Blue Eyes

Since I can remember, people have always commented on my eyes. They are light steely blue with a deep, bold, dark ring around the iris. My fifth grade teacher was the forest to tell me that piercing blue eyes is a sign of "crazy." It was the first and not the last time I heard it. It always scared me when people said that eyes are the window to the soul, and because of that phrase, I avoided eye contact as a kid.

Now, I am well into my 20's, and I find all of this talk of "crazy" as a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the onset of symptoms around age 15, I was diagnosed with about 15-20 different things. For the sake of not being monotonous, I won't list them all out.

The diagnosis I was given after intensive psychotherapy and a Rorschach test (yeah, they do those. Or at least as of 2011 when I got one they did) was schizoaffective disorder.

Upon hearing my doctor utter the prefix "schizo, " my mind began to reject the diagnosis. At 16, schizoaffectice sounded like a life sentence of the abnormality and social difficulties I had begun to struggle with early in my teen years. I pictured being stuck in (what I did not yet know to be) psychotic or manic states that I often experienced during my junior high years. No sleep. Hearing things, small things, but clear as day. Ideas, all of them, rushing to me. And then approaching the edge, the line, the border. Everything past it is a blur that takes reality and distorts it into something very familiar and very real, but yet different and unnoticed by others. Entering the realm of psychosis. I didn't know that my first psychotic episodes were exactly that. I thought them to be abnormalities of my mind or results of medication I was taking. I used to stay up all night, listening for scratching in my walls and convinced something was trying to burrow through. I stayed up all night and lit things in fire with a book of matches I stole from my parents. I was doing this to appease the entities in my walls and cleanse my room. My floor was slate, so as long as I stayed away from walls or upholstery, the fire never spread. But those entities didn't leave me be all night; the next morning, my brother walked in on me taping up the walls the next day with big X marks where I thought the scratching was coming from. He was never sure how to respond when I got like this, but him and his friends witnessed it often. I think he might have suppressed most of the memories he has had of me being psychotic, because people tell me it is really sad and disturbing when I am. But anyways, I am circling back to the diagnosis of schizoaffective after a decade of my symptoms spelling it out for the doctors. Schizoaffectice, bipolar type. All the tests, the therapy, the hospitalizations, the trial and error with medications, the symptoms, and the things my loved ones witnessed made it clear to my doctors that schizoaffective was indeed the issue all these years. Because of my refusal to accept it initially, I suffered a decade of being misdiagnosed, improperly medicated, and overcome by my illness.

There are so many things about this illness that haunt me constantly. The long stays on the psych ward, being shackled up and carted off at 4 AM to be driven hours away to the state hospital in a small neighboring town. The constant monitoring, never being left to myself when I needed it the most for fear that I would harm myself. Upwards of 5 stays in the local hospital and 2 runs at state. The people you meet. You love them. You understand them. You still feel completely alienated by some of them. You feel truly sorry for others. And some try to choke you out when the psych techs aren't around. The loneliness. The books. The sleepy walk I took 5 or 6 times to the nurses station to report banging outside my window, which nobody else could ever hear when they came to investigate. The clonopin and ativan and zyprexa haze. The shots in the ass. The restraints. The doctors, toting their binders stuffed with everything from your eating behaviors to your tendency to go on about believing you have died. The district investigator who comes from the state to evaluate you and decide if you are going to be moved up the chain to a state hospital. The holidays and birthdays I missed due to hospitalization. I turned 21 on the psych ward while totally psychotic and thinking my loved ones had been replaced with body doubles.

All of this and so much more made up my life as a teen and a young adult. I refused to stay on medications, and as a result, had uncontrollable symptoms during 10 of what are supposed to be the best years of my life. I was diagnosed schizoaffective by 4 separate doctors by the age of 25, so I decided that was the name for my beast.

I did all sorts of things I regret to numb the pain. For about a year, I got so into drinking that I got into some hardcore drugs. The drug part stemmed from an incident where I had a bothched spinal tap that drained my cerebral fluid and gave me spinal headaches. The doctors gave my Norcos, the big honkin yellow ones. I would wash them down with beer or canned margaritas before going into my college classes. One fateful evening, I had a brush with a drug that is pure evil, and I was under the influence off and in multiple times a week for a good 6 months. Self medicating. It was all I trusted. It was so wrong, and I slipped into an evil set of people to match my newly adopted irresponsible and totally out of control attitude. I can tell you, drugs and mental illness do not mix well, not does drinking and mental illness. And both combined? It can become a catastrophe. I blew money at strip clubs, tried to move to Hawaii, shacked up with a house full of toxic addicts, became separated from my family, and wasn't looking back. All until something happened that changed me forever. A traumatic event in my life that broke me finally brought me to a point where I realized addiction was not an option and maybe that my mental illness was worthy of concern. The drugs induced psychosis, the trauma amplified it, and next thing I knew I found myself in a hospital bed. Dried blood covered my face and I had scratch marks all over my back from being dragged. I was begging the cop who was assigned to guard me to shoot me so I could finally be at ease, and he sat silently, only breaking his silence to remind me he is here to keep me safe. I am held down by four nurses and sedated and transferred to the psych ward, where I woke up without realizing what happened dud to being knocked out. The last thing I remember was digging my nails into the arm of a nurse that was trying to restrain me, and then two shots, one going in each thigh as I laid in restraints watching, and boom. Wake up the middle of the next day of no recollection of the big dramatic scene that was my arrival. I woke up wearing paper scrubs and the blue hospital socks with the white grip lines on them. I was in the observation room behind the nurses station, meaning I was constantly being monitored by a camera in the corner of the room. I also had no roommates like you do in the normal rooms. I spent many different occasions in obs rooms before, and knowing you are constantly being filmed while psychotic is an interesting trigger, or at least was to me. My paranoia shot through the roof to the point where i would only communicate in song lyrics written in crayon on the back of a piece of scrap paper. I would give these as notes to reply to doctors, nurses and the district investigator, and it sure as shit got me carted off to where the real fun begins. Long cinder block halls, stronger sedatives, more unstable patients, a mostly burnt out staff, and in the middle of nowhere. Been there twice, and hopefully never again.

And I am starting to wonder, what would my life have been like without this? Without the weeks-to-months long hospitalizations and the constant delusion and hallucinations. Did I ever have a chance? Why didn't I just accept the diagnosis and wait to receive it again years later with a footnote about being "gravely disabled." Did I do something to deserve this? Was it inevitable? Was it karma? Whatever it was, it was way different than how my peers spent their mid teens to early 20's. I often fear I am missing out on something due to my condition, and I long to know the feeling of a life without all of this. It has become such a big part of my life that I cannot picture myself without it, for better or for worse.

But whenever people comment on my eyes, I always think back to what my teacher said. True crazy. It feels like she put a curse on me... although not seriously.