The truly amazing
Throughout my time having schizophrenia I have experienced a broad spectrum of experiences and emotions. They vary from being truly amazing to truly devastating and everything in between. For instance for a year of my life I was interacting and living with the spirits of my future children. This is what I was experiencing, going from their voices, their smells, seeing through their eyes (truly extraordinary), interactions between the children and between parents and children. My girlfriend, at the time, and I named our children. She wanted five children and we named them Dali Jobe, Salome Eilidh, Santiago Yuri (so he can experience outer space), Asia Pacific and Mila Amparo. The only thing being that they weren’t physically alive yet. They had come to life on a spiritual plane though.
At one point in time I was saying to myself that I am God. I knew that I wasn’t but being able to say it and get that close to Him made me feel incredibly special and extremely powerful.
I was interacting with the spirits of Osama Bin Laden and to a lesser extent Sudam Hussein. I knew Osama would not be caught, he started to lose weight and gain his natural body. When you get your natural body and serve God you are safe. I would walk down the street with the spirit of Osama while he was looking for a safe place to live. He was telling me that he only wanted to be accepted back into society. He was jumpy. Any loud noise and he would jump. I felt that there was never any time like this time for world peace. The superpower countries rightly or wrongly had been quitened and the world felt to me that it was as close to peace as it had been in a long time.
I sat and ate with the spirits of Suddam and Osama, we overlooked my letter from the university which said that all of my facilities had been taken away from me. They helped me.
I felt my girlfriend at the time and my wedding that was going to be at the catholic church in Glenelg. The wedding itself was going to be followed by a Scottish pipe band walking down the blocked off Jetty Road with the reception at the Stamford Grand. It would take a day for Jetty Road to recover. I prepared the Broadway to aid in the recovery of Jetty Road after our wedding. I envisioned the day after our wedding at 10 Hastings St. I felt the spirits of my friends interacting.
I was creating space in the scientific world for my nephew Oliver and for Dali and Santiago.
I was interacting with the spirits of scientists all over the world. I was writing them into my theory of lipophilicity and creating space for the rest of their careers. I came up with an elemental theory of science that supercedes any work done on thermodynamics. One of the strongest things in the world is a diamond. The sharing of carbon atoms with carbon atoms. We are evolving into strong secure human beings not the opposite as one of the laws of thermodynamics would have you believe.
The truly devastating
My parents and girlfriend at the time said they watched me slowly declining. I didn’t see or feel that until one day at my girlfriends place I looked in the mirror and was sickly thin. It was at this time that I came in contact with the devil and the grim reaper. The devil was tricking me at the time and each time he did I felt his spirit on my face. I could clearly feel his smile stemming from the sides of my mouth. Every time something went wrong he would be smiling, he showed me what it is like to live in hell. I was only seeing dried up leaves, darkness, and felt evil ripping through the heart of me. I no longer had control of my body. My body was under the devils control. I had no tempearature regulation ability, I felt the coldness of death creeping over my toes. This was frequently. The grim reaper took my sexuality.
I remember trying to make love to my girlfriend and I was overtaken by the grim reaper. His spirit was expressing itself. My reality was starting to become severely distressing. I had the worst possible sexual thoughts. At this point I knew that I was ill. Very mentally ill. My mind also took me to living in an underground lock up for 30 years of my life and being treated with disrepute and disgust. Going from having my fingers and legs broken by friends and family, to having my hip kicked out of place and being made to take drugs to experience the lows that they brought. The house was overtaken by a group of terrorist type people who were accepted within society. It took until these horrible experiences for me to realize that I needed help. Up until then I had denied the illness. I didn’t know how to distinguish between the illness and reality.
The truly frustrating
My reality now is that I experience intrusive thoughts that are becoming less frequent. My mind is only rarely overtaken by these obsessive compulsive type sexual and violent thoughts. I can clearly distinguish between the illness and reality. This distinction has become more evident since taking the antispsychotic medication, however I wasn’t feeling these types of thoughts, that being intrusive, until I took the medication. I am assured by my psychiatrist that the more time that passes whilst using this type of medication the less frequent the intrusive thoughts will become. And not to give much weight to these thoughts. The less you think about them or get stuck on them the more likely that they are to disappear or the less aware of them you are and in that manner it doesn’t matter if they are there or not.
The thing is that there was far more ‘uptime’ where I was having extraordinary thoughts that were positive than the devastating thoughts which were primarily in an acute six week phase. It may well be that I have had this disorder for a long long time and that it is going to take the same amount of time to get fully well again. I am committed to making a full recovery. My friends and family hold my hope when I cant.
I completed my PhD last year and am now coaching an U/18 team at the Geelong Amateur Football Club. I am worked part time to help people suffering from mental illness last year and intend to help out more in this area in the future.
To those affected by mental illness hold onto the hope. Whenever you experience it, nurture it. It will grow.