Tag Archives: magic

I’ll Take Medicine Over Magic

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in bipolar, mental illness, schizophrenia, Uncategorized

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Have you ever heard of the book, The Secret? It is a video now, too. The premise of, The Secret is that you can visualize what you want in this world and it will come to you. If you visualize wealth, money will come to you. If you visualize health, you will be healthy. The book claims that most great thinkers and artists throughout history knew this “secret” and practiced it.

You can probably guess where I am going with this already. I hate books, videos, self-help programs that tell you can have anything you want by “thinking it” into existence. In my opinion, the very core of these “programs” or philosophies is victim blaming. You have cancer? Just visualize yourself healthy, and it will go away! You have schizophrenia? You must be manifesting bad energy!

I think it is helpful to visualize things you want for yourself because it can help you focus and meet goals, or make something a priority. I don’t think visualizing something will automatically make you wealthy, healthy, more creative, etc. If this were true, all doctors would send us home and just say, “visualize your healthy mind!” And while I do think visualizing a healthy mind could help with symptoms, I don’t think it is going to replace medication. In other words, I could spend eight hours a day visualizing a healthy mind, and I would still have to take an antipsychotic to keep psychosis at bay.

In my opinion, these books, videos, programs are created by people who are lucky enough to be healthy and lucky enough to have opportunities available to them, or they are lucky enough to beat the odds and make it out of poverty or have an illness that goes into remission. I think it is almost cruel to subscribe to these ideologies and believe that people manifest their destiny. Honestly, I can’t think of a single person who wanted or thought their way into having cancer. I can’t think of a single person that would choose schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (there is still the occasional person who romanticizes mental illness and believes that heightened or brilliant creativity comes along with mental illness).

I had a cousin who believed the information presented in the book, “The Secret,” and he used to tell everyone that would listen, that he was going to be a millionaire by the time he was thirty. Well, thirty has come and gone for him, and he never mentions that anymore although we listened to it for years. Also, both of his parents are very ill now, and I think that has given him a new view of life – we simply don’t want or choose everything that happens to us.

Making a vision board to realize your dreams, or increase your creativity makes sense. Like I said before, having something like a vision board up in your workspace can help you remember and focus on the things you want out of life. But even if I filled my house with vision boards full of pictures of the things I used to do but can’t do anymore, it wouldn’t make those things magically manifest in my life.

I think we can all use a little dose of magic in our lives, but when it comes to health and healing, I count on doctors. Besides, antipsychotics can work like magic anyway.

 

The Real and Unreal: Struggles With Schizophrenia

08 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in mental illness, schizophrenia, Uncategorized, writing

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I have been applying for jobs that I think I would be able to do for the past year. One of the things about me is I always want to contribute. I worked up until five years ago. Since that time I have been trying to take classes and become retrained as a writer so I can build a freelancing career. I even went to culinary school and graduate school but couldn’t (for different reasons) keep up with either one.

On days when I can seriously self-reflect, I know that a freelance career or a work from home opportunity is all I can manage. In the morning, after I take my medications I frequently become so groggy and tired that I need to crawl back into bed and sleep for thirty minutes to an hour. There are days when I call my husband and ask him to come home from work. It is a good thing that he works so hard and has a good relationship with his boss.

One of the things I try to do to build a freelancing career is attend writing conferences and network with editors. I try to build these relationships on social media as well. My husband always goes to the conferences with me, and it is a good thing because we haven’t been to a single one where I didn’t run into problems with my symptoms.

If I made an appointment with you at ten in the morning to meet at Starbucks, you probably wouldn’t realize that I have schizophrenia (that is if I didn’t have to cancel or wasn’t experiencing anxiety).  Many people see me for short periods of time and don’t realize that I have a severe mental illness. I am capable of having a conversation, and I laugh a lot when people possess a sense of humor.

One reason my illness isn’t always easy to detect (with the exception of anxiety and paranoia) is because I have been practicing hiding it for over twenty years. I don’t like people to see my symptoms.

The strange thing I am trying to express by writing all of this is that I have a desire to be well. I think I am capable of more than I am. I have a desire not to have schizophrenia. I think I have an illusion (delusion) of myself at times that convinces me that I don’t have schizophrenia at all even though I am always adamant about taking my medications (a constant reminder that I am ill).

It is hard to describe having clear enough thoughts to write these essays or to write anything, but in the same day be so paranoid that I need my husband to come home from work to help me. Those two worlds, my healthy world, and my symptom-filled world, don’t sit well side by side. The side of me that writes these essays thinks that I can achieve anything, and all I need to do is try hard enough or get the right breaks. The mentally ill part of me requires more medication, help from my husband or others, and keeps me from really being successful at anything (because no matter what I think I can do, I can’t control the daily symptoms).

