It was about 10 o'clock in the morning and I had just woken up; the luxuries of summer. I remember that I had slept in my contacts and my eyes hurt. It was as I was getting up to go to the bathroom when I heard someone call my name: “Bridget!”
“Yes?” I said. There was no answer to my reply. I wandered into the kitchen to find my mom sitting at the table, reading. I grabbed a glass and got some water from the fridge.
“Oh, you’re alive!” she joked. I rolled my eyes, smiled, and took another sip. She smiled back at me and then returned to her reading. As I was walking out of the room I heard my name being called again, this time a little louder.
“Mom, did you say something?” I asked. She shook her head without looking up from her magazine. I shrugged it off, thinking it was nothing.
Looking back at my 15 year old self, who thought she was simply mishearing her mother, is still a painful reminder of how quickly things can change. I didn’t know that a single voice would eventually become seven, nor did I know that crippling paranoia would deprive me of sleep for the next three years. I even failed to realize that considering jumping off of a tall building because I thought I could fly was a sign that something was very wrong.
Days, weeks, and months passed without me knowing I was severely mentally ill. It wasn’t until the beginning of school when I noticed that nobody could hear the voices, that nobody else could see the girl who always followed me to class. I didn’t tell anyone until January after the new year about the hallucinations. When I finally did, I was swept into the arms of the hospital and put on medication.
The diagnosis: schizophrenia.
Needless to say, I was confused—those people and voices who had been with me for the past seven months were never real. It was crushing when I was told that I was not able to fly. It was as if my life was a lie, and that the reality I knew was some sort of cruel, practical joke. I hated my doctors for trying to tell me that I was very sick. I became a hateful, miserable, angry person and shut out everyone who tried to help.
For me, time was the best medication: the screaming voices became whispers, the paranoia slowly went away, and the delusions subsided. The past three years have by no means been easy or symptom free. Relapses and hospitalizations are still a constant threat—even when I’m relatively stable. I never get too comfortable with the way things are and am always ready to take on a crisis because, after all, the day the first voice came was just a normal June morning. Living your life constantly on-edge may be exhausting, but the alternative has proved to be even more draining with sometimes irreversible consequences.
Approximately 20 percent to 40 percent of people with schizophrenia attempt suicide, and about 5 percent to 13 percent succeed. I know that one tiny trigger is all it takes to send me into psychosis, a state in which rational thought is taken over by my own skewed perception of reality. It can happen in an instant; the flick of a switch is all it takes. Knowing that my brain could betray me at any second, that I am both the danger and the one in danger, is absolutely terrifying.
But, in my opinion, there is nothing more frightening than the thought of your daily routine changing so drastically in so little time. I am nowhere near where I thought I would be three years ago. Now, I expect to wake up to the chatter of seven voices, each with their own personalities and agendas. Silence is so rare that, when there is the very occasional blip in the system, I often do not know what to do with myself.
Tiny victories like these feel like gold medals. Even the smallest and seemingly irrelevant minutia carry the weight of a day's worth of defeats. I've learned that, as devastating as a diagnosis may be, it is the way you recover and how hard you fight back that defines you. Somehow, I have managed to get out of bed every morning and graduate from high school. I’m off to college in the fall, with all the normal fears of a transitioning young adult, and then some.
And I must say, I couldn’t be more ready.
