Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [114]
And the Voices? The Voices were growing softer. Were the Voices growing softer? They were growing softer! They began moving around from outside my skull, to inside, to outside again. But their decibel level was definitely falling
It was happening. I was being set free. I had prayed to find some peace, and my prayers were finally being answered.
April 20
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
April 26 Wednesday, 6:20 P.M.
My birthday. 30 years old. Never felt better. I'm hanging in there real tough thinking of PACE (Positive Attitude Changes Everything). I'm going to have a great, great life fulfilled with warmth and love and happiness and health, and consistent growth. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ME.
The thing that frightened me most was the possibility that the clozapine's effects would wear off. After all, that's what had happened with each other new medication I had tried. A brief flurry of improvement, then a crash. Anxiously I waited.
My head kept clearing. Thinking was less of an effort. The scrambled-eggs unscrambled, the mixed-up spaghetti strands of thoughts unraveled. The compartments that had come unhinged, flinging their contents into a wild unruly heap in my brain, creaked shut. Thoughts presented themselves to me one at a time in more or less logical order.
When the Voices reared up and roared, it was as if they hit a glass shield, crashed and fell away. I could hear their cries and complaints. But now I was hearing them as if from far away. Their noises were muffled and remote. They were shouting, clamoring, angrily protesting their own demise. But dying they were. Clo-zapine was standing between them and my brain. Denied the nourishment of my thoughts, they were perishing.
Even my body kept on coming alive. Increasingly people were remarking on the way I looked. Animated, they said. Alive, they said. My face began taking on expressions other people said they had not seen in years. Emotions—subtle human emotions, like curiosity, interest, sympathy, humor—began registering again. My dad said even my walk was different. When I was sickest, I had a walk he called my zombie walk, my motionless arms at my sides, my feet shuffling down the hall. Now I was actually walking like a real person, arms swinging, head up, my body relaxed and a jauntiness in my step.
But the biggest change was in the return of something I hadn't realized was missing: I began to feel connected to other people.
For as long as I could remember, it had been the Voices who had seemed real to me. Other people had seemed far away, distant, as if they inhabited another planet. Their very presence frightened me. I felt alienated from other people, alone. I could never quite decipher other people's meaning or intent. When they intruded on my space I backed off, disturbed by their encroachments. I was suspicious or afraid of people who said they were trying to help me.
For most of my time in the hospital, I had done my very best to isolate myself from the other patients. I had spent as much time as possible at the far end of the long hall where the stereo was. I wanted to be near nothing but my music. When another patient came down the hall toward me, it was as if an enemy were invading my territory. Immediately, without even a word, I would pack up my tapes and leave the area, feeling that some peace had been taken from me.
As I got better, I began to share my stereo space more willingly. Other people ceased to feel like intruders. Something in me was growing that enabled me to reach across the air that separated us, and feel that we were all just people. I even began to be able to lend out some of my most precious