What’s It Like To Have Schizophrenia: Reflections

Trigger Warning: Unreality

Schizophrenia is like walking through a funhouse mirror. Through. The world is twisted and bent, nothing looks the way it is “supposed” too. You have to guess as to what people mean and what they’re really saying, and often you have to guess if you are seeing what you’re really seeing. The distorted reality around you makes you question yourself, and there’s always some upset in the pit of your stomach as you don’t know if anything is really happening as you see it. But you live your life as best you can, because surely everyone lives like this, and you’re the only one who can’t handle it….

Eventually the colors begin to swirl and flash become so intense, and a hyperreal reality. Everything is intense and bled of life at the same time. It is too much and nothing. Colors and lights swirls across your path while inside you have been drained of energy and joy. You live in mesmerizing reality but you can’t bring yourself to appreciate it. You just want rest, but it never seems to come. You’re awake primarily at night and sleep comes in odd cycles, a nocturnal life that separates you further from society.

One day, your mind breaks open. The colors take over and Voices from the Void start screeching for their torment to stop. The world is hyperreal and fast, but also flat and slow. The room is spinning and you are the center. You laugh and cry and scream with the Voices. Alien words come out of your mouth, you’re not in this world anymore.

They give you medicine. Your mind feels open to the world, and beings and colors and light appear and disappear in front of you. The world doesn’t look like the world anymore. But you are tired. You are drained. You’ve seen too much, and it’s not worth it anymore. Your mind is scattered, your thoughts connect at what seem like random points to others. Open. Open it seems. Open and Untethered, but unable to function.

Stabilizing in your full reality is hard work. Treatment for this condition isn’t easily available. Labeling this condition isn’t easy. Medication do not do much but make you sicker for many years it seems, eventually you get well enough it begins to work as a sort of tether, keeping you from floating too far into the chaos. Sitting down and working ones way out of Unreality takes time. Time, money, and clinicians, privileges most people with this condition do not have access to do. You do at the right point in your life, and you’re able to get a grip. Find the right balance of this world and the Other. One foot in Shared Reality and one foot in the Untethered Chaos.

Sometimes you want to go back.

You don’t.

I look forward to reading your comments on the Instagram post!

@PsychosisPsositivity