Soundtrack to a Schizophrenic Mind

by Heather Daniels , '06

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky." ~Jack Kerouac On the Road <<Track 1: Ryan Adams>> "Back beat the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out..." Next door and two flights up an unknown woman sings scales, melancholic and operatic, ghostlike, she vocalizes the sorrows that haunt me. Music has always been my salvation. A feeling rolls in, filling the empty vibration of my atmosphere. Rain, softly at first, then steadily. The universe weeps. It feels like God mocks me, showing off by crying when I can't. In retrospect, maybe he was empathizing, like a parent leading by example, gently nudging me to follow suit. But presently, I am bitter, completely incapable of seeing optimistically. Perception is inseparable from state of mind. There is a huge difference between being alone and feeling lonely. The former is bearable, even enjoyable, when a person is actually physically alone. The latter, being surrounded by the people who care, yet separated by an invisible distance, a magnetic charge of pride and insecurity, repelling love despite closeness of its proximity and the friendliest of intentions, tortures the soul. In Thailand, halfway across the world, I missed the people I love, but in a happy nostalgic way. Alone yet never lonely. Home again, I see them every day, smile at them, converse with them, yet cannot connect psychically. There is no heart in my friendships here. Surrounded by the people I once missed, I feel only empty. 58 moonstones arranged on links of tarnished silver wrap loosely around my bony fingers. I am not catholic, or even Christian, but on this night I slide my fingertips over the smooth rosary beads. Drowning. Sometimes it is just so painful to be alive. Screams, trapped with the tears somewhere inside, build a dam of hopelessness and frustration to protect society from the unsightly emotions: anger, sadness, grief. Freud called it melancholy: loss unmourned. Modern society calls it depression, apparently a phenomenon common amongst students returning from extended travels in "developing" countries. "You'll readjust in a month or so", they consoled me. Translation: not to worry, soon I'll be comfortably numb like the rest of upper middle class, ivy-league, land rover driving academia, safe in the comfort zone of otherization. Western ideology is an insensitivity I don't ever want to return to. <<Track 2: Dave Matthews Band>> "It used to be that you and me played for all of the loneliness, but nobody notices now..." As freshman in college, I floated on a happy cloud of innocence and naiveté. Happiness is beauty of energy and people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. Sanity is merely a harmony of mind. Sometimes the neurons in my head fire like a meteor shower, disorganized and out of control, yet beautiful and creative. When did I stop appreciating this? Once upon a time, strangers gravitated toward happiness in me like moths to a light in the darkness. So very in love, with life, with school, with a person. It transferred into everything...this light of protective joy enshrouding my innocence. Bliss. But time doesn't let a person freeze life at age 18. My prefrontal cortex matured. Truth knocked and when I opened the door it smacked me square in the face. I grew up, but somewhere in this process I disconnected from the positive energy that was individual and beautiful. Regret. That's the sediment of feeling disturbing my mental solution, visible only once the solute of pride and perfectionism boils away. Had I been able to accept my mistakes in school and in love, forgive myself and step foreword, with pure heart, with lovingkindness, with the sanskrit metta, free of ego...how it would all be different now. But I'm a runner and a fighter; everyone's greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. So much compassion for others, yet none for myself! I fought a battle with me by running to Thailand. Don't like attachment? Forcibly detach yourself and it's sink or swim. But I am the one person I can never outrun...I know that now. The pink fuzzy haze of idealized nostalgia pervades the minutes rolling into hours which crash into days. Wakeupgotoclassstudystudystudysleepwakeup. It all just feels so monotonous and meaningless in the end. The families of the Burmese refugees I once lived with with are running from troops systematically enacting a 40 year long genocide campaign, and I'm wasting my energy doing what? HIV prevention? How can people worry about safe sex if they don't have the resources for food or clean water? When every effort feels mutually exclusive in this quest to save the world, where the hell do we begin? Thus begins the entrapping vacuum of downward spiral from mania to depression. Seemingly Polar extremes, but the doctor's didn't understand: both are escapes from the same emotions. Psychic pain, its that overdrawn appearance of my pale skin; a cancerous infection spreading outward from the soul covering bright eyes with a blinded "dear in headlights" glass film. "When you laugh the world laughs with you, when you cry you cry alone." The words of my mother echoing in my head...How I feel them now! <<Track 3: Heights>> "Would you lay down your hair, be transparent for a while, just a little while. To see if you're human after all. Honesty is a hard attribute to find when we all want to seem like we've got it all figured out. But let me be the first to say that I don't have a clue, I don't have all the answers. And God I pretend like I do. Just trying..." Coffee at 7 am, espresso at 9 and again at noon. Soon the cups merge with the hours blending waitressing with catering with bar tending with forced social interactions under the pretense of a painted maniacal happiness. The summer from hell, yet ultimately I am my own