Is this survivor’s guilt?
At that moment, I was trapped in my head. Very literally. Trapped. Eyes forced shut. Beneath me, scratchy hospital sheets rub against my skin. I can’t, or very much don’t want to, open my eyes. A rough hitch beats my heart out of time, racing at 135 ugly beats a minute. I can’t stop moving my legs. Every time I stop an indescribable feeling of needing to move consumes me. But nothing satiates it. My first experience with the horror of akathisia. Kick. Kick. Kick. Knees like plastic hinges burn beneath my pale skin. Every few seconds I’m crying. And the voices in my head are loud, I can’t block them out.
I was unstable at the time.
In the corridor, I hear a doctor ask, distant, unreachable, beyond the scope of my mind, “What’s wrong with her?”
Again, I scream. And my mom says, “She has schizophrenia.”
“Ah,” the doctor says, “I see.”
I’m posturing, confused, and in the middle of a strange psychotic episode. Every time I opened my eyes, I could see spiders bursting from the corners of the room. I was terrified of spiders. I can't feel my body very well. A non-epileptic seizure threatens me like an angry fire at the back of my brain.
This disease, this schizophrenia, with which I was diagnosed at the time, was a hungry ghost. Consuming my mind, licking up bits of my life, nibbling away at days and weeks, trying to swallow me whole. I wondered how long before I’m catatonic again. How long before it robs me completely of my body, rendering it useless and frozen.
The body was never meant to be in pieces and does not tolerate well the act of being torn apart. And yet, I was so used to my body betraying me.
My brain commands a mutinous central nervous system.
Of that day I remember very little.
A distant memory exists of stumbling through the August heat. Of the sun dancing across the sky. Of swallowing pills to try and calm myself, then the current took me and I was gone. Gone. Then, the hospital, my limbs full of fire, forcing me to move against some invisible force. Spiders. Overwhelming darkness. A sticky brain. Every once in a while, the medicine didn’t do enough and it was those days that I feared.
These days it is quite different, like night to day. Catatonia, nonepileptic seizures, visual hallucinations are all things of the past. A memory betrays a persistent illness and I am left with a thick mouthful of survivor’s guilt: why me?
Many people with serious mental illness do not get to see recovery in their lifetimes. The reasons for this are numerous. Some lives are cut short, some by suicide. Some by coexisting conditions like heart disease and obesity. Some at the hands of police officers. Some lives don’t see recovery because they never grow well enough, due to poor treatment or lack thereof. Some are lost in the empty ocean of anosognosia. Some due to homelessness, some due to substance abuse. Many, many slip through cracks in the system, never to be found again.
It is nearly every day, and especially on days like today, days of introspection and medically traumatic memory, that I am wracked with guilt. When I think of all the families that have lost children, parents, and partners to serious mental illness, I can’t help but ask myself why I came out on top and why so many others did not.
Perhaps I tripped into the right treatment without trying. Was it luck, some stupid cosmic lottery? I don’t know but I hate it.
After years of being diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic, I was re-diagnosed as schizoaffective. Which took into account the handful of manic episodes I had had. That fluttering in my brain. Those wings of fire and a heart burning and beating and screaming. A fluttering mouth, a body buzzing with language and missing time. I could take over the world, or at least save it, but I couldn’t have saved myself. In my memory, or somewhere outside of time, an entire week is missing. Not to mention one thousand five hundred dollars, which had been my entire bank account. What happened in that week, the week that exists outside of time? And how lucky I am to be alive. I remember only mania growing like another body in my chest, then nothing for some time. I often have said in my writing that I’m “always trying to sleep, one second the great hibernationist the next a hummingbird with two heartbeats and a mouth full of language." Which is the best descriptor I have found to describe that wild swinging of the pendulum. The psychotic aspect of my schizoaffective disorder is a steady stream of voices in my head. And once upon a time a messy exhibit of complex visual hallucinations.
I am schizoaffective, the poorly mixed combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Being both of those things but neither of them. Schizoaffective disorder is its own entity. One with which I have grown well acquainted. The entity which did try quite hard to end my life, the entity I fought back against and still fight to this day. But always is that thought, lingering: why me? Why? I wish only for everyone’s recovery but know that I can’t make that happen. I want to burn this system to the ground. The one that allows people to fall through the cracks. The one that abandons people, the one that steals our autonomy. The system that kills, and does not care (or at least not often enough). The system that leaves people houseless, and often drug-addicted. The system in which police draw guns against sick people and are seemingly allowed to fire them. The world hasn’t gone mad, it was built this way. It has always been this way. I am lucky enough to not have been lost to it, though it has traumatized me, I am still here. I wish I could say the same for everyone else.
