(*Note* To live with the mental illness schizophrenia is to experience a punishing journey through the world. Having this illness offers us who have it unique challenges on this mysterious life path we're all on. All people out there who have schizophrenia are on a similar path together, a path shared in common by millions of other struggling people around the world. With this appreciable struggle in mind, I have decided to write more in my future blog posts about my personal experiences in living with schizophrenia in the hope of reaching out to people who also have this same illness. I'd like to let people who live with schizophrenia know that they are not alone, and to let other people in general know that we the people who have this illness schizophrenia have a voice which is loud and clear. Perhaps the ideas I share here can help other people in some small way. Hopefully we can even begin a constructive conversation that can bring change for the better to a few people who live with this devastating mental illness.
With this idea of wanting to make a difference for people with mental illness in mind, I was a few days into the writing of this new blog entry when something happened that made me rethink whether or not I should continue to share my views. Before that new consideration, I was writing on a very personal subject that I was already apprehensive and uncertain about sharing with people. The subject I was busy describing was the experience of being rejected by the friendship circle I once knew while living with paranoid schizophrenia. The experience of being left alone, for over twenty years, has made me feel determined now to try and stop what I believe is a more widespread phenomenon beyond me that exists in society. I know there exists in society a deliberate and organized behavior that teaches and persuades others to cruelly avoid the mentally ill. This shared response by society toward us people who live with mental illnesses like schizophrenia exists as a cold shoulder which leaves us out on the margins of life. My thinking in response to this behavior is that If I can change any of these cruel sane behaviors in any way then I want to try to do so, despite any humiliation involved, for the sake of my brothers and sisters who live with schizophrenia.
The post I'd been working on, in pursuit of this view, reads like a rant at the end of the article. The article may sound desperate but after suspecting strongly that I'm not alone in this experience I believe it's worth my damaged pride to speak out against this cruel injustice in defence of the weaker people of society.
Then something happened in my neighborhood off the page causing me to question if I should continue with the argument I was making. Having not yet shared the angry message about being marginalized in community, my father, who lives in a house beside me, was exiting our avenue, when he was met by a neighbor and his wife, who live at the end of our quiet street a few houses away. The man and his wife invited my family: my mother, father, my brother, and his wife, to a barbecue that evening. The man said to my father "to make sure to tell Donald that he's invited; please tell him he's very welcome, and we're really hopeful he'll come, it will be just us, no other people will be here!"
In reflecting on that new consideration, after receiving this welcomed message of kindness from my neighbors, I had to rethink whether or not to write this present blog entry. I had to reconsider the present post because it reads in the end as a rant describing how people living with the mental illness schizophrenia are often angrily gossiped about and forgotten by others in society. I therefore considered changing the message because of the kindness shown by my neighbors. Yet I knew in further reflection that basically I still feel the same way and I know that people living with the mental illness schizophrenia across the continent all know what i'm talking about. I know they understand loneliness, because I had talked to lonely people living with schizophrenia in hospital, and I had read extensively about people's experiences in the community who have the same mental illness. I knew people with schizophrenia were commonly avoided and forgotten by people in society and I had experienced prolonged loneliness myself, enduring years of being forgotten by old friends. I was forty-eight now, I thought, and I was well aware of just how cruel marginalization was and how very real it is in the lives of millions of people living with mental illness in our society. My heart went out to younger people especially, in their twenties and thirties, facing this illness for the first time and having no one to bring further meaning to their lives around them.
I decided therefore to post this present blog entry as planned, with the rant included, and yet I had to appreciate and acknowledge the kind people at the end of the street. On past Christmases, and when holding neighborhood party's, they had went out of their way to be kind and to try and include me. They had extended an invitation to attend their party's, in order to try and help me feel welcome in the community every year, showing a concern and maturity that many of my old friends I used to have sadly lacked. They had been really kind in wishing me a Merry Christmas and there were a few other neighbors who had been kind in similar ways I had to fairly consider.
It should also be observed, in reflection now, that in this blog post below certain angry thoughts might be misdirected. When I write about overhearing angry neighborhood gossip coming from some yard in the area what I think to be an angry discussion directed at me and my life at the time might actually be my thinking affected by paranoia and ideas of reference. These may not be observations that are actually accurate in reality. People might really be understanding toward my illness and they might really be saying only kind things about me late at night while drinking rum and smoking pot at outdoor barbecue's. To live with the illness schizophrenia is to face these kind of troubling thoughts, and suspicions, especially when distant conversation isn't clearly heard well enough to know what's really being said.)
Crazy
I was deep in contemplation sitting on an old ripped and stained sofa listening to distant noises around me. I peered through an old pain-glass window, there in my shaded grove, in the sanctuary of my dusty living room. The hours of the day then passed by as I deliberated unknown puzzles, sitting and watching a mysterious reality pass by numbered by some inglorious hand. Then getting up, and walking out the old flimsy front porch door, I moved from inside my house to a folding chair on the front lawn. I sat there and then watched as the prehistoric sun gradually descended in its path beyond this side of the unusual world in the wondrous and mysterious sky. I watched the sun carefully as lingering sunbeams moved gradually beyond this side of the spinning earth and then mysteriously found another puzzling side of the mystifying planet. I thought how the source of this light stood out there a part of boundlessness in an anomalous sphere of majestic and vacuous deep unknown as I marveled how those unknowns awaited to be realized, amid the distant landscape, where interstellar winds blew within the infinite starlit darkness. Far out there was a far spanning solitude that reached with perplexity into endless unknown reaches, I considered, as dusk now began to wake my soul from its doubtful slumber and I became filled with a belief in the real wonders and awaiting possibilities of existence.
A few minutes later, just past dusk, suspended above me in the night sky, a view of ancient stars appeared in the unexplored and outer universe. Then as I gazed around, out of the shadows around me, where I sat watching, I imagined there to be unseen forces roaming this terrain around me, preying on neighbors, targeting all thinking minds, causing misunderstandings, agitating society, and working on the emotions, thoughts, and frame of mind of people to no good ends.
Fireflies appeared now interrupting my suspicion of prowling specters. They moved in the air dancing and flickering in the darkness. I again wondered if unseen apparitions really did move about like roaring lions on the landscape. I knew that I had seen too much evil in the world to doubt such things existing in nature. These nefarious forces could have chosen to reveal themselves like the flickering firefly light, if so inclined, I thought now, but instead stood hidden and without form but they were around.
With this present interpretation of reality some people might have argued that these thoughts were brought about by the illness schizophrenia I considered there in the quiet. As I thought this thought now, I then recognized God's presence take up a vacant chair on my right side on the lawn beside the porch as the moons light dimly shone down on where we sat. I knew now that no one else would ever know besides me that God was really there.
