Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [119]
And of course, there's the door. A regular, ordinary front door that opens and closes with a key I keep in my purse. Anytime I want to leave, I do. Anytime I want to go someplace, I drive myself there. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, I don't need to sign out. At last, my life is my own.
I teach three classes at New York Hospital each month. One is for patients and their families on what it feels like to experience schizophrenia. The other is about clozapine. The third is on how to stay well after discharge.
Who would better know than I? For today, four plus years after I left the hospital for the last time, it is I who am in control of my illness and not the other way around.
It's been a long road here.
I spent three and a half years in a halfway house called Search for Change. I had a lot to change. I had a lot of learning to do. After a total of three and a half years in the hospital, I had learned well how to be a patient. I had to learn to be a functioning person out in the real world. Every day I went back to New York Hospital to the day program, which was designed to help former patients make the transition between the hospital and real life. We showed up there as if to a regular job, signed in, took a lunch break and went home at the end of the day. Attendance was mandatory. We had three personal days off and two weeks’ vacation.
We used one another and our counselors to practice behaving normally. At times these groups were so intense that people stormed out in tears. I sometimes was so confused and threatened that I came across as hostile. Gradually, I began taking account of the feedback people were giving me, and started modifying my behavior.
Pretty soon I began to get more used to life on the outside. Following the rules at Search for Change wasn't so difficult. It wasn't such a big deal to make my bed every day before I went out. Doing my chores twice a week became routine. Cooking for nine residents and two or three counselors became a fun challenge. And at day hospital I began to learn one important lesson: how to live without the Voices.
For as the Voices began to recede, something startling happened within me. After years of begging them to go, to leave me in peace with my own thoughts, when they finally did leave, I found to my surprise that I missed them. They had, over time, dissipated into a kind of background static, only occasionally coming back with their full-force chants. I should have been happy. Instead, I felt like there was a neon vacancy sign flashing. My head felt so empty. Without them, I felt lonely.
I began to reminisce about them, to think about them wistfully as one might an old friend who has died. Now that they were mostly gone, I wanted them back. So I brought them back: I willed them back into my life. I turned my mind inward, searching in its dark recesses to find where the Voices lurked and imagined their presence. Hiding among the static I found them. By focusing my attention on them I was able to coax them out. I welcomed them like lost friends. They were horrible, cruel and profane, but at least they were familiar.
This went on for a long time before I realized what I was doing. I wanted to get well. I wanted to live normally. I wanted to relate to normal people as an equal. Yet here I was walking backward, down the road to sickness and madness again. I was choosing my sick Voices over a healthy reality. I must really be crazy!
After that, I began to turn outward more. Part of the problem was that, once the Voices left, there was nothing in my head to think about. The Voices had dominated my brain for so long that they had left no room for any other thoughts. What brain space I had left over all those years was devoted to fighting off the Voices’ overpowering attacks. What's more, as a full-time patient on a locked ward, even if I had had more space to think, I had nothing much to think about. The dreary sameness of my daily life gave no foothold for thoughts to grow and take root.
Obviously what I needed was a life.