Mom's garden lights. I have agreed to participate in a documentary about schizophrenia. We had an introductory call about it last night, a few of us, on skype. I noticed that I am not really prepared to speak about schizophrenia. Even with the therapy I have had, I am not used to trying to talk about it. I was asked how schizophrenia affected my life, and I answered that it ruined it. This is true, but it is not all I want to say. I have had a good year, for example. I mean, it did ruin my life, but I am slowly moving past that, I hope. I was a film director and photographer, and I was married to the world's sweetest man, and I had to leave all of that to go home and live with my parents again. It was an epic fail. It was. But it has been 17 years, and only just now I am beginning to think I can just make my way out of the agony and into something peaceful and a kind of scaled-down productivity. I don't know what that means exactly, except that I am, because of Latuda, more positive mentally, happier, and I have a camera again after many years without one, and same for oil paints. I think if I just do these two things for a while, I will have some confidence back eventually. One of the other people in the documentary, a friend, said that he considers schizophrenia a gift and that it helps him creatively. He said that while it ruined his life, it ruined a bad life and gave him a good one... The producers want to talk about God and love and so on. These are kind of hot topics for some schizophrenics, for me too. I don't want to believe that God did this to me, but the voices are hyper religious. I don't know why, I did not have a super churchy childhood or anything, but I did not love what church I did have, except for a few stories from my Grandmother. Nothing that would make me think I was damaged or something. Like being screamed at for months about do I believe in Satan, for example, as happened a few years ago. Last week I came across a Facebook post from a friend. It was a preacher talking about the book of Job. I looked it up - I don't really know the Bible that well - and I thought yes, I feel like God did that to me sometimes. And there was an alternative translation, that Job did not repent, but was still given restitution - though how you could replace children is not made clear. But this has been my reaction to my own inquisition, I just do not apologise for anything I did. I did not deserve this test. And although I think I can improve my life and keep the ball in the air in terms of happiness, it will never be that I am with my beloved and what would have been by now, a couple of teenagers, which I really wanted. The most I can do is try to make myself happy with what I have left, and it's just small and not very important, but it's all I can do. I am quite happy right now, and about my husband I am just philosophical. I know he's happy and has two beautiful daughters. He is still working on his photography occasionally too. I google to keep up with the news on all that. When I think of his life, I just feel kind of pathetic with my little camera and paintbrush. But it's really all I can think of, and I mustn't lose respect for it. As for love, I don't think I will have another partner again in my life. For one thing, I am just too medicated to be able to fall in love, or even enjoy sex. I don't really get upset about this. I have tried many things in the past, since schizophrenia, to get a "normal" life back, and all of my attempts ended up with me in the hospital. I think if I had had reliable mental health, I would probably be more open to love, too. I would have confidence and mobility. But after many years of trying other things in other places, I have decided to accept my Dad's offer to take on the house and my brother, who also has schizophrenia, but refuses his medicine. I have focused on making this proposal a success for about 5 years now, and in the process I was able to accept the deal and all it involves as home. I don't really want to leave now, and set up a new home with someone else who I quite like, but don't love. I don't want to deal with housekeeping and a glass of wine in the evening, which is all I can imagine that life offering, with local guys. I am enjoying my photography and my painting, and I don't really want to interrupt that. When I was younger and healthy, I could do it all, but now I have to spend all my thoughts on my own sanity and well-being. When I am able to meet with friends, and it has happened with just four people over the course of nearly twenty years, I prefer to talk about their lives. I enjoy their uninterrupted successes and I don't want to talk about myself or have to explain. This is my problem to work out for the documentary. My therapist just keeps a bouncy conversation going. We don't talk about how schizophrenia affected my life very much. We talk about my family mostly, just about news, not feelings or doubts and so on. So I don't know quite how to think about this project. I want to say to the audience of the film that life can be ok for a schizophrenic, but the truth is I can't really recommend it. I just take each day as it comes and that seems to be all I can do. It's like advice you might get on Facebook, "one day at a time" - it works for people who have jobs and friends and something exciting comes from that. When it is just you and your own mind, it's quite hard work, actually. If I look back on my whole life, I remember hearing voices since I was like just months old. There is a photograph of me in my Dad's arms, and my mother was trying to get me to look at the camera, but the sun was in my eyes. I heard a woman's voice explaining to me that she was my mother, and that she wanted me to look at the camera, for some reason, I understood her voice, but not my mother's. Prophetic things have happened regarding voices, and