The New Year, A New Life for My Family and Me

As the new decade dawns, those with mental illness are called to rise up and try to help themselves again for the new year and new decade.

I, for one, am going to further my education by pursuing my MBA in Finance and trying to further my career and job prospects for the future. I also resolve to keep my friends and family close and in touch with me whenever there is a problem with my schizophrenia.

SO BE IT! 2010, here we come!

Turning over a new leaf

As I round the corner on some of my issues from the past and look ahead into the future, it's looking more and more like there is a light at the end of the tunnel now more than ever. After all, I have weathered the storm, and have done it the right way, by sticking with my program of medication, sleep, good media, and no drugs or drinking.

That is why I believe that now is the time to further myself, not push myself too much, but to further my education while looking into the bright future with my beautiful little family.

What a beautiful life!

Feeling much better the last two days

Such is the nature of my experience with the disorder of schizophrenia, one day I am feeling at my lowest and the next two days, I'm back up and running on all cylinders.

I always remember what a wise man once said when I am going through a tough time. "This too shall pass."

Losing it at the fair

So we packed the car up and had what I thought was going to be a good time at the County Fair last night. It was my wife, my son and I; along with my father and his girl friend. There were rides, plenty to eat (although we had eaten home-made quesadillas before we left), as well as activities for children of all ages.

All was going along well, until all of the stimuli at the fair began to take its toll on my psyche. From that point until we left, which was approximately 1.5 hours, I was actively psychotic and paranoid. At this point going forward, with all of the still-incoming stimuli, all of the people as well as the responsibility of a young child, I felt like a leper's leper.

If I did indeed have lepresy, which was known all thoughout the dark ages as a disease highly stigmatized, at least people would stay away from me. However, since I was in my own personal hell, unknown to the wandering throngs of people around you, the end result is feeling somewhat less than a leper, or as they say, a leper's leper.

Even those whom I call my extended family had no sensibility for the illness in which I was engulfed. My wife was my shoulder to lay my head on, though, coaxing me to smile through the pain that she could see on my face. When a stranger made a joke that normally would have been funny, I reacted as someone in the throws of mental illness, causing him to back off slowly and awkwardly, as if he had witnessed an alien disguised as a human being at the county fair.

My wife has always been my hero, always there to help me through. Not that she always understands my inner struggle, but that she will always be there for me to lend a hand when her partner is in need.

The Honeymoon is Now!

I am now in the period of my illness that I call, the Honeymoon period. That is, the period in which I have the least symptoms historically. After all, I have had schizophrenia for 10 years now and I have learned an awful lot about my specific case in that time frame.

For instance, every 4 years, I have an episode, which I call the cyclical component of my illness. Then, every spring and summer, I have more symptoms, and fewer in the fall and winter time.

Trying Desperately To Quit Smoking

I have long been a believer in a healthy body, healthy mind. Although I know that this is not always true, I have come to the conclusion, and not recently, that I need to quit smoking for my overall health--mental and physical.

It was only Wednesday of last week that I quit....until today when I took up smoking again. During the two and a half days that I was smoke-free, I found that I needed less of my neuroleptic medication, as well as functioned psychologically at my peak.

I have a demanding job with plenty of stressors and when some of them get too much, I turn to smoking cigarettes. Research shows that people with mental illness smoke cigarettes much much more than the average population and there is something to it. The smoking seems to TEMPORARILY improve cognitive functioning. However, that is not to say that a person that has mental illness that smokes should not quit immediately.

As I said, my psychological functioning as a WHOLE improved greatly. In fact, I felt as if I was released from a cloud of smoke!

Party Party Party

I just attended two parties with my two-and-a-half year old son yesterday. I went alone with him so for someone that deals with Schizophrenia on a daily basis, it was a bit of a stretch of my abilities. However, I ended up having fun at the parties and then getting a little bit paranoid on the ride home. Thankfully, my son slept on the ride home and I was able to take some medicine and get better as I drove back from Cherry Hill to Hackettstown, NJ.

All is well that ends well....that's what they say, anyway!

Black holes....a lot like a mental illness episode

In the universe, there are these things called black holes. They are at huge centers of the galaxies and have incredible gravitational force--it's part of their nature. There is something around the perimeter of the black hole called the event horizon--but I call it the point of no return. When something ventures too close to the "point of no return" around the black hole, it gets sucked into the gravitational center of the black hole and then something remarkable happens. All the "space" between the atoms that is there normally, disappears and the unlucky heavenly body get squished to 1/1,000,000,000 of it's original size at the center of the black hole.

To illustrate this, if something the size of the Earth crossed the "point of no return" in a black hole, it would be "squished" to approximately the size of a NBA sized basketball. However, no mass would be lost, and the gravity exerted by the "Earthy basketball" would be the same, but we would certainly be finished!

Thankfully, the chances of this actually happening are infintesimily small, so we do not need to worry about crossing the "point of no return" anytime soon!

Methodical, yet wildly creative

In keeping with my wild, fantastic dreams, I know that I have an active imagination. But on the other side of the coin, I can play Mozart Sonatas and Scott Joplin's "The Maple Leaf Rag" almost perfectly.

I think that I have had quite a bit of experience in both the wildly imaginative and sometime paranoid and delusional side of my mind.....although I do not wish to go back there--at least not very often.

Teaching piano lessons gives me a great deal of personal satisfaction while earning me some extra money at the same time. I love it--and hope to do it more and more as time goes by.

Haven't been active in the blog....here's why

Hello again,

I have not been adding to my blog recently because I have been feeling quite well lately and work and personal lives have been extremely busy. Although I would like to update my blog daily, I simply cannot find the time to add to it more than once in a while these days.

Seasonality--

I have both a seasonal AND a cyclical component to my disorder. Each fall and winter, I am virtually without the symptoms of my disease. Then, during the spring and summer time, I feel more symptoms, and not coincidentally, my only episodes have been in the spring and summer time. These periods have been difficult for me to understand and have an almost opposite pattern to the seasons as one would expect. The periods in which there is a lack of daylight, it seems, is when I feel my best.

Cyclical--

Every four years, like clockwork (in the spring and summer times) I have an episode. Ever since I had my first episode ever in 1999, it has taken a four year cycle. 2003 was bad again, then again in 2007. Each time, the severity of the symptoms have lessened, but not fully gone away.

In conclusion for this entry, I look forward to the day when either my symptoms get to a point where they are almost non-existent, OR they find a cure for schizophrenia.