I sat there for a long time in the darkness, looking at the stars, and listening to God reassure me in clear thoughts. I then chose to say a prayer under the unknown cosmos and then reluctantly I retired into my house into my bedroom.
As I lay in bed in the darkness my mind began wondering freely. I found myself suddenly begin to float in a great void, with no earth under me, and nothing else in the unknown but me alone experiencing this existence. It became clear in the void of nothingness that I existed out of nothing in the unknown for a reason and that reason was responsible for being here amid seeming impossibility. It became obvious to me that life was more then my doubts and fears could conceive of, as laying there now God's clear thoughts occurred again to my thinking like they had before while writing my sixth book: "A Paranoid Schizophrenics Message Of Hope For The World." After experiencing the clear thoughts while laying there now the experience left me beyond reasonably convinced that there were further expanses of meaning, and much larger mysteries, waiting for us all beyond this presently known reality. Good itself, in all its sophistication, lay behind us being here in this mysterious improbable seeming unknown place. After realizing this, I quickly climbed out of bed, turned on the overhead light, and wrote these inspired thoughts down on a piece of loose-leaf including God's clear words.
"Don't worry about death, it's no obstacle for me."
I then returned to bed again and slept well through the night in my little house in the sleepy village under the elms.
Immediately after climbing out of bed in the morning the sunshine hit me as I began gathering items together and placing them in a backpack. I was preparing for a hike that I planned to take that afternoon. When the mid-afternoon warmth of the day arrived, I set off out my front door on a long walk. I was planning now to traverse across the open terrain, under the afternoon sunshine, and travel far beyond the distant big hill of Brookfield. My plan was to walk through the trees of the scenic forest, until I reached the distant Forest Glen, and then to keep going beyond there and eventually picnic beside the winding and peaceful Stewiacke River.
As I hiked along now, I happened onto a large meadow in the wondrous sunshine. I noticed looking above the sunlit terrain that the sky was absent even one of its miraculous white clouds. Standing there, amid the illusive reminders of seeming finality, on this changing, impermanent earth, I reflected how that I, and all life as we know it, was supposed to one day disappear entirely amid the large span, and immensity, of time. Thinking this, I looked from my curios moment in time around me at what seemed prepared deliberately there for me now as in all directions I viewed an endless field of green.
The wild green terrain held yellow grass too, was dotted with the color purple, along with stems of bright yellow daffodils, as my eyes turned then to growing daises. I thought of swift warm breezes sweeping over the trees of the forest, and meeting the grassy terrain, blowing the fragrant scents past the busy hovering bumblebees circling and buzzing around the fragrant flowers. My favorites flowers, I thought in reflection now, were crimson rosebushes with prickly thorns, as beyond me I noted the peonies that didn't sway now on this calm windless day. I stood enchanted by them nonetheless admiring them and other wildflowers in my present wonderment.
As beautiful and serene as the peaceful meadow I now looked at was, I began to think how here among the same scenic terrain evil spirits actually prowled. They moved about us sabotaging the capabilities of people for maintaining peace between each other in this mysterious reality we live in. The evil in the world I knew was real and prowled about like a lion scheming and deliberating on this very same beautiful terrain I now walked on and admired. This nefarious influencer will come out of hiding in the lives of mankind once again too, and inflict new and more nightmarish realities on this weary world. Evil will try, and often will successfully succeed, at working on the shaping of thoughts, beliefs, judgment, and behavior, as well as work on human emotions, and temperament, as it seeks to produce as much conflict, hatred, pain, and violence as it can. The individuals will I knew was vulnerable to being misguided by imperfect thought processes. The responses in our psyche, through our flawed reasoning, often enough didn't have the wisest interpretive means available for us to understand what we actually confronted in thought in order to know the right ideas to meet these challenges in the right way. We react to human pain, injurious drama, others meanness, with ideas, and those ideas didn't always originate from within ourselves. Our reactions commonly, not uncommonly, were responses tempted by spirits inspiring conflict instead of peace making, forgiveness, or strategies at deescalating the situation with wisdom. In challenging thought processes our judgment faces key behavioral struggles that may destroy our own life or someone else's because evil is real and not an illusion. In the battlefield thought filled terrain we're on we're often enough not able to counter faulty reasoning that actually comes from an evil origin that is deliberately stirring up and nurturing conflict generating reactions in our present and habitual long term thought.
As a result of our blind retaliatory action, that gets produced in our imperfect mislead minds, what then comes about is more human pain in life in a scenario which evil has deliberately produced within the lives of naïve human beings across time. The consequences of such misguided thought leads to behavior which causes various forms of needless conflict between people often causing consequences that hurt all people involved. The tempting of our minds toward violence, or cruelty, or to act with retaliation through pride; the overwhelming demand for revenge, is not an experience pursued only by paranoid schizophrenics alone, but is the same struggle faced by billions of sane people in the world. Out of our pain comes defiant emotion, misguided reasoning, and intense deliberately inspired anger, brought about, and then intensified in us, by a nefarious agent quietly nurturing imperfect people's minds producing lasting and painfully spoken words, acts of humiliation, every kind of hurtful injurious behavior, injustice, cruel and violent infliction on others, all carried out by people caught up in a spiritual battlefield of human experience which sees in reality real forces of good and evil acting on our lives.
This evil is not unreal, I knew, or just found in some foreign impoverished country which lacks a good government. Evil is real and challenges human interconnectedness everywhere, including in Canada, and evil really does hope to destroy not only that individual effected by it's influence but other people's wellbeing everywhere in the wider world. Because of a persons ignorance in reasoning, because of impulsive action, after being inspired by hatred, out of an innocence and naivety in people when faced by evil unknowingly, people are being inspired toward engaging in conflict as they are thrown innocently into a total loss of direction. Billions of people face this nefarious force every second on this planet. This prowling demonic beast, I know, will make ruins of many people's ability to willfully resist by preventing people from finding a peaceful way through this chaotic life. I know this, I think now, because I have faced personally these deliberate and diabolical misguiding storms and I know from them how many lives will self destruct, not only potentially hurting others, but ruining their own future opportunity for a bright future in this world. I know that I'm not a Bible thumper, I think now, but if people knew just a few of Jesus parables, remembered well to their mind, they would know how to think when confronted by demonic spirits. The temptations will come and the war for many of us will be long and laborious but to those who triumph they will find a brighter future in this world. Those who don't triumph in the spiritual fight may self-destruct, or will produce misery in the world, and will be a pawn in evils moves on the chessboard of reality.