I have considered that my life was mapped out in advance by guiding spirits. It's not natural for me to think like this. After a few years of not hearing voices, a voice and a vision asked me why I wanted to get married, as I was packing up to leave for London to be with my love. I said I don't know, but if it only lasts ten years, it will have been worth it. I was wildly in love, but I thought the question was rude. My marriage lasted 10 years and six weeks. There are other little cut points and questionnaires I have had that happened, but I had dismissed them. Like, when I was about 14, a voice asked me what name I would like for a child, and I thought for a while and answered Justin. I heard an English voice, a woman, say, I bet you would like my Justin. My husband was English and named Justin, we met at age 23. But I had forgotten the exchange totally when I met him. A photographer, whose work I did not know previously appeared to me in a vision at the Student Union at university while I was taking a break from my studies. Robin Williams' movie called Popeye was due to open and the voice asked me if I would see the movie. I said probably not. The voice said, I have done some photography about Popeye for a magazine, I think you will like it. Again, I just dismissed it. A few days later, I bought a copy of Vogue like I usually did, and there was a spread in it inspired by the Popeye film. I did like it. It was monochrome and about girls who dressed like Olive Oyl. I tore it out and saved it. I ended up meeting that photographer years later in London but I didn't make a connection. I found the tear sheets later, when I returned to my parents' house after my first psychosis. I don't appreciate all this foretelling. I have also considered that there might actually be a devil or a Satan, which I did not embrace when I was taught about it growing up. I can't stand the religious angle as it has been presented to me with this illness, but I also can't ignore it. It is like stories from the Bible, though I never really read it through. Just passages here and there. I occasionally will follow a clue from my religious Facebook friends. I am opposed to what has happened to me. I liked it better when I felt that I was just working and being in love and making my own decisions. But this is not what it looks like now, I admit. I just don't want to say that on film. I don't want to add to the anxiety of schizophrenic viewers who are looking for a clue. I'm just not able to say it's possible to go on with a normal life, at least for me. But there are others with this illness who can say that. This is all stuff I never discuss with my therapist, who feels I should just overcome the schizophrenia by moving to New York or Los Angeles and getting a job. She is not used to really mentally ill people I think. She offered to analyse my dreams though, but I declined the offer. I just don't want to freak myself out and I feel I know what to follow and what to dismiss regarding dreams, which I do not have often anyway. There are two prophetic dreams, and they spell the end of the life I thought I had made for myself, like clockwork. I had a recurring dream as a child, maybe 5 years old. I was trying to run into a cinema, but there were lots of adults there and i had to push my way through. i push so hard that I start flying, and i fly into the screen and over a desert for a long time, just flying. at the end, I come to a fence with a pair of birds there, like Heckle and Jekyl. They are in front of a three-sided wooden shed and they are laughing at me, like in the cartoons.The dream ends. When I moved to California from London with my husband to continue our film work, we took a trip to the desert and there was a place exactly like in the dream, with the two birds, the fence, the three-sided shelter. I had my husband take a photograph of me next to it. Another dream was in London, when I was in my early 30s. I was sleeping on the floor, exhausted, when the dream happened. Two people came to me and said we need to perform an operation, to get the bad spirit out. It will hurt more than you can imagine, but after that, things will be good. I was disturbed because I was very happy in my life with my husband, and I knew of no bad spirit like they were talking about. When I had my first psychosis, it was really really horrible and went on for months. It was like the Spanish Inquisition. But what really drove me over the edge was the pain in my head. All of this was the end of my ability to function as a wife, and some time later, the voices were screaming at me to ask for a divorce, which inside, I did not want. I wanted to be left alone, in peace, to pursue my relationship with my husband and our film work, and the possibility of having children. I never made it. The worst of it seems now, more than a decade later, over, but my life is not better as promised. It's just medicated and peaceful. I hate these "people" who did this to me. And I just have downsized my expectations of happiness and try and pursue that - the camera, the paint. I hate what happened to me and I don't want a fucking explanation about it. I don't want to know who did this or why. I just want to be left alone. I have nothing left to give, anyway. they took it all. There are other visions that worried me as a child and seem to have come true. Pardon me for talking like this, I never do, with anyone, ever. And this is my real schizophrenia. It's just awful, really. Like a terrible joke or a Grimm fairy tale. I just don't feel it's suitable to talk about all this in front of a camera and I am wondering what to say at all. I didn't know I was like that, with 18 months of blogging about pleasant memories and little projects, I thought I could just breeze through an interview. But now I don't know.
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