Psychosis Archive

At nineteen I traveled from Portland to Seattle with friends for the World Trade Organization protests that became known as the WTO Riots or the Battle of Seattle. I was tear-gassed and ran from rubber bullets, fleeing the police across barricaded city streets. I enjoyed the sense of danger, thinking little of the fact that I was narrowly escaping arrest every time I left an intersection at “one” when the National Guard announced they were moving in on a count of three. I was a teenager, my friends were anarchists, and my perspective was different then.

I grew up a white, middle-class, cisgendered, femme bisexual. These are the labels and privilege that I am willing to claim. When I reached 33 and went on SSDI, I went on food stamps. The transformation from Daddy’s Girl who just had to get another temp job to actual psychotic starving schizophrenic who had to take anti-anxiety medication to take out the trash was a process but has landed here. With me, today. Taking a handful of pills so that I can be brave enough to go use my EBT.

One of the hardest things about existing in a community is that eventually you will have to meet new people. The elephant will enter the room. “What do you do?” “No, what do you do for work?” I am on SSDI, Social Security Disability Income. That means I don’t work in the technical sense. I sit around in my underwear drinking iced coffee and working on my novel while the government sees fit to direct deposit funds every month. I go to the grocery store and use food stamps to buy spinach and chicken.

Trigger warning for description of psychotic hallucinations, mentions of drug addiction & alcoholism

Schizoaffective Disorder, a fusion between Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia, combines the symptoms of both. I was diagnosed with it three years ago after a lifetime of Bipolar I with psychotic symptoms. I could say the results were shattering, but in a way the diagnosis was a relief: to have a name for the paranoia, the white vans following me whenever I left the house, an explanation for the voices, the dialogue constantly critiquing my actions. The schizophrenic break came that terrifying summer after graduating from an MFA program with no prospects and huge debt, but perhaps I should begin at the beginning.

triggers: suicide mention, delusion, paranoia, hallucination, mania, depression, historical abuse of mental health patients and queers

I am somewhere in the more manic fray of things. And I am paranoid. Probably delusional. It’s so much easier said than actually believed. I can say “It is delusional to think that everyone is against you, that even the people closest to you are hiding deep and damaging secrets, that everyone is only pretending to like you when they are around you…” But to truly believe that these thoughts are wrong is a gift.