Please note: this story contains descriptions of mental health
Yesterday, I wrote about sitting in the garden looking up at the deep blue sky where the gulls gilded slowly overhead, made bright by the afternoon spring sunshine. While, at the same time, the rooks, from the trees across the road, were clattering, rising in tangled noisy flocks, coming back and settling and then swirling away again into the sky.
While I was looking at the beautiful sky, the children were tumbling and bouncing and laughing on the trampoline. (The one that we got from the neighbors, which they set up for us in our garden last week.) Wendy was sitting on the decking by the birch tree, drinking tea and looking at the weeds she had dug up from the strawberry patch. I was at the table, a garden level below them all, with my whisky and my laptop. Or at least I was, until James reminded me that he would only leave his Xbox in the house if I would promise to bounce on the trampoline with them too. So, writing abandoned, I joined my new family until, exhausted and zapped by static electricity from all our bouncing, we lay down on the webbing of the trampoline to stare up again into all that blueness.
That would be all I could ever want in the world. Even I know that is perfection; far better than any other success or achievement, better even than making the world a better, brighter place for all of us.
And yet it isn’t. Because, although I see it all, although I try to join in, I cannot. It is like I have been in a car crash and am dazed, looking around me but just not getting what has happened. That absence, that loss of feeling from the car crash happened so many years ago that I only just remember what it is like to live; to laugh. I am apart and not present; seeing but not inhabiting this perfection. Lost in a place where I wonder if I exist; if maybe I am a ghost of myself, observing my family from a distance.
For years I thought this feeling - this void and absence - was one of the negative symptoms of my diagnosis of schizophrenia. That batter of a word that has flattened so much of my life and it made me sad.
Nowadays I wonder to myself if maybe it is the combined effect of three decades of antipsychotics. The major tranquilizers that, apparently, give me the life I have but also drag my energy from me.
It tugs at me, this realization. It makes me yearn for a time when I can stop this medication; live with a bounce in my step, a smile ready on my lips; enjoy the delight of finding a spark, an idea, a joke; that leap into the wonder of doing for the fun of it.
I remember those times long ago when I felt so alive, so full of life and emotion. I pray for the day that I can live again. For the chance to inhabit my body again. Free from the dull safety of my medication.
I look to a future where I no longer unbutton my shirt for the length of the needle to bury itself in my muscle. That sharp nip followed by the dull ache as the liquid swells inside me. Or, if I am unlucky, that pause, when my nurse says that the drug will not come out; that the scar tissue in my shoulder from the last decade of injections is blocking the needle; that pause where she says ‘Sorry’ and hopes it doesn’t hurt but has to use both hands to squeeze the drug out of the syringe into my tired flesh.
If I was free of this, I would no longer have to let my nurse into my house and would no longer have to see my psychiatrist. I would never again go to a tribunal where a group of three people decide on my future; where people talk about me, question me, decide what is in my best interests. I could leave a lifetime of illness behind me; no longer assume one day I will end up dying because I can no longer cope with life. Never again be followed around a hospital ward by a nurse determined to stop me from harming myself. Never again have to go to the toilet, watched by strangers. Never again have to sleep with the light on night after night, being watched all night long. What bliss it would be!
What a beautiful dream! I could sit at my laptop in the garden, while the dog eats twigs and the family does their thing and I could smile and smile.
But the more I dream of this future, the more I remember that last nurse who said that this absence in my life is the cost of a medication that keeps me from the terror of my beliefs. I remember the conversation with Wendy when she repeated what I know so well: that without my medication, I will return to my former reality. And though I yearn beyond yearning to be real, it always involves the terror of the urge to harm myself. Could I do this to my family? To myself?
I pause. I think of my future and that maybe this is what we do as we get older; temper our expectations. After all, at least I can see the blue sky; I can hear the children laughing. Wendy still greets me in the morning with a kiss and, unlike so many others, I have work, I have some money, a house, a family. I have more than most people like me could dream of. I just wish it would feel real. I wish I was living this dream I am inhabiting.