Hi there people. Dan here. I've been on USM half the day, looking through posts, answering here and there, and it occurred to me that i need to say something about myself; to open up and be honest for once about the things that have happened to me. These things need to be said because i feel them to be important in gaining your trust and creating bonds between me and the people who frequent this site. If you do know me, you know me as the person who writes posts that are slightly irregular, slightly nonsensical, and slightly off the wall. There is a reason for this madness. The reason, as far as i know, is that i am avoiding the truth. So here for you tonight is my 'coming out' post. However, i am not coming out as being gay! No! I would not do that to the women of the world! But for all that my sexuality has contributed to my problem, I am coming out as being mad; that is, insane. Yes, that is my secret, the one hidden notion that i feel i need to share with USM (my rock of sanity) today.
For people who don't know what it is, schizophrenia can be described as a "Loss of contact with reality". Unfortunately, i am only too aware of this fact, as i shall describe.
Strangely, there are deliberations as to when and where exactly i picked up the illness. It can be said that you can have a 'predisposition' to my particular ailment, and i've looked through my past, and i've found that at a very young age i was fascinated with madness, drawing pictures of people in straightjackets and so forth. But for the record, I realised that i was a schizophrenic only about four years ago. It's not something that you can know intuitively; it is learned, i.e. it was 'drummed' into me by friends, family, and professionals alike, for the reason of 'safety'.
I'm not sure how i can make this palatable for the frequenters of USM, but i shall endeavour to put it in context. USM plays a surprisingly large part in this history, so what i will say is that I first joined USM in 2002. Back then the family consisted of people like Moongirl, Frankenstein (god rest his soul), Wooden nickel, Ginger, George, Kurtvedder and countless others. I was known as Helpful Bill! USM was a godsend. I could not have been happier to be joining in the fun, writing funny posts, being part of the family. But then in 2003 something happened which turned my life upside down. The importance of this occurrence can be debated, but i feel fairly certain that it was the beginning of my current problem... I did cocaine. One day a friend suggested it, and i was in two minds, and i wish i didn't do it, but in the end i did it, and it had a devastating effect on my brain. Everything i knew... all my intuitions about life seemed to disappear in one fell swoop and it crushed me. Since then, my posts on USM seemed to make no sense... i had lost my wit... i had lost my fervour; my 'mojo'. It began my decline into madness like nothing before.
Now, you can be as mad as you want. You can write things that make not one iota of sense to anybody around you. You can write about all the violence in the world and be considered a literary genius. But the second you transpose this nonsensical, violent view into the world of actual experience, then you are in trouble. In a nutshell, this is what happened to me. I was writing posts that were completely nonsensical, replies that made no grammatical sense at all and i felt left behind by all the ones at USM. It is hard to say at exactly what point I became violent, but that is what happened.
My parent's tried to find me a place to live, and we succeeded in the form of a room in a place called Finchely, where i lived with a man who was some kind of journalist. It didn't last. I was evicted because of my strange behaviour, which incidentally i thought was normal and logical, i.e. rational. As i was evicted i became more and more upset and to cut a long story short, my mother phoned the 'crisis team' to find out whether i was becoming ill or not. As it turned out, they found that i had 'thought disorders' and wanted me to come to hospital. I was so frustrated by this that i shouted at them to leave (i was angry) and they left and i moved from home to a place called Watford. (I still had no idea that i was ill, because to my mind, everything made sense.) But in the end, due to a misunderstanding about where people should leave their trash, i was also evicted from here as well. This happened and made me worse than ever. I found myself leaving the house just to get into fights. The culmination of all this was that, on one disasterous monday, i went to look for a job and i got into a fight with a rather strong black man, who consequentally beat me to a pulp (fully deserved, i admit) and broke my jaw. What happened is that the police came and i ended up in a cell where i was visited by the crisis team once more and told i was to be taken to a hospital. It was here that i was first administered with medication which, like the cocaine, turned my life upside down. I would not reccomend anti-psychotics to anybody... they take away your thoughts, nay, your ability to think. Doctors say that medication makes thinking clearer, but it seems to me that they make it slow and effortful. Anyway...
I still didn't know about my illness; i thought there was nothing wrong with me. As a result, as soon as i was discharged from hospital, i came off my meds and found myself thinking of myself as some kind of a God in heaven. I walked the streets with the idea that everyone could hear my thoughts and that i was psychic. everything demonstrated to me that this was the truth, and it was not until i had contact with a well meaning but dare i say corrupt policeman that i realised that all my thoughts were unfounded. I was sectioned again.
Ever since this time i have been, on the whole, fine. Fine that is, apart from one more hospitalisation. I even managed to complete a college course in humanities that got me into university. But university is not for everybody.
I've made this account as brief as i can, but there are outstanding occurrences which i have not told of here. If you want to know anything, just ask me. How it changed my life:It needs to be said that having schizophrenia is a blight on my mind. I wish i didn't have it, because really, it gets right in the way of life and is relentless. On the positive side, i have met many great friends who i love and i admire, but it has left me out of work and fairly disillusioned with life. Other than that, it get's better every day, and i love life, despite my confusion with experiences that should not be had!
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