Skizzie Lizzie Goes to Grad School

Dear online diary,
I have been conditionally accepted into the Master's program at my University. The only catch is that I must complete all my degree requirements by Fall of this year. I just need to pass the 5 classes I am taking right now and 2 short-term classes at the end of May. Then, poof! Diploma.

Once my BA is posted I will be eligible for fellowships and grants for Fall 2012. I have already registered for 200 series classes! I am so thrilled to have earned this opportunity and thankful that my former professors were willing to write such positive letters of recommendation.

I am so psyched but nervous at the same time. This is what I want, though. I have always valued education. Plus, I feel like I should prove society wrong about the mentally ill and do something productive with my life.

I went to a grad fair last semester. The fair was for undergraduates who were thinking about applying to grad school. I went, just because it was free. I learned a lot about how graduate school is rigorous, tough, and worth it. It seems like just yesterday I was daydreaming about being a grad student. Now that day is one and half months away.

Well, this is it. Skizzie Lizzie is accepted into a Master's program. Wish me luck!

On Weight Loss, Breasts, and Curvy Women

I was watching a youtube video yesterday by a woman who lost a lot of weight and is now very, very slim. She talked to her audience about the shrinking breast size that comes with weight loss. She went from a D cup to an A cup! She then told her audience, "I'm better this way, because I am healthier. Men aren't worth being fat."  Ouch, I thought. I do not want to be fat anymore, but neither do I want to be an A cup. Am I doomed to being one or the other?

I am 162, sometimes down to 159 pounds, but I am only 5'2" so this means I am borderline clinically obese, or very overweight. My breasts fit best in a bra that is a UK size 34FF in Panache bras, and 34G in other bras. Most of my weight winds up in my thighs, followed second by my butt, followed third by my gut. I wish there was a way to spot check these areas and avoid losing weight in my breasts, but this is not possible. When I was 15-21 years old I was about 112 pounds, 115 pounds at my heaviest, but my breasts were a small B cup. I always wanted big breasts. I envied women with pendulous breasts and curvy silhouettes.

Then I got what I wanted but with a steep price. At age 23 I had a major psychotic episode and I was hospitalized. The doctor prescribed me Zyprexa, an atypical antipsychotic with notorious weight gain side effects. It was designed to eliminate psychotic symptoms but it caused massive, immediate weight gain for as long as one takes it. Naturally, I got very fat. I reached 184-190 pounds, which is actually lucky for somebody on anti-psychotics, as many of these new drugs can cause people to become super obese.

My boobs got obese as well. They swelled with the rest of me; from a tiny B cup to a DD cup to a size that I could not find in my local stores. Either the cup didn't fit or the band was so wide in circumference that it would not stay in place, but rather hung around my hips like a hula hoop. Manufacturers assume that people with a medium band have medium breasts and people with larger breasts have a very wide torso. I would make due with a 36DD until that became too small in the cups. I started shopping online to get bigger sizes. I fit the cups of a 38DDD but the band was too big and I wound up getting too many back aches.

I have been regularly exercising since April of last year. I have begun to count my calories and restrict them to 1200-1400 calories daily (I use "Calorie Counter" made by fitness pal, a calorie counting app for android phones). By using a stationary bike, a rowing machine, free weights, taking a judo class, a dance class, and doing aerobics at home, I have lost about 25 pounds from a year ago when I weighed 184. Now around 161 pounds, my boobs lost about 2 inches, but they are still on the large side.

I am still in the process of losing weight. I will stop when I get back to 131 pounds. I lost a lot of weight two years ago, dropping from around 180 to 130 pounds in a matter of months, but I did this through unhealthy means (i.e. crash dieting) and I gained all the weight back and probably damaged my metabolic system during the time when I was crash dieting. I will not crash diet again and if you are crash dieting, please stop! There are healthy ways to lose weight, they just take a little longer to get to your goal.

Anyways, I really hope I am still top heavy when I get to my ideal weight. I have become very fond of being buxom. No, it is not just because that is what men like. I want to look like a woman I could be attracted to (I am a closet bisexual), and my dream woman looks more like Marilyn Monroe than Paris Hilton.

One time, funny story, I was walking to a grocery store and I caught sight of a woman with an amazing, hour-glass figure. Her thick hips swayed as she walked and her waist was surprisingly narrow. I was so taken by her physical appearance that I was walking with my head turned to look at her as she passed. Then suddenly--BANG! I walked right into a pole. I got a little bruise on my cheek from slamming into the pole. I will always remember that woman and her amazing curves, she is my ideal in terms of physical appearance. As for personality, I love, love, love this girl who used to be in my British literature class. She was a fellow linguistics major, studied Japanese, and was so brilliant that she aced all her tests in all her classes.