I stood thinking these thoughts there under the sun now and then I considered how I knew there was a good God behind existence. I knew that great good overlooked this remarkable picture in the ingeniousness of the unknown. Many people I knew would fail to find a peaceful or fair way through the world that offered them the opportunity to know in life real happiness or glimpses of joy. Many people would find themselves instead in war and dying of violent and terrible circumstances. Many other people would have their minds angrily hijacked by evil's destructive influence and naively and innocently lose the struggle and become lost to a life-time spent in an over crowded prison or penitentiary. Billions of other people in this world would not find another persons overly certain religion, a belief by those who hold it that thinks that they alone have found the only path of hope through this unclear world. The Jesus that I knew was for everyone, was inclusive toward all of humanity on earth in God's plan in a way that strict theology unreasonably wasn't. I knew from talking to God in conversation that despite this kind of prevalent narrow road for human hope held theology, that many religious people preached about God, that God really offered a much fairer hope to humanity on a much larger and more phenomenal scale. God's plan wasn't irrational but instead he loves eternally the imperfect human condition. I believed wholeheartedly in a much fairer God who would be reasonably fair to all of humanity. The clear thoughts then occurred to my mind again as I considered this now.
"You're not wrong, I died for the sin of the whole world."
I continued walking again now with my mind drifting across different subjects. Each of my footsteps fell on the soft green grass, stepping over the soil underneath my shoes, until eventually I walked out of the peaceful meadow and entered an old growth forest beyond the big hill. After finding the trail to follow I knew was there, I set a leisurely pace now walking among large billowing willow and pine trees around me. The branches of the willows hung together in tangled layers, some touching the ground, other branches rising in elevation high into the brilliant sunlit sky. With each footstep, I stepped on pine needles covering the forest floor beneath the pines. As I walked, and looked about me, a sudden wind appeared out of nowhere, whispering through the tree limbs, as birds hopped about on the twisting branches. The haunting wind whispered in-between the trees, funneling past leaves and boughs, as its gusts sent tree branches swaying, and leaves quivering, with the breeze meeting pleasantly my exposed arms and face.
My thoughts turned to something else now as I walked along the winding path between the trees. I thought about a young twenty-five year old woman I knew who also had paranoid schizophrenia like I did. She had written me from Saskatchewan after reading my online blog. She was one of us, I thought now, a person with schizophrenia, a deeply troubled soul living in the world. She was wounded by illness, and life, and struggling to fit in, while enrolled in community college and taking a legal assistant course. She had told me how she found the course really difficult to follow, while living with schizophrenia, which made learning much harder, and how she was hearing voices continuously, especially when she was sitting in her course among other students and listening to the professor.
As I walked past a line of low hanging alter bushes, encroaching on either side of the trail, I kept considering my new friend, and continuing to feel bad for her, as I plowed ahead through the scraping alter branches. Then ahead of me, a ways off, in a view that looked past the entanglement of view hiding tree twigs and green leaves, the trail suddenly opened into a clearing, just as birds appeared, and began to sing and hop across the trail. Impulsively, after seeing the birds, and listening to their pleasant sound, while looking through the leaves in front of my forehead and eyes, I tried to fathom the possibility of a joyful future reality that answered all our loftiest hopes with actual possibility. Hope appeared mysteriously to us now very illusively with skepticism and realism dauntingly working on our uncertain minds. I tried to envision beyond hope itself, however, a place of indescribable discoverable treasure, real treasure, unlike gold and diamonds, such as unending and ever increasing amounts of joy, something found that human beings secretly and mysteriously have always longed for more of. Was there awaiting ahead of us, on life's winding road, within the greatness of this journey we're now so mystifyingly on, in time, amid the unknown, such an awaiting possibility.
I considered this mystically rumored destination, prepared for weary searching hearts, a place of immeasurably given joy, coming to fruition and giving no more discouragement or disappointment at all. I pondered the corridor there, which I thought was now in reach of us, that would open into unseen unknowns of the universe and lead to a truly graceful place where God awaited all his children there. Such a discovery of hope, so realized, I knew was very real, though presently unseen, but that it had always been suggested in undeniable ways, I realized, as I weaved around the tree branches. that I knew standing there in the woods, whether being crazy or not, in an instant, that we would come out of this journey of life and be wholeheartedly restored from our scars and pain and ushered into a place of unfathomable tranquility and meet there not glances of love, but know love as it completely is in actuality in all its wondrous mystery.
After considering these ideas for some time, standing there among the trees, I then walked out of the alters, and into a clearing, and looked around me there. I appreciated for a moment the clover of the clearing as I listened to the buzz of familiar sounding insects and then continued to make my way onward moving through the forest trail until I exited the trees and reached the open meadow terrain of the Forest Glen.
A short time later, I crossed across a quiet country dirt road, with no cars in sight, as I admired the fertile terrain full of more picturesque wildflowers. I then walked farther on for another mile, moving across connecting pasture lands, and then looked and spotted deer grazing at the far edge of an open field. Wondering farther, I eyed a small skunk moving among a patch of long grass under the days sunshine. I soon came across a place in a pasture where a sagging barbed-wire fence cut across the open field, and hoping over its rusty wires and spikes, I walked on until up ahead of me in the distance I could see the winding Stewiacke River.
I thought more about this mysterious life now as I walked beside a small tributary stream that rippled with fresh clear forest water. The clear water flowed along now, gurgling as it traveled downstream, with the weak current moving over small polished stones found along the winding path. I followed the grassy terrain on, immersed now in heavy thought, while in sight of the approaching river up ahead. I then stopped walking and looked up at the enfolding endlessness overshadowing existence. I thought that the vacuousness was obviously there now to entrap us on this lonely rock that orbited an old ancient star. I thought how odd this human drama was in being here confined to an object in the unknown sky. I wondered what unheard of explanations, what mysterious revealing truths, existed that could reveal something grand about who we are, and where we are, that now waited somewhere in the unknown to describe to us and our searching minds the real grand picture of all reality. Maybe the source of explanation to our great questions watched on now, as its candles burned nearby, all as mans sights roamed with frustration the celestial prehistorical deeps while wondering what is out there and what does it know about all of unknown reality.
The human being alone knows something, I thought now while scanning as far east as the horizon allowed. No other living creature is conscious enough of this potentiality to desire an explanation to our existence. The human person gazes up into what might very well hold mysteries reasons for being here among a region in the endlessness of the sky which could hold great unseen phenomenon we now can't see or inventively predict.
