Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [123]
When I hear the Voices, I shake myself back to reality by using all my senses. If I'm riding the train to Manhattan, for example, I concentrate on the taste of the Diet Coke and the smell of the perfume I am wearing. I look out the window at the changing view, and listen carefully to the sound of the conductor collecting tickets. I feel my own ticket flipping back and forth between my fingers.
Some people can tell when I'm hearing Voices. I wish they couldn't. I don't mind talking about the Voices, but knowing that their presence is evident to others feels like an invasion of my privacy. If people let on that they know I am hearing Voices, I sometimes think it's because they've heard them too, and not because a particular expression has flitted across my face.
Nonetheless I find talking and joking about my symptoms helps keep them in their place. So I do it all the time. Like the time Anne Schiff, my father's secretary, questioned me about a current news item.
“What do you hear, Lori?” she asked.
“Oh you know me,” I said. “I hear all kinds of things.”
When Amanda lost manuscript pages or forgot to return phone calls, I would chide her: “I'm supposed to be the daffy one, not you.” When she needed to impress someone important, I offered to lend a hand: “I'll have the Voices write you a letter of recommendation,” I said.
For years I tried to hide the Voices because I assumed they would horrify people. As I have found out recently, that is not always the case.
When one of the mailmen who serve our complex expressed an interest, I showed him an article about me and my history. He was a young guy and I watched him carefully as he read through it. At the end, he looked up.
“You hear voices?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, sometimes I do,” I said, and waited for the look of horror to cross his face.
The look was, instead, one of pure admiration.
“Coooooool!” he said, with tremendous enthusiasm.
I wanted to hug him.
Writing this book has been painful and exhilarating. It was painful to force myself to remember things that I would just as soon forget. But it's been exhilarating to see how far I've come.
Dr. Doller told me once when I was in the hospital that I could never go back. I could never again be the girl I was before that dark night at summer camp. Looking over my life, I know now that I don't want to go back. I want to go ahead. I look forward to a future filled with accomplishment, learning and the love of my family and friends.
Many people helped me get to where I am now. Now it is my turn. Painful as it has been, I've written this book hoping that my story can help others the way I was helped. If my life and my experiences can help other people find their own ways out of darkness, I will know that I have not wasted the great gift I have been given: the chance to begin life again.
“FASCINATING̵UNDOUBTEDLY WILL FIND A PLACE IN THE CHERISHED LITERATURE OF FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS OF SUFFERING AND RECOVERY.”— Washington Post Book World
THE QUIET ROOM
At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child—the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her. Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage.
“CANDID…COURAGEOUS.”— San Diego Union-Tribune
An Alternate Selection of The Literary Guild® and Doubleday Book Club®