I guess that is my brand of schizophrenia in a nutshell – a woman full of possibilities and ideas that she can’t reasonably achieve because her symptoms pop up unexpectedly and demand all the attention.

It is hard to admit that you are limited in your potential. It is hard to admit that the very part of your body that occasionally creates original and interesting sentences can turn into your enemy.

I don’t feel sorry for myself, but acceptance is a life-long process and one where I feel my progress is not linear but more like forward and backward and off the path all together like when I apply for a job that there is no way in the world I would be able to handle. Is that hope? Is that delusion? Is that magical thinking? Is that over-confidence, or is that the result of schizophrenia and the reality of my illness playing hide and seek with me?

It’s hard to have a disease of the brain because even in healthy people the brain can play tricks on you, and in mentally ill people you can’t always tell the tricks from reality it’s like watching a magic show by a master magician.

A Tiny Tale of Wonder

07 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized, writing

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So many people say they have magic or synchronicity or coincidence in their life. Maybe they mention fairy dust or mermaids. I call it all God. All those wonderful moments when you know the currents of electricity or the moon or tides or whatever have aligned in your favor and everything works out. It’s a mystery; those moments, those miracles are God for me, magic for you, amazing for all.

I had a writing mentor, but he passed away a year ago last April. I was heartbroken by the loss. He was a very successful writer and poet and extremely well loved. He was the first writer that I had met that believed in my work since I had returned to writing after a twenty-year hiatus. (The story of why I didn’t write all those years is sad, and I think I have shared it here on more than one occasion).

Steve not only told me what he didn’t like about my work; he told me what he thought was good about it. He wrote essays for me to get into graduate school to study poetry (and I got into both of the schools that received his essays). I knew that he was serious about what he said about my writing because he published some of my poetry in two different publications where he worked as an editor.

Sometime after Steve’s death, I hired a writing coach to help me write my memoir. I worked with the coach for many months before deciding I wasn’t ready or didn’t want to write my memoir. I have a serious problem with motivation which is a symptom of schizophrenia that gets harder to live with over the years. I stopped scheduling appointments with my coach.

I missed having the support of a mentor, an editor, a cheerleader and a friend.

On the one year anniversary of Steve’s death, I was at AWP16, the largest writing conference in the United States. Before attending the conference, I found out that a writer who I had traveled to Flagstaff Arizona to see (at another writer’s conference), was auctioning off a package of her writing services for a year. I looked at the schedule, and there were two other things I wanted to attend (actually, I needed to attend) booked at the same time as the party where the auction was scheduled. I was devastated, but then I discovered that I could bid in advance and not be required to attend the party.

My husband and I talked about how much we could afford to pay for me to work with this writer for a year. We decided to put the absolute highest amount we thought we could afford so that I would have a better chance at winning the auction. (At that time, I didn’t know that I could contact this writer and work with her. I thought the auction was my only chance).

The day of the auction I ran into a poetry professor who knew Steve and knew how much he meant to me. I told this professor that I had tried but been unable to find someone who filled those holes and gave direction to my writing life. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I felt the tremendous loss of such an advocate, teacher, mentor, and friend.

It was the day after the anniversary of Steve’s death when I was sitting in a disability panel as a representative of writers with a mental illness when I got the text. Mine was the winning bid at the auction. I nearly screamed out my excitement in that auditorium. I let my hands go over my head and pumped the air above.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book, Big Magic; the book is about living a creative life. She writes a lot about those moments, those incidents when everything in the universe seems to be working toward a single goal that manifests itself before you, or in you, or around you.

I still miss Steve every time I write a new essay, or have an article published, but I believe in an afterlife and the continuation of spirit and energy. And I think he would have delighted in the fact that Anna and I connected. In fact, I think he arranged it.

 

The Secret to Writing

26 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized, writing

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For hours I read the descriptions for writing classes. I look at UCLA Extension classes. I look at Gotham Writing Workshop. I look at the offerings of the non-profit writing organization in my city. I spend hours searching for online writing classes and writing groups in my area. I attend as many writing workshops as I can afford. I am searching. I am looking for discipline. I am looking for a magic pill or bullet that will keep me in my chair every day writing essays, prose poems, blog posts, articles. There must be a trick to being productive. It doesn’t help that on Facebook I am friends with a wide network of writers. Those writers report their daily word count: 2500, 3000, sometimes more. I feel inadequate. I feel like a failure. I hire a writing coach.