I then thought that it had to be ok in this world to get reality wrong, amid all of life's uncertainty. There was no source of reasonable clarification among all of life's competing ideas. There existed no universal way to figure out the truth for everyone existing in the world. There was faith, which I had, I thought, that could open our minds to experience God, but to know that he is real, and that he is with us as we search, was an awareness that proved universally unrealized by billions of people, and there were no real guarantees that people would find any evidence of God in life's journey. This need for finding certainty, in an uncertain place, among imperfect thinking people, proved an unreasonable requirement for people because getting certainty right was an illusive task. There seemed to be no great fairness in the organization of our mortal opinions as our ideas wondered in uncertain and differing directions, our thoughts differing among multitudes of human beings in the wider world. Perhaps knowledge all along was meant to be free, I thought, and not forced in the direction it takes, so that wonder and possibility can reach new sights and experiences questioning a world of great complexity.
There were no universally placed road signs, not ones fairly placed enough on this journey, not placed strategically enough, or readable to so many lives, to guide life's weary travelers along. As much as mortal human beings endlessly arrived on the shores of life and thought in their hubris they knew certain truth it remained objectively illusive. Ideas changed as well beyond ocean divides, differing in persuasion beyond the next mountain escarpment in the distance, as imperfect thought met different reasoning and persuasion.
Even if there is a real knowledge that defines entirely what the absolute all encompassing truth of reality is it probably isn't known by any of us with any real clarity. Such insight, if here, seems incapable of reaching and helping many billions of human beings discover who we are and what forces over-arch our lives. So much of the human condition can't know that truth now, if it does exist here, because we are not being fairly presented with the opportunity to clearly scrutinize and access all thought to know if that truth claim really contains the answers and authority that imperfect people suggests to us it does. If there is a final answer to the mystery, in the form of an all-encompassing truth account of life's real meaning, it's not plainly visible for many lives on planet earth.
The world is only made up of imperfect people I thought while standing by the fresh flowing tributary stream. I was presently watching a black crow fly by in the eastern sky. This world is inhabited by people who can only search for answers imperfectly I thought. Imperfect thinking people keep responding in thought and believing in the various forms of guiding ideas around us. These ideas, and systems of thought, get uniquely developed to persuade us and influence our thought. There are many kinds of ideas that exist like this now in reality that are different from other ideas elsewhere in other parts of the world. Regardless where we are on this journey in this world, we all matter I think to myself now with great conviction.
I then looked up at the blue of the stratosphere for signs of nimbostratus or cumulus clouds but I saw none in the Atlantic sky. I thought how ideas effected how we all think in this world, guiding us imperfectly, persuading us all, and often enough effecting our judgment beyond our say in the matter, so that we lacked a mastery of the ideas we dealt in, as reality effected our judgment very imperfectly. It was obvious, I thought therefore, that ideas that influence us are frequently outside of our control in our flawed reasoning and thinking. This is compounded even further in the complicated dynamics of interconnectedness we face while interacting with other imperfect people. Ideas have been used to deliberately shape thought by directing our reasoning toward embracing human held ideologies and beliefs across time that influence us the imperfect responders to these influences. People around the wider world, across time, therefore I reasoned, have sought to develop and instill in us final claims and beliefs about what's real, what's true, and what is only relevant to think along this life's journey.
Throughout history these guiding thoughts have been repeatedly harnessed, for good and ill reasons, I continued to think now, as the warm sunshine shone down on my skin. These compass setting thoughts keep repeatedly being used to harness ideas to direct the next arrival of human beings as a new generation of vulnerable and persuadable minds keeps arriving into the world. Influential teachers use these influences to deliberately pursued people to embrace explanations for what the grand order of all knowledge in really is built upon, and to explain supposedly what lies behind the great unknown itself, and to teach what's relevant to understand when it comes to, death, future, and God, when these 'authoritative voices' might not really have the answers they claim to have.
I thought standing there now and watching the gentle wind rustle the soft swaying grasses around me that the result of such persuasion across the world has been the shaping of people imperfectly across time. The reality of there being so many people, with so many numerous ways of thinking, and all ideas in totality holding so many different positions about what the truth is, now results in a very confusing big picture. Getting claims wrong about who God is in this picture is a reality where error itself is common to the human condition. So perhaps therefore this happens not because people chose their new found error of belief by an error of conscience, in a willful denial of God and truth through disobedience, but perhaps reasonably speaking these people couldn't of otherwise chosen reasonably the right answer and found God, at least not in the way religious people now demand by their doctrines that teach that they must do the exact right thing they teach to find hope itself. In these circumstances should the human conditions understanding be punishable forever by God for us being imperfectly human. Instead for me, I thought now, it seemed that life was unclear for imperfect people while here in the world where there is no guarantee that truth can be found when living among multitudes of other people. There is after-all thousands of different persuasive ideas leading the human condition. It seemed unreasonable to me now to hold someone to account in the human condition for thinking something wrong in such an environment.
I spotted now happily four Canada geese, with black heads and white cheeks, fly by across the cloudless and clear stratospheric sky. As I watched the geese in flight, standing there within this uncertain universe, I knew standing there now that I loved and trusted God in this uncertain place, and I knew that because I believed in that friendship with him that there was a future for human beings beyond this world. Even with the abundance in the world of so many ideas that often appeared unclear, and unavoidable, that lead down so many unfortunate paths, I believed in fairness itself as being God's ultimate plan behind this mysterious world.
I started walking slowly again toward the river now as I considered the beginning itself, ages before everything we're now a part of was, and it stood to reason that there likely was something immensely mysterious there that contained many unknowns in its ways, a reality that none of us now knows of, not of this somethings story, its past, or level of understanding, nor of any of the curious and far reaching mysteries surrounding this somethings ways; but I thought that we shouldn't doubt that such a something was, and is now, as it always was, like this very moment as we look around; we shouldn't doubt that this something holds extraordinary insight, is someone to know and look toward and learn from, as we exist, that can open the breadths of unfathomable knowledge to us, eventually well beyond our minds present awareness, who also has the ability to open our appreciations to breadth-less novel places, who can delve our thought there into far-reaching vacuous depths of awaiting awareness and knowing, in effect opening windows to peer through onto extraordinary and unfathomable genius, to sights of great endless hope to be observed; should I now doubt that behind all the mystery here that such an unknown is not likely in this unusual place where I strangely find myself existing here; If I do doubt in such possibility then I stubbornly doubt the very size of the possibility we are now so unfathomably alive amidst as we all contemplate this unusual and anomalous life.
