For Kaspar: the ninth wave

 In The Handmaiden’s Tale, Margaret Attwood wrote of such people:

“We were the people who were not in the papers.

We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print…

We lived in gaps between the stories.”

I rose and rose through the skies and reached the outer reaches of the earth. Nothing could bring me down.....

The thing with Schizophrenia is that sometimes you will get these sort of manic phases where everything seems to revolve around you. My delusions feed into this since today it seems like everything has happened for a reason. Every little thing on my way today was put there by the gods, or the suits behind the scenery, and I know it seems weird but that's what I feel like. I know it's not true and I dont believe in fate but today it certainly seems like the entire world revolves around me and only me.

When I get like this I go so high that I loose touch with earth. I go farther than my life support can handle and that's when the fall kicks in.

 

A seemingly endless fall triggered by the fact that your brain is so full of signals to interpret that it just shuts down. The entire overjoyed state of mind shifts and turns into depression and sends you falling faster than anyone can catch you. I know because I've been here before. I've gone through this countless times already. Being so manic and happy thinking that everything is put in your way for a reason. Spending tons of cash on pointless things because you get a wicked impulse in your brain that tells you that you have to have this now and that it won't be there next month when you can actually afford it.

 

People with schizophrenia often act on impulse a lot and I am very guilty of that. It makes me fun to be around as I'll get weird ideas in the middle of the night and act on them, but it's dangerous for me as it's not just like an idea that pops up into my mind. It's a need or a craving for something that I can't ignore.

 

For instance. When I've gone to bed and cant sleep all of a sudden I will get this idea that I need food. I'm not really hungry or anything I just want to eat. So instead of ignoring that and getting a good nights sleep I get out of bed and cook not because I want to but because I have to.

 

Otherwise bad stuff will happen.

I've been to many record stores and bought a ton of vinyls that I couldnt afford simply because my brain was telling me that I need to get theese things otherwise something will happen.

Sourced from theendlessfall: a story


The author of this blog has not written since July 2012.  In his last post, Kaspar wrote: the mortality rate for people with schizophrenia is frightening...up to 13% successfully kill themselves while a staggering 60% of all males suffering have attempted suicide one time or more.

I think in total I've had about 10 suicide attempts.....1 or 2 of which were more serious than just attempting.


I feel in my heart that this articulate young man has......... left the building.


 

The Orthopedic Position

 

 

 

In a novel I read long ago, an intern said he had put an obnoxious patient’s bed in “the orthopedic position.” When asked what that meant, he said:

.... "you put the bed as high as it will go and hope the patient will fall out and break something so you can transfer them to the orthopedic service and be rid of them".


That was fiction, but the reality is that every doctor has difficult patients he dreads seeing on his appointment list, sometimes because they are obnoxious but often because their symptoms are stubbornly resistant to treatment and he knows he has nothing more to offer them. Referring them to an acupuncturist would be an easy way out, a way to reduce stress and to avoid guilt feelings for being unable to help those people.

Surely that is a natural temptation.

“Integrative” medicine is another tempting way out. When science-based medicine has little or nothing to offer, the “integrative medicine” concept is seductive. It allows you to step outside the constraints of the scientific arena. In CAM there are no rules because there’s no solid evidence to base rules on; you can pretty much try anything that occurs to you, and just make things up as you go.

~ Harriet Hall, MD
Science-Based Medicine





Lilith on Luke 13:11-13

Abraham took Isaac's hand
And led him to the lonesome hill
While his daughter hid and watched
She dare not breathe; she was so still

Just as an angel cried for the slaughter
Abraham’s daughter raised her voice

Then the angel asked her what her name was
She said, "I have none."
Then he asked, "How can this be?"
"My father never gave me one."

And with his sword up raised for the slaughter
Abraham’s daughter raised her bow
"How darest you, child, defy your father?"
"You better let young Isaac go."

 

~ lyrics Arcade Fire,

 

 

¹¹ And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.

¹² And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.

¹³ And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.

Jaysus Christ on a piece of toast,

Thank God for that!!

Now I can get my legs up over my head again

and go back to work as a

Whore!

Tha's nowt so Queer as Folk

My parents entertained seldom, being shy, very, but most people in our road were just like them only with bigger or littler noses and hopes the same way.  They woke then worked.  Then they ate and admired sunsets. The same sunsets.

It was the ridiculously simple routine of daily life that sent my mum crazy; she took Bex, Aspros and Vincent's Powders that she slid pinkly down her teeth mixed with Myra Plum Jam 'to take the taste away', and fled the dreary scene that way with some more fascinating interior view of existence that got flattened out flatter than the pikelets she made on a flour-board made of tough white plastic.

My main memory of the growing-up teenage years is of her baking lots of moist or very dry fruitcakes, depending upon what drugs she was taking and their influence.  Her good ones required lots of hard vigour; here's how she did them thirty-five years back.

First she got big bowls out and rinsed them very clean with lots of boiling hot water.  Then she dried each with a crisp tea towel until each was gleaming in its way, with a kind of sparkle. She rested the bowls on the stainless steel sink and patted down a few clean pages of The Herald newspaper on her limited work-bench.  Upon this she set the packets of O-So-Lite Flour.


Extract from Unparalleled Sorrow by Barry Dickens.