Suzanne Belcourt's Marshmallow Girl
April 26th, 2007
My Oh My
1. If I get abducted, I hope it’s by aliens.
2. I never received electroshock therapy when I was in the hospital. With the way my hair looks today, maybe I should have.
3. These blogs are dedicated to all the mice that had to have electroshock therapy so I didn’t have to. Because of them, I am now on the proper medication. So thanks.
4. I have a disease. It causes me to not only think some negative thoughts sometimes, but in the early stages, before I had the proper medication, it made me hear voices. These voices were very harsh. They were very unpleasant. They didn’t go so far as to tell me to pull on my cat’s tail just for kicks, but they were negative nonetheless. But throughout my early pain there was also a very gentle voice that told me that because I am gentle by nature, the negative thoughts and hearings conflict with my entire being; hence, my illness. But being gentle by nature the voice tells me, “The proof is in the pudding.” (By this, I know the voice meant that I wouldn’t even kill a fly. I tried to once; fly swatter in hand, but felt too guilty to pursue the little thing that probably had a family to go back to, so I put the plastic utensil down.) “What kind of pudding?” I ask back. “I hope it’s Yorkshire.”
5. Somewhere it says that we shouldn’t judge our fellow human beings. But when a skinny, bald white guy with tattoos plastered across his arms, smoking a cigarette that is dangling out of the side of his mouth where every other word is a swear word, you can’t help but think KKK. One good thing about having a mental illness is that you can detect others who also have some sort of mental illness. You can also get away with the judging of others part.
6. I had just made an expensive purchase: a thirty-dollar-a-pound coffee purchase. I put it inside my purse as to not have a plastic bag to carry. Also, it allowed me to hide the purchase from some suspicious-looking characters who were standing on the sidewalk. Because they were suspicious-looking I envisioned them stealing the coffee, i.e. my purse. I didn’t care about some of the contents inside my purse, like my much needed apartment keys, nor did I care about my Visa card, which was maxed out anyways. I didn’t even care about my identity being stolen. (Go ahead. When the government catches you they’ll put you inside of an institution instead of a prison. How much fun will that be?) No. I only cared about my thirty-dollar-a-pound coffee being taken from me.
7. Gosh, I’ve embarrassed myself so many times that having schizophrenia is a blessing in disguise.
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Piano Concerto no. 5 in F Minor
I hope my disease goes away soon. I was told that sometimes if your illness hits you in your twenties it will go away when you are in your forties. But by then I’ll probably start going through menopause.
I can tell you a little bit about what it feels like to have schizophrenia: When I am feeling bad—just generally bad about myself—or when I have negative thoughts, like when I first came down with the illness, it is like an orchestra before a performance going on inside my head. All of these different instruments are tuning up; it is loud and the sounds are all confusing. Depending on how good I am feeling that day, I can usually shake off all the noise. But then the conductor—or the pills that seem to work for me—waves his stick and the noisy orchestra starts to play J.S. Bach’s Piano Concerto in F Minor. And when this happens, it is as if my head is clear, and my imagination starts to take over and I can design anything. I can put collages together. Or just look out the window at the tops of the buildings with the pigeons sitting on the roofs and dream.
I dream about the future; the next man in my life; and if it is a rainy, cold spring day as I’m looking outside my window, what the water will feel like again at the beach this year, if there will be any waves so my brother, sister, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, my niece, a friend and I can go body surfing, and how the hot sun will hit my face and maybe this year I’ll get a tan instead of a burn.
I also dream that one day—just one day—the news will have a happy face on TV looking back at me, telling me what it is like to have a mental illness, and how they have contributed to society in a great, big positive way. I hope this really more than dream it because people with mental illnesses need to have positive role models featured in the media rather than the majority of news stories telling of bad people and their terrible crimes and the subsequent negative influence this has on society.
And I dream that one day I will no longer have this illness.
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