Schizophrenia. You know the word dropped like a date with a single flaw in this day and age or the word ‘I love you’ when it’s not meant. It’s dropped like a heavy burden, a rock no one wants to discuss. No one will tell the good side of schizophrenia, not even the person with it. Schizophrenia is game over. You hear the doctor say it and all you hear is according to the dictionary, “a brain disorder in which people interpret reality abnormally.” Oh okay, that’s fine. No cure. Some treatment may help but no one tells you the constant voices that not even medicine can always settle down. No one tells you about the sleepless nights and no matter how much you tell people about it, no one will understand. So it’s life over. According to NIMH, 7-8 people out of a 1,000 people will have schizophrenia due to genes or environment. They are at a higher suicide risk but let’s stop with the statistics and surface textbook definitions. We get caught in the web of seeing them as statistics or waiting for them to do something drastic. But there are so many different types of schizophrenia and every person with it is different. In fact, a person I’ve talked to who wishes to be anonymous wishes to bring what talent they have to light.

Before I tell her story, you may know someone with schizophrenia. Think about it first. You may never know since schizophrenia isn’t just auditory hallucinations or/and visual hallucinations. I’ll let you research that. Mental disorders are an uphill battle and not everyone wins it. Like cancer, sadly, not everyone makes it it's Invisible but always there. My friend, Zac, had schizophrenia among other things. He and his boyfriend were going to go to villages, live by the sea and become locals while one wrote, the other drew what they saw. Zac was a model, barely an adult. You’d think he’d have it all, he was overall funny and like a brother to me. Then one day, it was over. We thought it was getting better. It wasn’t. His last words, I remember to his boyfriend were, ‘I’m okay’. And I thought we would be but we weren’t. His boyfriend followed suit later that week and I thought to myself, for my friends, who out of all of them have some sort of mental disorder plus more, will it ever get better?

Now back to anonymous drawing is her outlet. She looked within to discover what she could do to find some calm despite being diagnosed with schizophrenia, a word normally diagnosed with negative connotations. People with schizophrenia are, in fact, people who can be like anyone else despite how daunting the word may seem. she loves to draw and wants you to know a little bit about her drawing, “it’s my first pen drawing...thought I’d try something new, instead of pencil because that’s what I normally draw with. It’s a picture of a woman’s face dressed up for dia de los muertos. My top preference of drawing are women’s faces, so I chose this one off a random image off the Web and free handed it. What inspired me was, the symptoms I’ve been experiencing. I try to do things that free my mind from the constant chaos that goes on up there.” The feeling of pain from her symptoms of “little delusional, hearing voices, anxiety and depression” seeped into the art.

So I advise, if you do have a mental disorder, a painful story untold, let it out onto a canvas, a writing journal, whatever creative outlet you need and take time to discover yourself as well as taking time to check out therapy even if it hasn’t worked before. Sometimes, like art or a good story, you need to try it again and again to keep building the story and figure out what’s there. Life isn’t over for you, it’s just the beginning and though it may be difficult, it may be excruciatingly painful some days, look within because as Rumi, my favorite Sufi poet, once said, ‘...the light seeps in through the wound.’

The woman's picture