Dark Cloud: The Weekly Schizophrenia Analecta

The Story: Relationships and the Lasting Effects of Divorce

I liked my ex-girlfriend. She had a wicked sense of humor. Her name was Ali, and she had three sisters and a mother named Gayle. Her father had bipolar disorder (so it was reported).

Ali's parents divorced when she was young, but I sensed that she may still have felt a slight heartache and sadness about the divorce, even in her mid-twenties when we were dating.

This is one of the many times I've seen the hurt and grief people whose parents divorced show as adults, and it seems to be a universal effect I'm not sure can be fully resolved. My father, Bill, spoke of his parents' divorce with the innocence and pained heart he would have had as a child even into his eighties; his grief was so deep.

I have trouble connecting to this depth of emotion others show, not because my childhood was all sunshine and roses but because I haven't had the cause to face such a difficulty.

To some degree, it seems like a luxury to feel so deeply about experiences like divorce. Only about thirty percent of men with schizophrenia get married. We also don't make the greatest parents, generally. Grim facts.

Much of my adult life and energy have gone to simple survival (with the greatest threat to it being my preoccupation with suicide here and there). Avoiding that sense of self-directed danger has become a fear I can feel at the base of my neck if I focus on it. It's like the approach of some beast whose only purpose is to see me gnashed and spat.

I still know that suffering can be an ordinary experience that no one is immune to, nor is it one that any may possess solely at once.

I relate to the sorrow and the forced realization that nothing will be the same again, I guess, as people affected by divorce do. I wonder anyway what a lasting relationship is like, even with the potential hazards. It's strange.

What Does Akathisia Feel Like?

I am doomed in this place as it is to suffer and vacillate in anguish, my body being pulled apart in a chair that only tightens if I attempt to rest. A fury of voices consumes my hearing and mind as I sit, struggling against the shards pushing around my body, attempting to break free of my skin.

I want to be at the center of God, a part of the whole, the appearance of my closed eyelids and the dark room so black it becomes radiant. I would surpass my understanding and knowing of all lifeless things and the highest order of living things, my breath a far, transparent, echoing cloud.

Note to Self…

Be quick to admit you're wrong and forgive others when they do the same. People may see it as nebbish, flimsy, or capricious, but that's a welcome alternative to living with the regret or embarrassment of having been wrong and never admitting it.

Anyone who has a serious mental disorder (or even more so, one who has found themselves in the psych ward) could use a little grace and forgiveness if not mercy. So, forgive yourself and others quickly as a matter of principle.