And being pretty isolated praying cuts through that isolation. When I pray I feel loved and loving, safe at least for a while.



Christina Bruni has brought up in her blogs her need to send out a positive message to people who suffer from schizophrenia and to their loved ones and I think she is right, but I’m afraid I’m still caught up in the psychosis. My blog is a personal journal and will show some of the negative sides of schizophrenia. I don’t mean to bring anyone down but it’s important for me to try to be honest about my experience with this illness and this is the only way I know how to be right now. So while I cheer Chris on, I have to struggle along behind her. She has worked hard in her recovery and I admire her example. I hope some day I can be as far along in recovery as she is.



I went to the NAMI schizophrenia board to cut down on some feelings of isolation and to offer help to others, but strangely I’ve felt isolated even there. I started writing about my belief in the existence of aliens. I still believe that I am telepathically connected to them, that they are “the voices”, but I know I sound delusional writing about it and I wonder--is it good for me to continue believing this? Or should I tell myself that schizophrenia is a purely biological illness and that the voices are just some kind of mistaken impression, an auditory hallucination? It would be a great comfort to believe that and people who recover do believe it as far as I can tell. Also can you recover and still hear voices (or have auditory hallucinations) because I have no way of knowing whether this is permanent or not. When I’m depressed I give in to the belief that they will never go away. But I’ve also heard, I think from one of Christina’s blogs, that a certain percentage of people stop hearing voices by the time their in their 50’s. That would be amazing. Sacred silence. Well, I can continue to take my medications and go to therapy and hope that that’s what is in store for me.

Why have I been feeling isolated on the NAMI message board? Maybe because everyone is very polite and won’t challenge any of my beliefs when I almost wish they would. Not to fight and spread ill will, far from it, but to deepen my understanding and maybe change my perspective. I started a thread called Living With Voices (I think) and invited anyone to talk about their voice hearing experience. About four people said they heard voices and I struck up a good dialogue with one of them, a very nice man who believes now that his voices are just hallucinations. And I found myself wishing I could be like him. Today another very nice man emailed me and we then chatted on Yahoo Messenger but both of us are convinced that the voices are real, each with our own particular slant on the particulars. But what good does that do us to believe in something that hurts us?

I hope we do become better friends. He is suffering so much and so are others and I want to be able to help him and them. Do I reinforce ideas that are ultimately harmful when I say I believe the voices are real? It would seem so. But it also starts to cut through the feeling of being so isolated. I mean I don’t talk to anyone about my beliefs except online and sometimes to my therapist. But while I’ve been writing too much on the NAMI board about aliens, I’ve also been feeling more psychotic and detached, not a lot, but enough for me to notice. One thing you learn to do when you’re trying to recover from psychosis is to be sensitive to any danger signs--an increase in voices or their negativity, delusional ideas, paranoia. It means that if the symptoms persist or get worse that you have to engage in some kind of action: talk to the psychiatrist and increase the dosage of your med, talk to a therapist, find a support group on and off line. Lately I’ve been talking into a tape recorder as a form of private talk therapy and it isn’t perfect but it definitely helps. Talking aloud can be a powerful tool and then listening to a recording is very revealing of who you are and what it is you really believe. It’s spontaneous talking and in that way an honest portrait of yourself. And it’s good to have a spoken (in addition to a written) journal to refer back to and try to get a reality check when you need it.

I want to get back to doing craft work, mainly crocheting, friendship bracelets/ and hemp jewelry. I know it will calm me down and focus me, plus I’ll have created something which is a great feeling in itself. I just have to get back to basics. Craft work and listening to audiobooks are other mental health tools. Singing and playing guitar, reading, painting. Getting creative.