Finding Meaning in Schizophrenia

Inside and Outside Views of What Schizophrenia Is Like

It's easy to underestimate how ordinary suffering can look. Expressions of pain and hurt (if not the visage of anguish) are the expectation, but as a person with schizophrenia, I know how silent and subdued suffering can look, feel, and be.

Suffering without proof or measure is what makes schizophrenia so difficult for me. I doubt the pain is real, and I'm fooled into thinking that because the mind is unseen, my claim to suffering is false. But in truth, it creates a world of delusion and hallucination that swallows me whole, consumed by a despair that blurs my sight.

The First Years After My Diagnosis

When I was first diagnosed in 1997 (at age sixteen), accepting the diagnosis was difficult and a constant struggle, as I was symptomatic and impaired for several years after the onset of the disorder.

I wanted something else to be true at the time—maybe a virus had infected my spine, or it was a symptom of a temporary concussion—something besides the harsh reality that my mind was not my own.

My wish was granted, in some sense, with the changes I went through. I withdrew from family and friends to a point where I did not recognize my inner world or the outer one, wholly removed from reality and unable to see clearly that something had gone desperately wrong.

People and places caused no feeling of connection, and I found myself lost and dazed by strange medications and a new, distorted, and disorganized mind.

Drowning in My Mind

The symptoms were torturous. I began going through alogia, or what doctors call paucity of thought and paucity of speech.

I'd catch fragments of thoughts here or there, but they were few and far between, quickly vanishing before I could see or hear them fully. My inclination to speak was equally battered and absent.

It felt as if I was drowning in my own mind—my sense of self and grasp of how I relate to others replaced by despondency and the inertia of my body and will. It didn't seem to matter what I did. Depression and delusion pulled me under, and I was left to fight against the currents of paranoia and psychosis.

Suspended in Time

My method of coping for the first several years after diagnosis had been to isolate, hide, and hope the sting and pain from whatever threatened my security went away.

I obsessed about everything that went wrong, as I saw it: People who treated me poorly, my family who at times had been unsupportive, medical caretakers who I had been furious at, and anyone that popped into my mind that I could blame.

I still felt at fault for it, however—All fingers pointing at me.

I rarely left the bedroom I grew up in at my parent's house for several years after the diagnosis, and if the silence and stillness of the room were broken, the walls and furnishings held in place felt like they would surely collapse and crush me. How could I risk leaving?

Finding Meaning in Work

When I was in my mid-twenties, my health improved, and I began working full-time. I still had little security, though—no concrete reason to think I'd be okay. But I can still recall the excitement of being a retail clerk at a Macy's department store, bumping my way up the company recognition program.

I approached the challenges I found at work as an exercise in stubborn resilience. Each day felt like navigating a vast obstacle course, and I calculated simple survival to get to work and back home in one piece as best I could. I eventually worked my way up from a store in Utah to the flagship location in Seattle when I was twenty-seven.

Losing Insight into My Disorder

The great optimism I felt when moving from Utah to Seattle caused me to lose sight of my condition, and my insight into my disorder deteriorated to a point where I believed I no longer needed medication. It's a pernicious state of mind called anosognosia, caused by a cruel disorder that has no empathy or compassion for whom it harms.

My non-adherence to medication resulted in a suicide attempt at twenty-nine, and it's still hard to make sense of it. How I felt was intolerable. And the quickest way out I could see was to subtract the things causing me pain: My body, mind, and spirit.

There's a lot of regret I feel about my experiment living in Seattle, but it carried me into a career as a college student studying English back home in Utah where I've lived since.

Picking up the Pieces

I loved being a student, even though my studies required arduous memorization that drained me mentally. Even the small things brought me joy. After school at night, I'd play songs I loved on my stereo, standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes and tidying up my apartment, happy I won another day.

College did wonders for my self-esteem and health. After a few years in the English program at my school, a friend reached out and asked me if I'd like to take a shot at writing after she had been promoted to a role as director at a marketing agency in Salt Lake City.

The Long Road

My life as I see it has been an odyssey compared to what I had known as a sixteen-year-old, given the impossible task of living with such a damning condition.

I've now had three major episodes of psychosis: the first in 1997, the second in 2009, and the third at the end of 2021. There's a pattern there that I am bracing for in the coming decade, and the more I go through psychosis, the more acute and physically painful the episodes have become.

Paranoia seems to leave a mark on the ancient and primitive parts of my brain, and the side effects of medication can overwhelm my comfort. Hallucinations and delusions feel more like my body is being whipped and pulled apart, strapped to a ghoulish device headed by a deranged executioner.

I should have grieved for my diagnosis and pain much sooner than I did after finding my way through psychosis as a teen and young adult before this pattern emerged. But I'm seeing how much more meaningful my experience is because of my ability to write, as my spirit brightens and strengthens the more I communicate and share my experiences.

Renewing a Sense of Self and Hope

I'm finally talking about the challenges I've faced in therapy, and I've discovered much more about myself reflecting on how so many years of feeling, thinking, and living as a person with schizophrenia have brought me a deeper, richer self-awareness and pride.

I never envisioned being as old as I am, and I've learned that even though memories fade, my past will unfold in a continuous push into the future if I let it.

A Consolation for Schizophrenia 

The meaning I've found as a schizophrenic is in the moments that renew a sense of hope among the hardships and the sheer force of optimism that gets me through bouts of psychosis.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, "We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode on the blissful repose of nothingness," and maybe that's the consolation for living with schizophrenia: There is a blissful repose of nothingness on which episodes of suffering are a disturbance—periods of calm after the storms.

I can accept the swells of hallucinations and pain should they return, knowing that it's impermanent and not the end.