Me in a Nutshell

Paranoia. It's a good place to start. The term was paranoid schizophrenia. That's what the doctors told me anyway. Paranoid schizophrenia with a dash of manic-depressive bi-polar disorder, oh and don't forget to sprinkle some clinical depression over the top. That's me, my labels, and they are the central core that has directed my life for the last seven years.

Hiding from them, to be more precise, has been the wind directing my sails for the last seven years.

It is the dirty little secret that makes close contact with anyone else so difficult, because after all, what good is a relationship if they don't know your faults as well as your strengths? And my whole life has been designed around hiding the one huge fault - a bunch of labels smacked on my forehead by doctors that held about as much interest in me as you hold for the kid bagging your groceries at the market - and the worst part, I don't even believe in the labels they placed on me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a rational human being, except when I'm not. I believe that chemical imbalances in the brain can be quantified and adjusted to help a person manage their moods. But, having been one of those people who was placed on some of the best psychotropic medication - yes that is really the name for the medication, PSYCHOtropics...its like they design these labels to cripple their patients socially just in case they aren't fully fucked in the head - the pharmaceutical companies could devise. But all their medication never changed my thoughts. Oh they can make thoughts come more slowly, they can drain you of that dark malaise, but the voices in the head are always your own, even when they sound like someone else. And no medication ever changed that.

Science has stripped us of our humanity.

Seven years, that's a long time to have a single day of your life be the center you revolve around. I've spent seven years hiding from the day that landed me in the mental healthcare manufacturing line. I've written novels about it, literally. I'm still too shy about it to set this blog up as something I want people that know me to read. Yet I'm not so shy that I am willing to go to any lengths to hide my identity. Maybe that means I'm getting over this thing? Maybe not.

In that seven years what I have decided about my trials is this: I am not sick in the head. I have never hurt anyone. I have never done anything so outlandishly anti-social that a restraining order was placed on me. For the most part, if people noticed anything about me at all, they would say my major fault is that I am too nice. I think they should rethink that label because the truth is I'm not that nice, what I am is polite, but if they ever start reading this blog they'll figure that out soon enough.

What I have done in the last seven years is wrestle with every demon in my heart and mind. I've followed Dante down into the seventh circle of hell, I've walked with the Buddha's Mara, me and Jesus sat on a hill with Satan, pick your parable...or someday, if I ever get the nerve to try and publish it, you can read my own. The bottom line is this: I am not mentally ill, my soul was sick and if those science obsessed doctors had ever taken the time to try and appreciate the spiritual depths I was diving into they might have been able to find a way to direct me out more quickly than my own wandering has managed.