My whole adult life I have struggled with mental illness. When I was 17 I started hearing these voices talking to me. One claimed to be a young teenage boy who told me had grown up in my childhood neighborhood of Chevy Chase, MD. The other claimed to be my mom who died when I was 9. They started telling me things about my life with such accuracy that I believed I had acquired a 6th sense. By the time I was 19, my doctor diagnosed me as schizophrenic. I really didn’t know much about the illness at the time so, naturally, I was a little scared. Soon after my diagnosis, I went to see the movie “a beautiful mind” in theaters. For those who don’t know, it is the true story of a brilliant man with a bad case of paranoid schizophrenia. When the movie was over, I was terrified. I kept rocking in my seat and sobbing because I was afraid that I would have the same fate as this man. The friend I was with assured me I was going to be ok.
I had my first four hospitalizations at age 23 because I felt my mind was completely out of control. I almost felt like there were times I couldn’t control my physical actions either. I was not dangerous but I was still afraid of what I could possibly do without my own control over the situation.
To be continued…
allysk01 