After withdrawing from the college of my choice in a state of depression, I returned home and experienced depersonalization. It felt like I was in a Snoopy cartoon where the adults were talking but it sounded like nonsense. In other words, my body felt disconnected from the my mind, my brain and my emotions. I [...]
Show me a psychotic child and I will write you a tragedy. "Your boy is sick," the fire chief said. "And very dangerous." No one had ever laughed when shown photos of burned bodies. Teachers, however, praised the unkempt loner who rode a skateboard, wore tie-dyed jeans, and excelled in mathematics, philosophy, and foreign languages. [...]
*Trigger Warning: Suicide* I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital for the first time when I was 20 years old. It came after a long period of severe anorexia and malnutrition, progressive dysfunctionality and decline in my physical and mental health. What I didn't know back then, I'm 30 now, was that it's not because [...]
My mental illness feels like a sucking black hole most of the time. On a good day I feel like I have something pressing down on my chest, making it hard for me to breath. That’s my panic attacks. The sucking black hole is my major depressive disorder and agoraphobia. I have suffered with mental [...]
Thinking back to my childhood, I believe that even back then there were obvious signs of what I insist on calling “a restless mind.” I remember always being a very agitated child, in my head mostly, and this has persisted into adulthood. When I was a child, gradually more and more, I distanced myself from [...]
It all started when I was about 16 or 17. I was doing drugs which led to a chemical imbalance. I woke up one day feeling off, paranoid. I went to my friends house and everything was off. I didn't trust them but I stayed. We went to the movies and the paranoia was so [...]
On bad days, I don’t know where the anxiety stops and the chronic pain begins. The tightening in my chest could be warning of a panic attack or of a fibromyalgia flare that will spread across my chest, down my arms and into my hands, rendering me unable to write – both my work and [...]
*Trigger Warning - Sexually Explicit, Self-Harm* Worrying about Worrying But somewhere in my soul, I know I’ve met the thing before. Real Riches, - Emily Dickinson It is healthy to worry. It is okay to worry. If we didn’t worry, we wouldn’t plan for things and have backups and contingencies in place. Worry [...]
What is the form of your thoughts? A poem for my body, this vessel of life. Sacred embodiment, yet struggling still. How to not forget. The shadows and the light. The undulating fields of color and the walls of sound. My restless mind. Or perhaps it was something else? Was it inside or outside? How [...]
*Trigger Warning - Suicide* I am 70 years old. My story won't end stigmatization. It was around in the earlier years of my life and it is still around. It doesn't bother me much 'cause I don't wear a flag'. "Crazy" is not 'who' I am. Schizophrenia is my diagnosis. In Canada, the disorder [...]