I walked on a narrow path that approached the river now which flowed ten feet ahead of me. The hard packed muddy trail entered between several aged old trees beside the shore as I listened to the singing of birds darting in the large surrounding tree branch limbs. I stopped walking and thought there carefully now about the end of life in the quiet.
If death is silent, and there is essentially nothing wrong in it, once reached by us, and peace awaits and ensues in a way that we alive can't now appreciate; if there is then, when found, something there that emanates in rich discovery, that we now can't identify, us having here longed instead for survival and continuance, but there realizing that something else, having finally reached there; while all along before having longed to escape finality and oblivion and meaninglessness; then with this step, toward something further, and mysteriously hidden, the journey reveals a recognition of wonder awaiting in that unknown, after life ceases its noisy bumbling journey, filled with so much anxiety, we there then go to join a perfect peace, one surpassing all known knowledge, expectation, or understanding; so thereby opening the way to real proximity and communion with humanities father, who exists in the heights of a lofty boundlessness, in an unending domain of immeasurable constructiveness, only presently there we will rest, for the time being, but not while lacking meaning or hope, but filled there with exponential joy and Holy wonder, not gone or forgotten, just resting for the now, as we await goodness itself to speak.
I continued to think more about death as I stepped onto a dirt trail that sloped unto the river bank under the enfolding trees around me. I thought of going still, to rot, for flesh, organs, and tissue to dissolve, for bugs and worms to feed on me, for eyes to sink and my brain to smell, as my bones revealed themselves to the earth worm under the clay colored soil; there where the old timber casket I lay in dissolved slowly along with the human body; while four feet above the soil, on the grassy ground, under the old aged large trunked willow trees branches, is a graveyard with the dead buried in plots, all one-hundred and ten people's remains, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, infants and young children; here in this place in the sky where the sun rises beyond on the horizon, near a meadow where baby sheep and playful horses graze; while under nightfall here the post dusk darkness casts its nightly shadows as an owl calls out with eyes aglow under the midnight stars; to be buried here, as we all will be, among the infinite, eternal mystery, somewhere in the wonderment among an anomalousness that abounds with so many unknowns.
I could hear now the babbling of the river and see how the current carried fresh water meandering downstream around a bend in the landscape in its winding path. The clear brightly lit water on the river mirrored the crisp colored blue sky I now marveled in appreciation. Approaching the shore of the stream now, on the rivers bank, I stood under the shade of a large hemlock tree and listened to the wildness of bird life. Natures debris of leaves and brown twigs lay on the muddy riverbank dislodged with the flowing waters path when the river became blocked or when its rushing waters flowed over its banks creating its own way downstream.
I stood and watched the broad river come winding around the bend as it then turned into a wide, gentle, calm fresh water pool that was presently lit up by the early evening sun. The sunlight came cascading down in its rays traveling through the waters surface and into the translucent depth below. I quickly noticed a turtle swimming along the calm water making a gentle ripple in the wide pool.
The Stewiacke River, I knew from prior learning, flowed into the Atlantic Ocean, with its waters starting at Round Lake, in Pictou County, where they then flowed into the Shubenacadie River, after running through the Stewiacke Valley. Beavers and muskrat were commonly seen here, I knew now while watching the water, and I hoped to see more wildlife today. Bald eagles were sometimes seen soaring across the eastern sky above the winding peaceful currents.
The river was ideal for swimming, canoeing, kayaking, and fishing and an angler with a fishing rod, reel, and bass lure, could fish for hours here while watching the area for signs of wildlife. Striped bass, Brown trout, and Allis shad were fished from the river under the nearby overshadowing pine, hemlock, and spruce trees.
I sat down now on the grassy bank now where my feet dangled above the rivers muddy lower banks. I looked at the river appreciatively sitting there and could see pebbles just beneath the waters surface lit up and sparkling as sunlight went filtering down from the enormity of the sky. The sunlight cut through the clear water into the awaiting translucent and peaceful fishing hole in front of me where I could see fish swimming through the clear water. I admired the suns rays glittering on the calm waters surface, and then I reached behind me, took off the back pack I wore, reached inside, and grabbed in my hand a roast beef sandwich. I quickly unwrapped the saran wrap and bit into the sandwiches soft bread tasting the roast beef as I chewed on the sandwich hungrily.
My mind began to drift again now while sitting there and I thought of the young woman with paranoid schizophrenia who I couldn't help but feel a strong concern for. She told me how the illness schizophrenia she lived with wasn't getting easier for her as she aged but only seemed to be getting worse and more difficult to live with as time went by. I had written her back in response and told her that my biggest struggle while living with schizophrenia was getting through my twenties, especially my early twenties. That's when I told her the illness was at its worst for me. I also told her that I wanted her to have hope that there was more then a good chance as she got older her illness would become easier to live with and endure. I explained to her that my psychiatrist had told me that as people became older while living with schizophrenia their illness often did become less severe. I hadn't believed my psychiatrist at first, I admitted to her, after my doctor first told me this in her office, but then I began to consider my own thinking processes over the years, and to focus on those struggles more carefully, and I realized then that my doctor had been telling the truth based on medical knowledge and understanding.
I thought of the younger people now who were just beginning to experience life while living with this mean mental illness schizophrenia. They would face so much adversity, and endure so many sizable personal battles lived in their minds, and do so alone frequently without real understanding by anyone in the community. Over time these false beliefs would reap havoc on their peace as they face an epic personal struggle full of negative emotion, and angry, worried, fearful, paranoid, and suspicious thoughts. This delusional thinking would haunt their daily perspective, cause great agitation, all while their judgment misinterpreted parts of reality unavoidably. As they adopt the false beliefs about the nature of reality It will seem like they are being unfairly persecuted, like they are known in grandiose ways, with this happening wherever they go in the world. Those of us who have schizophrenia are hopelessly left to try and unravel the puzzle of the delusions facing us, to figure out truth, to clarify reality, to finally form real understanding into the forces surrounding us. This is a pursuit usually sought without any real hope of success since the false beliefs are overwhelmingly so real seeming and convincing to us. It really complicates our journey considerably that we have to wrestle with these false beliefs here on this mysterious planet, within the lonely universes depths, where we exist in a wondrous and uncertain abyss within infinite space. No sane or insane person now truly understands any of this I thought while looking around.
I continued worrying about her, and about other young people growing up in this world who developed the illness schizophrenia. I worried how society and the world would treat them. I was aware how people without hesitation would remind these young people, like they had reminded me, of just how terribly flawed and unimportant society thinks they are. Such opinion was weak, emphatically false, and absurd, I thought now, as I grew angry and began to rant aloud sitting there by the river upon the grassy bank.
