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Everyone experiences pain. It's how you address that pain that determines how
well you are able to love yourself and others. If each person resolved their own
pain, the world would be perfect.
In 2021, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It changed my life forever. I thought
it would never happen to me. After I was diagnosed and prescribed medication,
I tried to end my life before the mental illness consumed me entirely. The stigma
associated with the illness caused me to believe I would never work again or be
able to produce anything of value. I thought people would always see me as a
crazed manic from that point on. I didn’t know what quality of life I would have
with a crowd of loud voices running through my mind 24/7 and overwhelming
emotional urges constantly running through me, so I attempted to commit
suicide. I survived the attempt. I took my survival as a sign that I was meant to
be alive. I wanted to know why. I used my second chance at life to fight through
my mental illness and resolve all the chaos, anger, and fear in my mind. Since I
was able to journal while processing emotional trauma in a severe state of
psychosis, I decided to turn it into a story. This is the story of my healing journey.
Today, I'm able to function at an even higher capacity than before I was
diagnosed. That may seem like a ridiculous claim, but if you knew how foggy my
mind was before, how out of touch I was with my emotions, and how little
inspiration I had to do anything out of the ordinary, you would understand how
that claim is true. Surviving from a suicide attempt, and healing from a condition
like schizophrenia, these experiences change a person in a way that I can only
describe as miraculous. You see life and all its possibilities from an entirely
different perspective. Whether it’s a delusion of grandeur or not, I decided to
write a book, which is something I never felt made sense for me before. My
book is entitled “The Beauty in Crazy” because you have to see the positive in
any situation to heal from such a severe condition, but it’s not easy. If you look
at my journal entries, you’ll wonder who could see the positive in any of this. If
you find it, hold on to it. That’s what helps you get to the end of the story.
One primary focus of my life now is the coordination of my mind, body, and
spirit, and the tools that help this system flow in a healthy way. When my mind
failed me, my spirit carried me through. Before my experience with mental
illness, I described myself as a spiritual person. I have always had a strong belief
in God, but I didn’t spend too much time focused on religion. Growing up,
religion always seemed to focus on what I was doing wrong in my life, and I was
doing the best I could. Spirituality allowed me to privately pray to God during
my worst and my best moments, and believe God is with me and understands
and loves me, regardless of the opinions of others. It was my experience with 4
mental illness that showed me the practical applicability of religion. The
knowledge of scriptures, the connection to and social support of genuine
Christians, and the practice of helping and giving to others on faith.
For a long time, I felt alienated by the dichotomy between good and evil
emphasized in religious messages in some churches. If I had trouble being
entirely good, then I must be evil. That belief disconnected me from God and
any focus on my spiritual life, and blinded me to the practical applicability of
religion. There was all of this nuance that sat between good and evil in my dayto-
day life that religious people didn’t understand. In church, speakers spent so
much time condemning demons for wrongdoing, and attributing every miracle
to angels, that I would wonder where my spirit was in all of that. After all, people
have spirits too, right? How are the desires of my spirit assessed? I don’t want
to do evil, but the religious people around me don’t agree that my desires are
good. Where did I fit? Somewhere along the way, my spirit got lost in the
opinions of anyone who claimed to be religious. I believe this experience
brought my focus back to my relationship with God, which is very personal and
unique to me. Like my heart and mind, no one else can understand it, so I don’t
allow anyone else to manage it.
I also began to focus much more on nuance in the spiritual realm, those
unspoken emotional exchanges between people. Emotional intelligence
provides so much insight into the spiritual situations that humans deal with
every day. I can tell when someone I’m close to is angry with me without them
ever saying anything. I can just sense it. If I ignore that feeling, the situation can
escalate to something physical, an argument, or even a physical fight. I was
taught to ignore my emotions growing up. I was taught to bottle up negative
emotions and never express any of them to certain people, usually authority
figures of some sort. “How you feel doesn’t matter” people would always tell
me. So, I never learned to communicate negative emotions healthily or
respectfully as a child or a teen. The problem with this is that our minds, our
hearts, and our spirits never forget how certain situations made us feel, even
situations that happened during infancy. Our emotional memory is long, so
when you bottle up everything and refuse to address it, it leaks out in some way.