inflictor of pain. The whirlwind distracts my mind from a love lost which I refuse to acknowledge. Melancholy for a person and for the idealistic world-view of naivety. I struggle for a voice to express the black void inside me; but it seems the rest of the world had its bliss of ignorance broken so long ago they forgot what life was like without a hard outer shell. Can no one relate? Have you all hardened so that you fail to even notice what hurts me so? Emotions are abstractions with no concrete form, but their effects perform strongest in physical absence. Like a preverbal child, I am haunted by a profound sense of emptiness born of a realization for which I have no name and thus cannot understand. I spin around, fists drawn like the fighter I was raised to be, yet connect only with wisps of air. 1 am and someone gave an IV injection of amphetamine to the microscopic gerbils spinning the wheels inside my head. Round and round and round and round and round and my heart beats like a hummingbird's wings to sustain 17 hour workdays 6 days a week. Racing. A perpetual subconscious feeling that I'm being chased. Hurt is a state of mind and I choose not to feel it. My car crunches down the gravel driveway, returning from the local upscale restaurant; one of my three full time summer jobs. Nothing frightens me more than sleep. At 3 am I bolt upright, the tune of Led Zeppelin's "Thank You" on my lips and a pair of blue eyes momentarily arresting my broken heart and haunting my psyche. To sleep, to dream, but in this sleep of rest what dreams may come? Haunting images. Feelings. A mirror whose reflection I cannot bear. I lay awake, sweating the darkness away until morning's sunlight rescues my mind from memory's prison. <<Track 4: Bruce Hornsby>> "Listen to the Mandolin rain, listen to the music on the lake, listen to the tears roll down my face as she walks away..." 5'5" and 104 lbs. My friends and family reach desperately to help but cannot bridge the silence. The proud girl who packed a backpack for the other side of the world where she knew neither a person nor the language, lost herself somewhere in the translation back to English. Is it I or society that prohibits the helping hand? Parents, friends and teachers verbalize concerns, but their body language shuts the door for conversation. Society teaches us to care as formality. "How are you?" they ask, shoulders hunched in and down, closing off the heart. Their words imply thoughtfulness but body language conveys a disconnect of fear. "Really lonely," I once answered truthfully to a close friend. Silence. Psychic pain is not a public subject in Western society. From high school to college to career we move from one accomplishment to another, consuming more of the bigger, better, faster, newer. A truck drives by with the Morton bumper sticker "Whoever has the most toys at the end wins." But none of it can we take with us. All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see; are we as Kansas says, all just Dust in the Wind? When loved ones beg me to explain what's wrong. My answer isn't the painted picture of positivity they want to hear. John Maynard Keynes predicted over 70 years ago that capitalism would soon solve the basic problems of human want and material suffering, freeing people of ancient fears and struggles, yet forcing us to face the larger question of the meaning of life. For the majority of Western civilization, basic needs are met, yet heroically we battle onward with productionism, guiled by the myth of scarcity sold by propaganda through commercialism, popular culture and mass media. What's wrong? Struggling, seeking, sifting through this chaos of emotions, I can point only vaguely: American society is what's wrong. We share this beautiful planet with countless other fascinating life forms, yet every day humans kill each other, dump toxic chemicals into rivers and oceans, clear cut forests and hunt animals into extinction. What's wrong? Peace amongst humanity, let alone between humans and the environment, seems an overwhelmingly daunting goal. That's what's wrong. Blank stares. "Some things you just can't think about." Right, stick my head in the sand...sounds like a fantastic solution. Ever heard of sustainability? Call it work, call it school, or call it capitalism, but putting in the hours day in and day out in the name of progress leaves me empty, disconnected and feeling like some mysterious force ripped the security of floor out from under my feet, leaving me floating alone in a dark empty room, claustrophobically aware of black invisible walls on all sides, scared and lost with no light to head for. And society wants me to turn on a TV, close my eyes, and let the hypnotic electromagnetic radiation lull me to sleep like this emptiness is all just a bad dream? I don't even like TV! How is it that the farmers in rural China, the Burmese refugees on the Thai-Burma boarder, and the impoverished Nepalese piecing together lives after civil war, all smiled with a genuine enjoyment for life that I've never seen in America? How is it that these people we're trying to "develop" taught me so much about how to LIVE, to FEEL, and to APPRECIATE? Teachers ask, "So how is that Development Studies thesis coming along? Wait, you think they're better off undeveloped?!!... I'm not sure I understand..." Answerless, I reverted to fighting myself again. At least it gives an outlet for the energy; a target to hit at, and wow, when I connected did it ever hurt! Conversion of psychic pain into physical pain. Self destruction under the guise of health and exercise: A hell of a way to make myself feel alive. <<Track 5: Counting Crows>> "And she walks along the edge of where the ocean meets the land, just like she's walking on a wire at the circus..." My life force leaks slowly from the hole pierced by words through my skin, and the doctor offers a band-aid to patch a life-threatening wound. Prozac Nation. Numbed, I place one foot in front of the other down the long windowless hallway with its too-white walls and blueish gray carpeting that smells faintly of sanitizer. Turning through the doorway to my right, the common room shines like an ironic oasis. Rick smiles at me as I slide onto the couch next to him. "And what did the illustrious doctor have to say this morning?" he asks. I sigh, "That pharmaceutical companies make millions off of people like me. But don't worry, I'm not bitter." 