As I ranted aloud sitting there on the grass now, I took a pint of Royal Reserve Whiskey out of my backpack, and unsnapping the cap, I took a long swig. I watched the water carefully, squinting from the bitter alcohols taste, and then I began to rant aloud, half believing in my mind that my words fell on listening ears. I began trying hopelessly now to inform the younger generation living with schizophrenia of how we the older generation of people living with schizophrenia see them and care about them. I explained how we want to have your back, as much as our illness allows us to. I explained how we really needed to find a way to fight for each other proclaiming this defiantly now against any and all resistance. We don't want people who live with this illness to give up on life and die young when we know you matter, and God knows you matter, all life matters, and we see the great dignity in you too, I said angrily, and then continued ranting, and we're going to fight for you once we get organized; we'll become organized in a way society isn't now organized to protect your great dignity and worth, I vowed aloud defiantly. We love you, and we care about you; we care about all people who live with this terrible illness schizophrenia; don't let people discourage you; we'll find a way together to make things better for us all.
Nearly an hour passed by now, under the early evening sky, as I sat by the river drinking whiskey and deliberating life in the silence. While contemplating the great eternal mystery I was part of, I then stood up, removed from my backpack a bathing suit, pulled off my clothes, and pulled the bathing suit on. I then stepped down from the grassy bank and waked on the muddy shoreline until I reached the rivers wet downstream flowing current that soon trickled over my bare feet. As I walked across stones in the river I stepped further out into the splashing rapids in my bare feet.
In deliberation, standing there in the river current, I considered life's mysterious all encompassing unknowns. The original infancy of everything seen in existence now I pictured as being produced by some sort of original mist. Whether creation began as a mist, or whatever form it began as, I was convinced standing there now, that prior to the universe itself, was a source of far-reaching preexisting conscious life which held inestimable intelligence that had in its story its own prior far reaching mystery,
I considered this mystery carefully now, standing there in the current, as I consider how there was the reality as we know it, and how I believed that there was also another more sophisticated reality that we don't yet know, another reality that came about long before us. This other reality, not our own reality, predated our existence, and I chose to see it as eternal, and to envision it as existing elsewhere in the unknown. I suspected that this prior beings reality, and its unknown ways and travels, existed on a far larger more mind boggling scale. I thought now that there are at least two separate realities for us, one of which we know only something of, our reality, the other to which we can't conceptualize adequately or yet imagine with appreciation us having not been given the means to understand it. Yet that it exists now hidden from us, I thought, is as real in reality now as the vacuous distances around us are real. This other unknown, I suspected, had an acuity to build, and create, to give challenges, and to offer meaning to its creation, while existing in the unseen reaches, hidden there in enormous expanses of space, living among an eternal terrain of which there is infinitely and unendingly more pictures of reality then we can now begin to fathom. Our existence therefore was a result of this prior sources planning, a being who possesses far-reaching, sophisticated, and immeasurable intelligence. Before the beginning of this curios existence in time, predating what we can now appreciate in our existence, was this prior mystery. This mystery holds all answers into the questions we now ask and the problems we now face about this mysterious reality and my faith told me that any human being anywhere could call this great being their God.
This prior primordial intelligent reality God, I now suspected, deliberately provided the unusual building material matter. This being gifted matter to the universe, a matter of which all living and nonliving substances in the world and the universe are made of. Matter strangely and uniquely then began to expand outward with unusual constructiveness and unstoppable creativity.
If any other thinking power exists, besides us and God, hidden elsewhere in the unknown universe itself, and this being doesn't know the difference, it might misunderstand this substance matter and take it for an inanimate substance of crud with no natural creative potential or genius in its working nature. They might suspect unwittingly that matter isn't capable of coming alive: like a tree, a book, or a chair. Yet strangely enough matter craftily, and with great stealth, outwits such diminishing views and goes about confounding and perplexing everyone's perspective as it bursts forth building and creating in its path incredible and unstoppable achievements on an exponential scale.
Matter mass produces, with seismic ingenuity in its own wake, the natural world, living creatures, bodily systems, brains that ask fundamental questions about reality; it introduces a conscious mind, one that knows itself inwardly, that looks outward at reality and names it; a mind that understands it's part of something wonderful, that sees and reasons and uses imagination to understand how we belong to a great and curios unknown.
A path is made, by its transformational advancements, as matter works across centuries producing explosions of genius in existence in culture, engineering, invention, scientific advancement, literature, the arts, zoology, physics, philosophy, poetry, biology etc., as human beings discover mysteriously that there are already around us curious laws that have always existed strangely in the order of nature. These laws are found here and have strangely existed prior to us knowing them too. Seemingly these laws waited in nature for us to happen upon them as we now struggle to harness them within our grasp and use then in our institutions.
This is just a taste of the examples in reality that exist as mystery as we wonder who we are, where we are, and what force might have put us here. This mystery surrounds us as we float through an unknown sky somewhere in an immeasurable abyss never perhaps heard of before in the more outreaching places in the infinite unknown distance.
I took another step in the river now as the swift moving current came splashing over my ankles. The bottom of my feet felt underneath them the riverbeds smooth pebbles as I looked around and noticed several large rocks that sat mid-rapids upstream. The rocks were covered in moss, with river grass clinging to them, and I thought they might have been deliberately placed there by a creative hand using a divine natural blueprint. I observed how the river was rarely muddy, accept during flooding, and clear now to look through, having either pebbles, mud, or sand at the waters bottom, as I then observed sun beams moving and sparkling across the currents in mysterious heaven sent light.
I took another swig of whiskey, still holding the plastic bottle in my hand, and then threw the half drunk pint up unto the sloping bank. The bottle soared over the mud, moving over the surrounding moss, and fell on the grass, landing near my backpack. I stood there in the currents rapids, that moved and foamed around my feet, and then stepped over the polished stones and moved deeper into clearer and stiller water. When I was waste deep in the pleasant warm water, I crossed my chest, and plunged backward into the refreshing spring making a splash. I then lay there on my back, floating in the deep salmon hole, as a long time went by in the quiet. After laying there in reflection for a good forty-five minutes impulsively I turned over and swam down to the bottom of the river finding myself in a place of greater silence. I had left the worlds chaos now, and I would of stayed down underwater longer but for the need to breath. I swam among the bottom of the river, past some weeds, moving among the chubs, trout , turtles, and lamprey eels, and then I rose up into the sunlit beams of the sky now illuminating that peaceful and remote part of the Stewiacke River.
