Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [6]
Yet still they continued, commanding me, pounding into my head. They began to curse and revile me: “You whore bitch who isn't worth a piece of crap!” they yelled at me. I tried to answer them, to make them stop.
“It's not true,” I pleaded. “Leave me alone. It's not true.” Eventually, both I and the Voices collapsed in exhaustion.
In the nights that followed this torture continued. In the morning, I was exhausted, drawn and white from fear and lack of sleep. In the dead of night I jumped, pursued by the vicious Voices. Night after night I jumped, unable to sleep, either because of the screaming Voices, or my fear they would return.
As best I could during the day, I kept a calm but distant front. I spent as much time as I could in my bunk. But gradually people began to notice that something was wrong. My cheerful banter vanished, and I could sense that increasingly people were beginning to wonder what was the matter with me.
Finally at 9:30 A.M. on August 12 the camp owner, worried about my health, instructed a staff member to drive me home to Scarsdale.
Since that time, I have never been completely free of those Voices. At the beginning of that summer, I felt well, a happy healthy girl—I thought—with a normal head and heart. By summer's end, I was sick, without any clear idea of what was happening to me or why. And as the Voices evolved into a full-scale illness, one that I only later learned was called schizophrenia, it snatched from me my tranquillity, sometimes my self-possession, and very nearly my life.
Along the way I have lost many things: the career I might have pursued, the husband I might have married, the children I might have had. During the years when my friends were marrying, having their babies and moving into the houses I once dreamed of living in, I have been behind locked doors, battling the Voices who took over my life without even asking my permission.
Sometimes these Voices have been dormant. Sometimes they have been overwhelming. At times over the years they have nearly destroyed me. Many times over the years I was ready to give up, believing they had won.
Today this illness, these Voices, are still part of my life. But it is I who have won, not they. A wonderful new drug, caring therapists, the support and love of my family and my own fierce battle—that I know now will never end—have all combined in a nearly miraculous way to enable me to master the illness that once mastered me.
Today, nearly eighteen years after that terrifying summer, I have a job, a car, an apartment of my own. I am making friends and dating. I am teaching classes at the very hospital at which I was once a patient.
Still, I have been to a place where all too many people are forced to live. Like all too few, I have been permitted to return. I want to tell others about my journey so that those who have never experienced it will know what life inside of my schizophrenic brain has been like, and so that those who are still left behind will have hope that they too will find a path out.
2
Lori Scarsdale, New York, August 1970” Augyst 1977
As I look back on my childhood, one memory plagues me. It is the memory of the afternoon of the dog.
I remember that when I was young my family had a medium-sized black mongrel. He was kept chained to a door, unable to move very far in one direction or another. One day as I was in the kitchen with him I suddenly grew very angry.
In a burst of rage, I grabbed a nearby golf club and began beating the dog furiously. At first he barked hysterically. But because of the chain, he could not escape. He began to foam at the mouth. As I beat him, one by one his legs collapsed.