Spring, nearly Summer

It has been a while since my body has felt like my own, longer since I felt as though I have autonomy over my mind. Longer still since I have been able to write. I’m in the thick of medication changes, on my third after two haven’t worked. That takes a toll on the body and the mind, and certainly a toll on my spirit, I’m growing more disheartened. Once a week I video chat with my psychiatrist, who smiles every time she sees me, though I’m sure she smiles every time she sees each of her clients. Her internet is bad and there is a lag between our two feeds. I often have to repeat myself because of this. She’s still stuck in Canada and I’m still stuck at home, staring down the maw of another pill bottle wondering, “will this one work?”

I have a reprieve in my garden. In the summer I sometimes water shirtless, I like to feel the sun on my shoulders, not unlike the warm grip of an old friend, or the glorious bloom of a perennial flower, regrowing every spring after a long, seemingly sunless winter. In the early morning, I wake and start a pot of coffee, listening to the coffee maker gurgle and spit, filling the house with a bitter earthiness that I cannot go without.

I lied. It is not early morning. I find that as time goes on in the limbo of uncertain and irresolute medication changes, that I can’t get up in the morning. I feel so tired, so exhausted, so consumed by doses and half doses of antipsychotics. It is the lull of being on two antipsychotics at the same time. The dull thump of dopamine just isn’t enough anymore.  

So, it’s not early morning when I start the coffee pot, it is at least ten o’clock. My partner has long since left for his work shift. And I’m yet to drag my body from the bed, I’m yet to untangle my hair, I’m yet to get dressed. My cats sit, watching me, as I fill that black and earthy coffee pot. One orange and white, the other grey and black, both mouthy tabby cats. I step out into the sun, the brown wooden porch beneath my bare feet. I stare out into an emerald forest filled with birdsong. It is spring. The sky, a pale blue.  

In the yard, just recently mowed, there are six raised beds, and two new tilled beds we dug ourselves. Cabbage, beets, kale, carrots, beans, squash, chamomile, echinacea, rye, and a pumpkin. The pumpkin we hope will grow into a giant one, resting eventually in the fall, like a fat bear on the garden bed. We are growing other fruits and vegetables too. We have fruit bushes and adolescent apple trees of different varieties. This year the elderberries are taking off.

I have a reprieve in my garden, reprieve in the earth, in the smell of dirt, in the way the sun falls carelessly through the tree branches, half green, half golden. I take my long hose, it unfurls in my fingers like a big grassy snake, slippery too as the hose head leaks water into my soft hands.  Watering the garden takes an hour, and when it is hot outside, I slip out of my shirt, nobody except the birds will see me, and I’m sure the birds don’t care. I know my job is done when the dirt turns from a drab tan to a deep black-brown and the tomatoes and peppers no longer look wilted and thirsty.

Soon we will have wine-colored blueberry tomatoes, plum-colored peppers, brightly colored yellow squash blossoms, and tawny chamomile flowers. Soon the garden will be full of color and life. More life bursting here than inside of me, this I know for sure, all I can do is drink it in while the drinking lasts, suck it down like vodka until I am silly with plant life.

It is the only reprieve I get.

Soon it’s back to pill bottles, medication organizers, and the red medical alert id stuck to the side of my violet watch. Half of my life is very clinical. I’ve participated in trials, I do exactly what my doctors tell me to do, I take my meds every single day even when they leave me with crippling side effects. I get my blood drawn once a month. And at night I try not to cry when it is time for bed. Nighttime is the worst for me, that’s when I am most at risk for hallucinations. That’s when the tapping on the wall will start, the tapping will turn into banging, the banging will keep me up all night. That’s when the voices that I hear turn into angry yelling voices outside of my bedroom door. Hollering even though I can’t understand them, though I know they are speaking, it often sounds like gibberish to me.

Schizophrenia has robbed me of at least half of my life. At the very least it has robbed me of silence. For even when I find myself watering the garden, and drinking in the earth and the sunlight and the plant life, I still year voices that tell me to kill myself, to disobey the doctors, that tell me I’m ugly and fat, that tell me that nobody loves me, and even sometimes that I cannot trust my loved ones because they can read my mind.

I want to be left alone in the garden, at night when I’m trying to sleep, I want to be left with just my partner during sex, I want to be able to write whenever I want, I don’t want to take meds anymore.

But that’s just not my reality.

It has been a while since my body has felt like my own, longer since I felt as though I have autonomy over my mind. Longer still since I have been able to write.

It is spring now, nearly summer, everything is full of life…except for me.