For me, it leaked out through mental illness. I believe this practice of bottling
up emotions is what attracts people to evil and consumes people with demons.
In the worst cases, those bottled-up emotions leak out through self-harm,
abuse, and/or crime.
In horror films, spirits are portrayed as scary. Perhaps, certain parts of my story
might scare you for this reason. However, I would say that there is no real reason 5
to be any more afraid than you are of the physical world. It's not much different
than the unspoken emotional exchanges you have with the faces you see every
day in your family, amongst your friends, or co-workers in the workplace. You
battle emotionally with familiar faces all the time. They can kill you spiritually
with words said directly to you or through gossip with others. They can shift the
perceptions of the people around you by spreading lies. Lies can follow a person
for the rest of their life, whether it be as a rumor or just a belief in their mind.
For example, jealousy and resentment can be the first feelings that indicate the
start of an attack. Anyone who you emotionally attach yourself in any way has
the potential to haunt you, and they do sometimes. When you get a feeling of
dread being around someone, it could be an indicator that emotionally or
spiritually they regularly attack you in some way. Imagine if those feelings, all
had words attached to them. What would they say? Many aren't as fortunate
or unfortunate as those few people forced to hear emotions. Only 1 in every
300 people can.
It's for this reason that I think it's everyone's moral obligation to themselves to
take responsibility for their healing and attempt to find true happiness. That
means prioritizing mental health and spiritual wellness, in whatever manner
works best for you. That means changing your environment and the people you
surround yourself with until you look forward to seeing the people in your life
each day. The process of making those changes can be excruciating, but the
result is worth it. When I heard people talk about finding themselves, the image
that came to mind was some wealthy guy traversing through Europe discovering
all of his passions so that he could make his life even more perfect. I didn't think
that finding myself was something that I could afford to do. After I was
diagnosed with schizophrenia, I realized it's something that most people can't
afford not to do. Addressing my emotional trauma, and prioritizing my mental
health and spiritual wellness, helped me heal my condition. It helped me arrive
at a point at which I can write a book.
I’m not rich by any means. I had to sacrifice to heal my mind, but it was worth it.
My story is similar to that of a lot of people consumed with work. I never felt I
had time or money to focus entirely on my mind and spirit. Mental health
appointments and spiritual activities were on the list of non-essentials. I went
to church occasionally and prayed, but I didn't always have the time or resources
to dedicate my time entirely to those activities. For a long time, I medicated so I
could ignore my emotions and avoid addressing my issues. I was led to believe
that it wasn't practical to expect to be happy most of the time. I was taught that
life is filled with pain and obligations, so it’s important to learn to accept
unhappiness. I was taught that everyone has to deal with some form of abuse or 6
stomach misery in some area of their life, whether it be at home or in the
workplace. That toxic idea fed habits that contributed to my mental illness. Any
pain or abuse you allow to persist in your life is a choice. It may be uncomfortable
to end relationships, change occupations, or move to a different environment,
but if you plan carefully and ask God for guidance, I believe it will lead you to a
happier and healthier place.
When my mind failed me, I began to rely on God and my spirit, my instincts. I
learned to trust my positive emotions and my intuition, the language of the
spirit. I believe God talks to us through our intuition. When I did that, I realized
that my body plays a part in the conversations that happen in spirit. Those
physiological reactions helped guide me to healing as well. You know the feeling
that something is wrong before anything physically happens. (Spidey senses, if
you will.) Many ignore these feelings because there's no physical evidence of a
reason to take action, but that's a huge mistake.
For me, schizophrenia became the reason to take action. Schizophrenia turned
my emotions and intuition from feelings into loud, disorganized, vocal phrases.