20 minutes later, Kelly joins us at the table for breakfast. Tamara, the Nurse on duty, bustles about, checking vitals and making small talk while jotting down the morning notes. Mara, the nutritionist, lifts our round green plastic meal trays off the metal cart and places them in front of us. Turning to the refrigerator behind the table, she takes the huge loop of keys off her belt and sorts through to find the little silver one to match the lock. She pastes on a fake smile of enthusiasm while pouring prescribed mud-like concoctions "for our health". They taste like chalk with the consistency of runny peanut butter. Rick gags. Tamara's green eyes shoot him a warning look. A friend once said only artists and the insane feel things so acutely as I do. Ever since, I've wondered into which category I fit, secretly fearing someone would see through my thin veil of normality and affix a scary label to the thoughts that race through my mind. Now here I am, surprisingly at home in Rodgers Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, and it's not so bad after all. Inside me, there's no difference between the 21-year old wearing the blue bracelet and that smiling, accomplished 18-year old accepted into an Ivy League university from a public high school in a tiny New Hampshire town who was so proud of her. Three years and a hundred lifetimes older. In these naked rooms and long hallways, society hides the sensitive. Looking around, I see Ginsburg's "greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness," raped and ravaged by a culture stampeding itself into extinction. The only people for me are the mad ones... After breakfast Tamara takes Rick and me outside, despite the Doctor's explicit orders for "no exercise." The May sunshine of Madison, Wisconsin expands my lungs from the base of my diaphragm, up through my heart, gently raising my shoulders before ebbing in a long, slow sigh. I flop into the grass and float on the waves of my breath, appreciating every molecule of vitamin D my body absorbs. In this stillness, drifting away to old-school Counting Crows, wanting nothing more than to exist in these moments as they pass, I know heaven. Something gives within, pride, and my belly relaxes for the first time in three years. In and out. My breath flowing its healing energy through a body and mind disconnected by disparity between what is and what I want to see. But now every rise of my chest drops my shoulders down and back, opens my heart, pieces the broken back together. <<Track 6: David Gray>> "Meet me on the other side...I'll see you on the other side..." Led Zeppelin blasting out the open windows, wind whipping my untamed curls in all directions, my car hugging the bumpy pavement of a windy backcountry road in New Hampshire. Mountains whiz by in a blur of yellow, red and orange, decorated occasionally by a lake or river. The soft sunlight warms my face as I drive home from an early morning coffee rendezvous with a high school friend. I just can't help but smile. I stayed only one week at Rodgers. The contrast of sterile monotonous hospital life with the beauty of the patients within reconnected me with the simple pleasures that give meaning to life. A month later, driving through rural Arkansas on one of many adventures life offers those open to possibility, a tattoo-artist friend of mine gently gave me a permanent reminder that happiness is about finding the middle path. If ever I find myself out of balance, all I have to do is glance at my lower back. Living consciously requires feeling both the highs and lows, but without attaching to either. In three years I've loved and lost, made amazing friendships, tested them, and managed to rescue a few. It's still so hard for me to appreciate psychic pain. Finding the beauty in something that hurts so acutely takes practice...reportedly 2,000 lifetimes-worth for the Buddha. That probably leaves me with a lot more living yet to do before enlightenment. A lot more pain, but also so much joy. And I'm making progress; this morning I greeted my own blue eyes in the mirror, and smiled back. I no longer subscribe to mainstream ideology. I don't care much for accomplishment. In my two months living back in Providence I've worn shoes 5 times. I just like the feeling of the ground on my feet. It reminds me that I'm alive, that life is beautiful and full of sensation. The solution to mental illness isn't "normalization" of an individual's "abnormal psychology", but for that individual to learn to embrace herself. All of herself. The good and the bad, without judgment. This is not to imply that a person is imprisoned by some predestined personality, but that, by acknowledging all the feelings life arises, we can choose how to react to them rather than becoming our reactions. Consciousness. It's a paradigm shift. It's still so hard for me to appreciate pain, psychic pain especially. But a person has to know what "low" feels like in order to appreciate "high". In the end, happiness is about appreciating the individual nuances that give life meaning. They're there all the time, potential happiness, but in this crazy fast-paced world it's easy to forget them. <<Track 7: Led Zeppelin>> "And a new day will dawn, for those who stand long, and the forests will echo with laughter..."