Rough Draft for the Monologue

There’s so much to say.  First of all I want to say thank you for being here with me now in this moment for this time, and just for hearing me.  For so many years I hid the things I am about to tell you.  I was a little girl once, a healthy little girl with a big imagination.  I was smart, cute and funny and I read books like there was no tomorrow.  I wanted to be a doctor.  I have always been driven.  I grew up without my dad, and I think that left me feeling like I had something to prove to the world.  I was a little shy and nervous, but I did ok.  By high school I decided I wanted to be a cheerleader.  I was happy…I was finally popular which I had in my head is what I wanted to be.  Then my world was turned upside down.  I was raped by my best friends older brother. I was too shy to even kiss. I was sober that night, but I know that is what lead me to turn to alcohol and marijuana.  Marijuana did odd things to me.  It gave me the sense that I was being watched and everyone was out to get me…but it was more than paranoia, it was schizophrenia.  And I should have stopped, but I had such a drive for acceptance that I smoked for my entire junior year. By Senior year I had run out of friends.  I don’t remember exactly what happened the night I started my journey with psychosis, I do know it had started with marijauna.  I didn’t sleep and I thought it was the end of the world and that I was for sure going to hell.  In fact I didn’t sleep for a week  while my past mocked me and showed me all the reasons I deserved to be in hell for eternity.  Everything people said twisted and distorted to be about me.   The tv was about me.  Everyone in the world knew that I was the most evil soul to ever walk the earth.  I am left behind because I need a soul mate and I need to pack to go.  I need to pack the things that make me know who I am, but I never know what to pack and I am left staring at things that remind me I am evil. I was hospitalized for a month in this condition.  The notes said I had the IQ of a five year old.  But there was much more to it than that.  The doctors told my parents that I may never come out of it.  They sent me home and I was still psychotic.

But then after a time it stopped.  It always does.  I come out of it and I regroup. I go to college, get degrees.  Have a husband. Have children.  And every few years this trip to hell happens for me.  I pick up the pieces after being hospitalized every time.  This happened four times in 16 years, so its not like it defined me at that point.  But drinking did.  I am dual diagnosed.  And now I know that I have sexual trauma PTSD and that I would relive my trauma in occasional black outs.  I thought I was just having fun with minimal consequences…just being young.  But alcohol had become my way to cope.

Okay so I took that out of the equation five years ago.  It was then that my illness began to define me.  In an interesting twist of events I began writing to an ex boyfriend in early sobriety.  We had dated a short time…six weeks. He had said “take five months and see if your life gets better.”  I took this as a sign he would be interested again, should I improve myself in sobriety.  Well I wrote to him everyday in an effort to work on myself and a way to not text him which he had requested.  The writing was therapeutic and it soon became a book.  It was powerful to me.  And one day it built up in me and I decided to go tell this man I was in love with him.  Every now and then I had sent him some texts, which were based on my writing and falling in deeper with him and I am sure he had little idea why. He put a restraining order on me.

At the restraining order hearing he called me creepy.  I had never heard that about me before.  And then eight days later my therapist gave me a handout on soul mates.  Now remember in psychosis I need a soul mate to get out of hell.  So I had my fifth psychosis and I went to heaven this time, I had a soul mate and I literally packed a box with things around my house that made me, me.  Everything was beautiful and I was filled with joy!  All the bad things that happened in my life counted for good.  I was whole.  I was God’s princess.  I was talking to God in my mother’s womb.  Hallucinations and visions are a big part of psychosis and they feel so real.  This was probably the happiest most free time of my life, very spiritual.  I was hospitalized twice and the cops were involved a couple times.  And I also texted the man with the restraining order seven times that month.  Enough times for a felony.

So what did this feel like for me?  It was horrendous.  I was treated like a potential murderer.  I was treated like I had the capacity to hurt a man I was in love with.  I was placed on a GPS monitoring system for a year.  I went through a weekly mental health treatment court for two years until they decided to time me out…that was for two texts.  And I was exposed.  And rejected by many.  And most of all my illness defined me.  Something about this event or sobriety led me to have eight psychoses during my time in the treatment court.  It was a mix between heaven and hell and I would be hospitalized having visions and hallucinations.  The court did not understand a thing about me.  I remember the judge saying to me that my illness was “not that bad.”  Its because I present well.  Its because I dress nice.  Its because I am educated.  People just don’t believe that what I go through is all that bad.  They say get tougher.  They say try harder.  And judgement.  I always needed to know what people thought of me in order to know what to think of myself.  Thank God all this experience changed that for me, or I would have killed myself.  People are cruel.

The fact of the matter is psychosis is extremely scary.  And coming out of it is scary too…because you are left with a lot of questions.  I sometimes think what I experience is very real and a calling on my life.  I sometimes think that the reasons doctors come up with for mental illness is a bunch of horseshit.  I believe it is spiritual for me and always has been.  Not a chemical imbalance. I take the meds to be compliant in society although they make me fat and block my connection to God.  The medications make me feel normal, but I know I am not normal and that I wasn’t created for this world to be normal.  My purpose on this earth is not to be normal!!!

I think what if the crazy people who say they are prophets really are prophets and how we just ignore them and treat them terrible!!!  It says in the bible in the end times that God will rain down gifts.  And to me my illness is more of a gift.  I am set apart for a purpose. But I am still afraid to talk about the things I have seen.  That’s why I write about it.  I can’t go running around telling everyone what I believe or think on a daily basis, I would be locked away.  My blog give me an outlet for creativity and a space just for me to be me.  Thank God for the internet. I’ve been well for a year now.  Playing normal.  Working again.  Rebuilding my life.  I do feel alone a lot.  I do feel like there is not a man in this world that would take me on for keeps.  I have trust issues and rightly so.

But really at heart, I am just the girl next door that still wants to be a doctor.

PS.  I don't think this is it!  I was asked to write about what it feels like to have a mental illness in our society.  This is not feelings this is just me telling my story again.  I can do better than this!  I need more FEELINGS!!!!  I can write feeling poetry...why can't I tell my story with feelings???