As I began to heal my spirit, the voices became organized enough for me to
decipher between each one and find a message or a lesson. Every familiar
feeling was vocalized so I could understand the source of it. My most disruptive,
physiological reactions began to make complete sense to me. Panic attacks, that
sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach, the butterflies swirling around before a
speech or a meeting, the flutter you feel when you see someone you find
attractive—all of these feelings went from physiological reactions to verbal
phrases that provided insight into my life.
Most people don't get what I consider to be a privilege now of hearing vocalized
feelings or the vocalized feelings of spirits surrounding them. An illness that was
meant to make all my thoughts entirely disorganized and make me crazy
provided me with more clarity when I listened. I saw my life from an entirely
different perspective after that. So, I want to share my experience with others
who may not be familiar with schizophrenia. I’m hoping my story helps everyone
see the importance of processing their emotional trauma with the help of
mental health resources and spiritual wellness tools. I also want to emphasize
the importance of faith in God and trusting intuition. Most of all, I want to
provide evidence that supports the idea that prioritizing your health and
happiness is the best way to protect and help yourself along with everyone
around you. 7
My story is structured in an unorthodox way because of the state of mind I was
in when I wrote it, but I left it this way because it is the best way to illustrate the
progression of my mindset over the two years following my diagnosis. It started
with overwhelming and unexplainable negative emotions. I found myself angry
and depressed about things in my life that on their own wouldn’t have made me
angry or sad. Since I didn’t understand or know how to uncover the real source
of these emotions, I medicated it. Eventually, those emotions turned into loud,
disorganized phrases that consumed my mind non-stop. Now, my experience is
just that, my own. I'm not saying that my case represents the experience of
every person diagnosed with schizophrenia. For a lot of people, this illness is a
long-term or permanent condition. Some may not see the value in me sharing
every point of my experience, but sometimes you find the most valuable things
in places you feel there is nothing valuable at all.
It isn’t easy to process emotional trauma while in a perpetual state of psychosis.
It is a miracle that I found solace in the Bible, in writing, and music. Each of those
influences is a consistent positive presence throughout my book. Before each
chapter, there is a Bible scripture that reflects a theme that is engrained in me
from that phase of my journey. In each chapter, there is a song that inspired me
during that time. You may see my writing as the rantings of a profane lunatic,
but they inspired me to create this book and allowed me to chronicle the worst
part of my experience, so I embrace it as a necessary part of the healing process.
Like braces, you have to see the state of a person’s teeth before they are applied
to understand how remarkable the results are. I had a lot of disturbing feelings,
thoughts, and visions. I regurgitated what was embedded in my psyche since
childhood. Memories of physical, sexual, verbal, and psychological abuse,
sexism, caste, and/or racism all flooded out. “Sticks and stones may break my
bones, but words will never hurt me” as the saying goes. That is the furthest
thing from true. Sticks and stones could break my bones, but words broke my
brain.
After I got to a point where I could operate, I did and said a lot of strange things
amid my delusion. When you read my journal entries, I hope that you will be
able to frame them using this context. During the first chapter, I introduce
myself in a way that reflects how I felt during that time. You learn things about
my physical life that aren’t abnormal, but those details are colored by the
symptoms of a mental illness. I had so much bottled-up rage from moments
stemming back to my childhood, but I couldn’t understand it or express it
coherently. My thinking, and communication, were disorganized, offensive, and
showed a lack of restraint. It took a significant amount of work to process each
thought, convert it to a presentable phrase, and tie it to a relevant area of my 8
life. The way it is presented is the only way I can help others understand how
difficult it is to operate and recover from one of the most severe mental illnesses
discovered, without the help of medication. The format of the first chapter
reflects the amount of difficulty I had with thinking when I first began
experiencing the most severe symptoms. However, if you can find the positive
and useful aspects of the messages that I try to convey in the first chapter, you
will be able to understand what motivated me to keep going through my journey
from a schizophrenic mind to a healthy mindset that helped me to build a firm
foundation for a fulfilling life.
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