Elle

prologue

schizophrenia
/ˌskɪtsə(ʊ)ˈfriːnɪə/
noun
a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.
•(in general use) a mentality or approach characterized by inconsistent or contradictory elements.

bipolar disorder
/ baɪˈpoʊlər dɪˈsɔrdər/
noun
a mental health problem characterized by an alternation between extreme euphoria and deep depression.

• • •

Sanity is just a limited mind.

It's a mental operating system accepted by the masses as within normal perimeters.

I'm not like you, not like them. I'm something different.

I can shift from one operating system to another invisibly. They won't ever know which one I'm using because I don't have to tell them a thing.

Until the shrinks can mind read, they're done.

No more cosy chats, no more 'honesty', no more drugs, no more stupid rooms without door handles.

I don't need them anymore, I don't think I ever did. I'm not mentally ill, my mind is incredible.

It's full of ideas. Magical, crazy, wonderful ideas.

They're just too blinded by the label put on me by society to see it.

Mental Illness: Crazy, loopy, insane.

They make it sound so scary, so freaky, so wrong.

Imagine the craziest dream you've ever had, maybe it was a nightmare, then, imagine you can't wake up from it because you're already awake.

All those bizarre ideas that make so much sense when you're asleep, start to make sense when your eyes are wide open.

It scares them, I can tell. They probably think I'm going to drive them crazy. Insane! Insane like me. That me trying to 'wake up' means I have to go mad first, means I have to drag them down the rabbit hole with me.

And then, once you've had some weird sort of mental breakdown, your brain is fucked.

It's weakened beyond repair. You can go off on almost any tangent at all. It can ruin your life for months, for years, forever. You can lose people you love, people you hate, yourself.

What I have, it's not an illness. It's a bit like a spiritual awakening, a weird baptism of fire.

My brain is the fire. It's burning so bright, so happy, so light. Except when it extinguishes, and there's nothing to renew the spark. All I can do is huddle in the moment and live from heart beat to heart beat, until I relight the fire.

Or until something relights the fire, a new feeling, a new thought, something I can cling onto to make me feel something.

It's harder now to find that. I feel like the world isn't really there anymore, like it was stolen and replaced with something all empty and photoshopped.

It makes sense to me in a way, the real world kept it alive, I felt connected to it, a part of it.

But it was taken away. Either that, or I was.

Now, all I can do is float in the void.

I have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Before I was diagnosed, I'd only heard of the latter. Even then, I didn't have a clue what it meant, what it was.

It's hard to explain, even harder when you have it. I thought they were the same but they're different. They're so different.

My first therapist helped me to tell the difference between the two. She forced me to read boring booklets and stupid websites that only made my head more jumbled.

It's easy to understand when you piece it together. I can understand it now after applying it to real world scenarios. It might not make sense to you. It definitely won't make sense to them.

But the way I look at it inside my incredible mind makes it so it is one hundred percent understandable to me.

Bipolar disorder is like being on a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes you can predict drop offs and other times you just have to hang on, because the next turn is about to send you into an unexpected spiral. Sometimes you're laughing, throwing your hands in the air, and then other times you're clinging, holding on for dear life, screaming at the top of your lungs, begging for somebody to save you.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split, as shattered. I like to say it's like a waking nightmare. Who needs the darkness of the night when nightmares can collapse onto you in broad daylight. The bewitching voices, the alluring visions, they call to me.

They call to each other.

They call to you, but they don't call to them.

I think all this shit is how I've survived all the external troubles of my life over the years.

I've survived because the fire inside burns a hell of a lot brighter than the fire around me.