I have to accept that I am looking for shortcuts. I am looking for a guru with the answers to being a writer, but no such guru exists. The only true guru would tell me this one word, “write.”  That’s it. I realize today as I am typing this that my problem is not that I need one more class, another critique, the input of one more teacher, assignments, encouragement, one more syllabus, or to participate in another workshop.

I need to sit down and do the work. I need to open a document and begin to type. I have been looking for something magical or mystical, some easy way out. There is no easy way out. It is just me, my thoughts, my hopes, my dreams, my words on a page that I either send into the world, or I don’t.

The time of reckoning is here: I either want to be a writer or I don’t. I either take this lonely step, or I give it up altogether. I think of all the money I have spent on advice. I think of all the time I have spent in classes. I think of how I was searching for someone to do the work for me. It doesn’t work that way. I need the determination. I need the motivation. I need to sit down and get down to business, the business of putting words on a page.

I have always believed that everyone has a book inside of them. I frequently meet people who tell me they are going to write theirs. I wish them well, I do, but this business of putting ideas on the page every day is not for everyone. It is both a pleasure and hard work. The words don’t always flow. The ideas don’t always make sense when you try to type them out. Not every piece is artistic or amazing.

I lost the ability to write for many years because I couldn’t focus while on my medication. I never want to lose that ability again. I don’t take this gift of time and the gift of desire for granted, but I have been looking for shortcuts and the path that has already been cleared for a few years now. It’s time to take out my machete, and start hacking away at the obstacles. No one can do it for me. I’m out in the jungle and the options are, move forward or stand still and perish without water.

I sat in my chair today, and I wrote. I wrote these words. I cleared the path a little bit. I took a step forward. Tomorrow, I hope I can make a little more progress, and after that, a few steps into the jungle each day.

It is work this writing, and although it is the best life I can imagine, I need to stop searching. If you want to write a book or make a living as a writer, you can pack your bags and begin to search for the best way to do that. But when you return home, you will find your computer waiting, and if you are lucky, there will be a sticky note on it that says that one word, “write.” And you will discover that you already had everything you needed before you left on your journey. That’s it. That’s all there is to it, “write.”

It’s so much harder than it sounds, you’ll break a sweat again and again, but that’s the secret, and it’s up to you to somehow find a way to turn it into magic one word at a time.

 

 

Visitors

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in relationships, writing

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My oldest brother is visiting. He is seven years older than I am. I can remember when I was a little girl, and my parents were separated, my brother would pack me and my other brother up and take us out to a neighboring town where our mom was waitressing, so we could see her before bed.  While we were visiting my mom, we would fold napkins for the tables, and when we left she would give us After Eight Mints which I thought were the fanciest chocolate in the world. My oldest brother would take us home and help us get to bed.

Today we are all going to a baseball game. Baseball has been a big part of my brother’s life. I remember going to watch him play when he was in high school. In grade school, like most young children who are exposed to both fantasy and religion, I believed a combination of the two, and I used to try to use “magic” prayers when it was my brother’s turn to bat in order to help him do well. I would sit there and hum, or recite the same word over again and again, with the full belief that I was changing the course of the game.

I loved my oldest brother, and I thought almost everything he did was “right” and “cool.” I am sure he is the first person in this world that I looked up to. I can remember that he used to keep Reeses Peanut Butter Cups in the freezer and tell us not to touch them. Even though I would open that freezer drawer and stare at that candy longingly, I never took one from his stash. I also remember that he had a pet mouse that he took with him to a baseball game one day and someone accidently killed it. My brother came home in tears. It was one of those times when I wished I knew the right thing to say or do, but I was still pretty young without a lot of emotional resources or experience.

When I was still in grade school, my brother made me a concoction of mouth wash and I’m not sure what else, and told me it was “White Lightening” and that it would give me super powers. I took the potion to school, and would drink it on the playground and then run as fast as I could. The teachers questioned me about it, and took it away from me. They may have even called my parents, I’m not sure. All I knew was that my brother had given me a bottle of super powers, and I was going to use it.

Today as I watch the pitcher warm up his arm, and the first batter step onto home plate, I will be thinking about the young boy who was one of my first caregivers and heroes – a boy who had a lot of responsibility placed on him at a very young age, and never took out the pressure on his younger siblings. I’ll be thinking about him swinging a bat and I might say a few “magic” prayers that this time he wins at something bigger than baseball. I want him to win in love and in life.