Written April 9th, 2013
When shaken
with trauma, different people handle the situation in several ways. There are
two ways to deal with adversity that I have come to understand. Some people
prefer to carry on with their lives, without a reminder of what hardship they
have faced. Others, like me, like to carry on living too, but also appreciate
an occasional reminder of what we have been through. In my case, I believe that
no experience is ever wasted. Personally, I actively remold my identity based
on significant life events. A while ago, I had an experience I would never have
imagined would be part of my life’s journey. It seemed as though my destiny had
been changed- and suddenly! Now, how this will affect me is yet unknown, as the
events have been ongoing for the last three years, but what I can say is that
it has not been without significant pain. However, being the second type of
person I previously mentioned, I have learned a great deal from this series of
affairs.
Among many
things, I now believe that humility is a state that some of us can only reach
with lots of hard work. More importantly, I believe that humility and patience
are the first requirements if one is to experience real growth. With humility
and patience, a person is able to respond sympathetically and with concern—in
other words, compassionately and constructively—to whatever hinders them, in
form of a flaw. It all started one night. The night I was taken away to hospital.
After three months on admission, receiving psychiatric treatment, the doctors
convened my family and I, confirming all the symptoms I manifested as being
those of a schizophrenic. The most notable feedback I will always recall from
that meeting is that the nature of the mental illness—schizophrenia—makes it a
life long disorder. I was shaken by that awareness. My father, till date
believes it to be a condition I can subdue, if I thoroughly apply myself.
The night I
went into a characteristic mental breakdown, I was sure the world had just
ended. Engulfed in an odd reality, pushed deep into a world of fear: In this
place, my most crippling fears and my greatest passions took shape in many
forms. I would have constant hallucinations: hear voices in the wind, voices
from the radio and the television. Many were threatening voices, but overtime
the voices of loved ones—long gone— replaced them. Reunited, we created a
formidable team and played around in the world by contributing to major world
events. I was always in the news. Yes, all news channels, including the radio! Basically,
the world became my oyster, and I found this to be the most amazing feeling in
the world. As I engaged in mischief and play, I passed time by resurrecting the
dead, and I was quite certain this was happening. One becomes larger than life
while having these mental episodes. All around me were people who appeared very
skeletal, and smelled not like dust, but like they themselves were dust. I saw
dead people. They were cleaners, kitchen staff, some of them even patients at
the nurses’ station, who came in for their vital signs. Once, a group of almost
twelve people came into my room to pray over me. All around me, I looked into
eyes sitting loosely in their sockets, smelled dust, and found them to behave
old and new all at once. I thought we were all living in strange times. Or at
least, this is what imbalanced brain chemistry caused me to experience.
For three months,
such a world was where I existed, walking in a hologram of my internal affairs:
my greatest fears and my greatest passions. The future and the past amalgamated
in this place, lain out before me with an intensity of emotion that has been
etched in my essence forever. My sisters, brother, my entire family thought
they had lost me, also forever. I was being seduced by a future that in fact
brought me hope, but was tormented by a present and a past that brought me fear
and great discomfort. Why was I imprisoned for a mass murder on almost the
entire humanity? This is a story of my past that had furnished my new world. My
sanity was gone; I knew it but could not find an end to it. This other life was
really all that I could understand during those times. Actually, I had lost
memories of the true world in my battle to survive. Every night I entered into
the depths of my unconscious and awakened its most heightened fears. At these
hours I came to know that I lived alone in battle, within an alternate world I
really could never understand. In this place my subconscious flawlessly architected,
I had no hope of an end. Sleep did nothing to release me and the days never
stopped. Once a year, for three years these episodes took place, and each time,
to my delight, they did in fact end. Life continued.
Each time
these schizophrenic episodes occur, there is a relatively long psychiatric
visit, then the long winding recovery process, which includes a struggle to
recall normalcy. This struggle lasts anywhere from five months to a year, and alas!
Recovery kicks in. Since my most recent episode, or relapse, I am still
struggling: this struggle is for mental and emotional fluidity. Unlike other
relapses, this time around it seems as though everything has been taken away
from me. The rug has been pulled from under me, and I need to start over. I
have lost the self I used to know, and a lot of my old abilities gone with
that. I have become awkward in many ways: in my outlook, my thought process and
my behavior; this is not me, the one who used to be so free spirited, positive
minded and quick on her feet. But now, finding herself to be overly critical of
oneself and others, unappreciative of the positives and slow to think. It has
been a struggle in many ways, but a blessing when I see that I have to be my
own healing. In thinking about my situation, I have observed a multitude of
characteristics about myself.
One of these
characteristics I take much interest in is the extent of pride I have
cultivated over the years. I became so comfortable in my effortless way of
being that I expected the same of others. With this turn of events I have begun
to struggle for those same qualities that I thought to be my way of life, my
natural mode of being. It hasn’t taken me too long to realize they are altogether
my driving force of living. I depend on them immensely. Each and every day I
see more and more how this understated pride has hindered me from living with a
truly open mind and with genuine compassion. In effect, I find how it impedes
my growth. This lack of compassion reflects in my impatience with myself. And
if anything is needed at a time like this, where I am trying to rebuild myself,
it is patience. Going by my logic on how each trait depends on the other, this
same patience first requires humility and then compassion. I am learning that
pride often goes unnoticed within us, and it is a journey worth embarking on to
achieve the humility we so often hear of. It takes hard work. In my fresh need to live
through each moment merciful upon myself, I am learning that I need to show
this mercy to others sometimes even before myself.
It has been
almost a year since my last relapse and I am still very well invested in
recovering. For me this is the longest recovery has ever taken. I grow
impatient at times, but at other times I am blessed with great insight
regarding my situation. It is true what they say, that everything happens for a
reason; but I believe that the people who truly live by this credence are the
ones who proactively go out in search of that reason. I say this because during
my times of frustration and hopelessness, faith has always been my anchor —
though shaken at times — but not faith alone. For me, the sign of hope is often
revealed as a deep-seated insight into what I am here to learn from the
situation or what I am being built for by my experience. As a result of this, I
spend my days immersed in hours of never ending introspection and
metacognition; metacognition of which has in fact become my greatest tool. A
product of the aforementioned activities is what is now a constant awareness of
the degree of pride that sits, hidden within me. I know now that pride works
silently, and is often contained in a camouflage. To seek humility, is a work
of a lifetime; this is a notion now thoroughly engrained in me.
Wrote this one a year ago. My journey begins now: I have a dream to alleviate this brain illness for generations down. Books on Science, Fact and Fiction soon come.