As evening approached, an hour later, my peace had left me, as I walked past a line of pine trees in a mind frame now troubled with anger. The indignation arouse in me after I realized that a few people in my community had called me an idiot. A person without mental illness calling a person with a mental illness an idiot is the real idiot I thought now defiantly. These people haven't the commonsense to realize that unusual behavior is caused my an illness of the brain effecting thought. It doesn't take a very sophisticated person to see who the real idiot is I reasoned angrily as I walked.
As a person living with the illness schizophrenia I was aware just how frequently people with this illness seemed to got rejected and forgotten by old friendships. I considered this carefully now as I stopped and began peeing on a birch tree. A sassy squirrel lectured me now from the upper branches. I was also reminded constantly of how frequently we get rejected in love. It seemed to me like this happened too often to people like me and in really cruel ways especially when we're young. I thought how troubled people seemed to get rejected much more frequently in romance, often in very cruel ways, often in ways that haunt us across decades of our lives.
I began walking again and daydreaming as I crossed out of the forest briefly and spotted a myriad of wild flowers in a nearby meadow. I then entered the old growth forest trail again that winded through to the Brookfield hills.
I wished now that I could somehow during this summer months find a way to get to the coast of Nova Scotia. I wanted to hear the rhythm of the sea, to ingest the briny seaweed salty air, and gaze at a patch of small dory boats bobbing in the sunlit bay. I longed to sit on the scenic wharf, at a place I knew, to be there at night especially, and to watch the moon lighting up the cove; wouldn't it be nice too, I thought, to have a female companion maybe, to drink and frolic shamelessly in the harbors refreshing dark blue moonlit waters.
My mind began to wonder again now just as I finished off the pint of whiskey entirely and put it in my backpack. I recalled how I had referred to people in general, who had schizophrenia, as being "schizophrenics" in my blog. Most of the responses were friendly and appreciated my insights, but a few responses weren't I thought now. I walked along the path in the forest thinking about this observation carefully.
As if the biggest threat that people like me face, while living with schizophrenia, is being called "schizophrenic" I then thought bitterly. These people became defiant that I had called people like me living with schizophrenia "schizophrenic" as opposed to me calling them people who live with schizophrenia. I think that they were really agitated because as a schizophrenic I was talking about schizophrenia and it wasn't them talking about it. I think they were trying to divide us who live with the illness and sow seeds of suspicion and mistrust between us. It can hardly be said true that the biggest threat people who have schizophrenia face, while living in society, is to be called a schizophrenic I thought now shaking my head. The biggest threat to our wellbeing in society is the widespread and prevalent dislike of us as human beings. This dislike of us is why our suicide rate as a statistic is so high in Canada and the USA and this is because sane people are adding to our hopelessness and despair by disliking us. We are hopeless and in despair because so many of them dislike us and we're killing ourselves because of it I thought resentfully. Yet these two people dare to cast me as the villein, someone who loves people who live with mental illness, I thought now defiantly to myself.
I looked up at one lonely cloud, that now went floating by, as I scanned the trees for hidden cameras that I thought might have been placed there somehow. 'No that seems very unlikely!' I thought now while feeling glad to have a reprieve in the schizophrenia experienced delusions I knew so frequently.
A short time later I was walking across the open field, on the back hill outside my village, and then a few minutes after that, as the sun began to set, I was walking into the center of the village.
Walking across my parents lawn I could hear neighbors talking about me rowdily from a distance. These same rants, I suspected, described my ills and monumental failures as a human being. I had heard them sound repeatedly throughout the years on the quiet street I lived on. I wondered, while trying to listen to them now, what they were saying so angrily. What really bothered me now was we people who live with this mental illness are expected to come up with the reasons why schizophrenia is a legitimate disabling illness. What are we expected to share with these people that could educate them as to why they are wrong in their condemning judgment of us. Why must we have to articulate excuses for ourselves when people judge us so harshly.
The unfortunate reality, I considered now, is that we face with this illness alarming, agonizing, and disruptive delusional thoughts. These thoughts, that are so deeply troubling, develop into false beliefs that misread reality and create considerable struggles for us to endure in our weary and troubled minds. Other trying struggles of thought that we encountered, I thought, involved issues like severe anxiety, that appeared in our lives as a crippling fear of talking and interacting with other people, as well as motivational, and organizational problems, which are equally as problematic for people living with schizophrenia. These issues weren't excuses but were known to be real by physicians and scientists who observed how schizophrenia effects behavior in people.
Sadly enough, I thought now, we alone have to try to make the case for ourselves since no one else is helping. We unfortunately make the case for ourselves in our living rooms, talking to non existent hidden cameras, but as hard as we try no one is actually there really listening to us. We can't convince these irrational sane people how we're real human beings and why we matter I thought.
Approaching my house, and walking inside now, I thought that perhaps it should be society instead who should be obligated to make the case for us. Why is it that society, instead of us, isn't the one obligated to defend us and our human worth in the community as we struggle with a legitimate disabling mental illness. When we get rejected and marginalized and struggle with reality why should we have to take second jobs, that we can't do right, to try and educate a modern society and culture in a way that humanizes us and cares for us people who live with this mental illness schizophrenia. Why should people with this illness have to live alone in loneliness and isolation, tens of thousands of us, as Canadian society follows its unwritten rule, which is to respond to the insane by leaving us alone and forgotten at a distance.
We shouldn't have to inform backyard idiot judges that we have dignity and value as people I thought defiantly to myself. That's someone else's job to inform these ignorant people of our strengths, interesting ideas, and worthwhileness as human beings; which is something these people haven't caught on to yet it in their sophistication, that we people with mental illness are interesting and likable. I thought now that it should be the compassionate people of society that should be responsible for changing the ignoramuses of this world's dull beliefs.
I considered this sitting down on the ripped sofa and looking at a print of Ireland on the wall. Whatever great sizable and intelligent unknown that surrounds planet earth, this unknown, along with any other unknowns that are out of sight, off in some distant corridor of the universe, no doubt have a more elaborate, conscious intelligence, a more far-reaching understanding, on some scale of greater sophistication, that knows something privileged in that awareness of who we are here in this world we're on. Whatever ancient primordial being it is that set the terms of life on this earth in the sky, he/she created the many obstacles that all living creatures face while living in this life. For whatever reason severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, were a part of this design; with this illness deliberately being made a part of this beings master planning, as was manic depression, and every other kind of heroic mental challenge meant to be wrestled through within the frontier of life in this world.
