I read a blog that is written by the mother of a young man with schizophrenia. I enjoy reading this blog, because it is a mother (caregiver) on the outside trying to look in. My blog is a person with schizophrenia on the inside trying to look out.  It is fascinating to me to put these two perspectives side by side.

Anyway, yesterday on the blog I mentioned, the mother wrote that her son’s doctor said the symptoms of schizophrenia are like the weather, they are constantly changing.

I thought about the analogy to the weather and my symptoms for a long time. I don’t want my symptoms to be constantly changing. When things are good, I want them to stay good. Of course when things are bad, I want the weather to change quickly.  After I thought about it for a while though, I had to agree, my symptoms are ever changing.

There are times when I can be at a party enjoying myself for hours, and then all of a sudden a wave of paranoia can hit me and I am frightened, anxious, uncomfortable, and ready to leave. This can happen anywhere at any time.

On the other side of that, there are times when I am so strong in terms of my symptoms that I amaze myself.

Yesterday, I did two things that I never do. I have written about my relationship to food and how complicated it is, well yesterday, the safety seal on the yogurt was torn and I ate the yogurt anyway. This is something I have never been able to do before. Normally, I throw the whole container away without even so much as a thought about it.

Another thing I did yesterday was eat leftovers from a restaurant that we brought home from a city that is two hours away. Normally, I would let my husband eat anything that has sat out more than fifteen minutes, but I popped that eggplant parmesan in the microwave and ate it all up.

I don’t know where my courage came from yesterday, I have not been able to do either one of those things for longer than I can remember. I had to overcome a little fear to eat the yogurt and the eggplant but a very low level of fear, a fear that was easy to override.

I would consider yesterday a huge success. The fact that I could do two things that normally cause me to feel fearful and paranoid, and that I usually would avoid, was huge. I deserve gold stars on my report card in my opinion.

Today, the weather could change and there could be a storm, or cloudy skies. Unfortunately with schizophrenia you never know when you will need an umbrella or winter coat.