I listened now to an intoxicated loud and angry woman's voice, coming from some unknown backyard, as her speech contemptuously sounded through my open window. Her voice was followed then by a sinister sounding and obnoxious males laughter. I thought how out of this struggle that we the people who have mental illness face that we 'the mental cases' are seen as weird and shameful to so many judgmental people. They look at us, in our very real struggles, as their pride and ego, which often lacks any compassion, attacks our humanity with angry sneering hatred. We ourselves know, however, that there is beauty in us, in our minds, even in the nonsensicalness of our interpretations of reality. We know there are points along this journey, with our mindful struggles, where we deserve real reward, places along the way where we can tell ourselves knowingly just what kind of fight we've endured and triumphed over to date. Still however in the culture of our society our path is only seen by the sane, in so many ways, as a senseless life, one of which they perceive only as one of strangeness, with them seeing only error and ugly imperfection in us, something in us to bully and feel superior to.
We know however that this has been a hard fought journey that we've endured I thought sitting there in the quiet now.
These sane people weren't important world speakers, I thought; they didn't give speeches to enormous audiences, to world leaders, speaking directly to: Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and Queens; they haven't personally ended famines in Ethiopia and Somalia, stopped world wars singlehandedly, confronted the news media to preserve themselves and stop a grandiose threat to their reputation, all as the media threatened to reveal untrue information about them; they haven't lived with the experience of receiving daily hidden messages of communication that they perceived was coming into their living rooms deceptively where they sat listening to their radio's and TV's suspiciously; nor have they believed they were watched constantly by hidden cameras; they haven't wondered the streets and sidewalks believing that perfect strangers knew them; nor lived in a reality of constantly adjusting delusion involving unusual beliefs that changed continuously as to why they think they are being watched and persecuted; they haven't struggled to understand people's fascination with them that at times proved to be very alarmingly upsetting and even torturous to their understanding; they have never seen reality in such grandiosity, and to such extremes, nor struggled through battles that involved so much misunderstanding; they never danced with the ghosts of the famous, tap danced with Fred Ester, or learned boxing from former heavyweight champion Sonny Listen; they never put on an inspired play because they imagined themselves to be a world class entertainer, or danced and sung along in delusion to the great opera singer Luciano Pavarotti who they thought was singing live to them as they believed they were entertaining enormous television audiences; they never expected to receive lucrative sums of money that they would never see; yet to those of us who have had such experiences the sane can unfortunately only see something pathetic in us who have, a side of nature, from their great vantage point, only to be pitied at best, and mostly frowned upon with disgust, as they themselves live the real reality worth mentioning with any true dignity.
Are the sane alone the only minds worthwhile of any status attainment, I wondered, or should we all be valued in this world. I sat and wondered this as I tried to calm down. We are the weak who misunderstand everything while their awareness is so fucking perfect I thought angrily. They have their precious perfect version of reality that think's that it understands everything so well, as we the mentally ill simply misunderstood everything and are fools in comparison.
As I considered these thoughts now, I listened to the evenings symphony of crickets sound out the window. I thought that whatever primordial genius lurks in the shadowy unknowns of matters workings in nature; this unknown no doubt built this human civilization, the animal, and the ocean, kingdoms, engineered our consciousness, that we alone as human beings hold, as we observe the world, and comment on it, a world that we've been given direct access to. This being of thought no doubt knows all human challenges, sometimes abnormal ones, seeing our psychological make up, knowing our thoughts; this planner and designer who gave the world such a multiplicity of unique parts and added so many nuances to this profound journey. This Being put us all in different shoes, placed us in different environments, challenged us with different histories.
This planner and originator of this reality of life here must have knowledge of many paths, while seeing the many heroic human voyages, the great discoveries of humankind, those who's footsteps discovered for others a betterment for civilization in the great achievements of existence. This archaic power must also see past the feeble eyesight and opinion of ordinary man too, who scoff at mental illness, who mock imperfection and lowly status, who glare down with harsh opinion at other unfamiliar people, who laugh at the mentally disturbed.
This being, let's call him God, must see something in the lives of each lonely wonderer who faces mental illness, and see life through our eyes, and know the monumental struggles that we endure while knowing our personal victories and long endurances of suffering from our minds struggle with misguidedness. God must see our hearts plunge continuously into despair and watch them break at the hands of sane human beings as we navigate the world.
We are unevenly equipped and don't have the same abilities at beguilingly out-crafting, and outwitting, the minds of sane people who too easily spot our weaknesses and capitalize on them for selfish gain. Yet it is God who sees our wondrous beauty, our great dignity, our heroic walk through the world of unjust men I thought. God see's our long endurance through the ages and the beauty of our hearts as we struggle. It is God who knows what we're all really about.
None of us knows where in the great unending frontiers of possibility this eternal unknown reality really is. What power might now marvel hidden, but not far away, while observing the curiosities of created beings like us adrift among the ancient stars. Love in all its scope and magnitude will no doubt untangle the web and bring to light what real fairness is here in this great mystery we're all a part of in the sky.
*After Note* (An after thought occurred to me after the above article had been compiled)
Before I had the time to complete the final draft of this recently compiled article an item I ordered from an online internet company finally arrived in the mail. After experiencing relentless paranoid thinking, while living with paranoid schizophrenia, in desperation I did something unusual and went online and ordered inexpensive electronic listening equipment. I needed to settle the matter for myself of just what was really being said, out of range of my hearing in my neighborhood, which sounded like extremely angry gossip that I could only partially hear. The device for listening to distant sounds was advertised for bird watching use by the internet company I purchased it from. I unpackaged the contraption and began taking the device out into my yard at night, over several weekends, desperate to know once and for all if I really was being judged hatefully in the discussions of people around me in my community. I needed to know whether the kind of cruelty I suspected now was real or simply in my delusional imagination alone. I recognized that if my suspicions were real, and people really were ruthlessly judging, condemning, and disliking me in my community, a person struggling with schizophrenia, how this kind of cruel behavior toward me must then transcend my life alone and really reflect a more general widespread attitude of unfairness toward all people living with schizophrenia across North America. I was soon astounded by the conversations I picked up clearly while listening to other people from different yards around me speak at a distance through the earphones. As I listened to their discussions for several weeks, while lying in stealth, hidden in my garden among the tulips, what I heard truly amazed me.
*Second Note* Unfortunately I never purchased the listening equipment, although I did consider the idea of doing so very strongly. I wanted desperately to know what the angry sounding voices I could only half hear at a distance were saying. I decided in the end, however, against chasing after and solving that schizophrenia amplified unknown. I opted instead to just try and find any peace I could in myself, and forgive, if there was anything to forgive. I decided to pursue peace, of which there is very little with mental illness, in the best way possible, despite whatever malicious possibilities might really be behind people's behavior out there in the unknown of the world.
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