Sorry, I keep going off on tangents, but I am not editing this at all. Right now I am just typing into the blog without a thought as to flow or coherence. Well, if William Burroughs can do it, so can I! :)
Thanks for reading!

Schizo-affective: what do I do now that I am improved?

Now that there is a calm inside me rather than a storm of chaos, I do not know what to do with myself.

I am part of an online forum board for people with a mental illness. I won't say which website. I once requested resources relating to the dopamine theory of schizophrenia. I also mentioned the quirk within schizophrenic brains of a higher than normal rate of increased ventricle size. If you don't believe me, google "schizophrenia and ventricles." Just FYI, a ventricle is a little piece of the human brain. The response rather shocked me. Rather than getting resources I got a response that referred me to a diagnosis center (ironic, considering I AM schizo-affective, but NOT delusional when it comes to the biology of schizophrenia!) and the suggestion that I not listen to what is said on the internet.

What bugged me the most was that the responders clearly had never done any research on their own disease! Then I started thinking, how many others are out there who do not have the slightest clue as to the science behind their illness, or the illness of their family members? It is not very hard. A simple stop at the local library can get one started on understanding schizophrenia. If you have access to a University library there is often more detailed, academic resources available to research the illness than there is at the public library. I strongly encourage everyone, diagnosed or not, to learn. I know, for example, that the trembling associated with Parkinson's Disease is due to a lack of dopamine activity in the brain---and I am not afflicted with Parkinson's Disease, I just happened to get curious one day when I stumbled on the subject. Even if you do not have schizophrenia you can search for the topic on wikipedia and it will only take a minute to read the information there.

As for the website, I have stopped posting there. I feel a little out of place. I am not actively mentally ill. I have not been psychotic for the past 1.5-2 years. Now that I am well I find there is little place for me. I can interact fine with classmates and friends but they do not know I am schizophrenic. It almost seems moot to state I am a schizo-affective because I do not display any significant symptoms. 

I do not live off SSI or spend my days in my pajamas with nothing to do. It seems like a lot of fellow schizophrenics are giving up on the idea of living a normal life with work, family, and responsibilities. That seems like a shame. Maybe for some people, work can be too stressful, but for the majority I strongly believe reintegration is a possibility. 

Comment on BBC Asylum documentary

youtube link for bbc documentary on the history of the asylum

Things were much worse for us skitzes. Not that things right now are peachy. I know a lot of people likely hold on to misconceptions, stereotypes, and irrational fears of schizophrenics and the mentally ill. That's okay, I do not hold this against them too much, it could be worse...they could lobby to re-institutionalize us, or to take away our constitutional rights. They have not done that, most likely, and I am infinitely grateful.

The thing I hated the most, aside from the strange power dynamic between patients and omnipresent staff, or the one sociopath faking symptoms and trying to mess with the women, or the horrible suffocation that comes with imprisonment, yes, the thing I hated the most was the decaf coffee. I am not belittling the horrible things that go on in psychiatric facilities....but it was the littlest, most trivial form of punishment that hurt the most. Even incarcerated felons get real coffee. I, with a clean record, am denied the one thing that made me want to get out of bed in the morning: real coffee. Instead I get a tiny little dixie cup filled with weakened decaffeinated coffee. The cup of decaf coffee was like a symbol of some larger injustice.

Another way to look at asylums is this way: it is an internment camp, a detention center, a coed jail of innocents (mostly innocents). 2.2 million American schizophrenics must all suffer for the crimes of a lone gunman, and that does not even include the number of bipolar mental patients, or others.

The end of this BBC documentary made me hopeful at first, until the last 3 minutes where the narrator stated that a random act of violence resulted in people condemning the lack of asylums and condemning all mentally ill people and demanding their anti-constitutional captivity. Up until that point it was all looking so peachy.

I do not want to go back into the hospital. This hospital does not come with kind nurses and little get well cards or teddy bear presents. I want my coffee. I want my freedom.

I am now going to walk along the canal bank listening to pop music and feeling grateful that I can walk more than 8 feet without hitting a locked door.

I will have my bachelor's degree from University by next August. I am just this semester and 2 summer classes away from my goal of achieving a higher degree, something my illness and poverty made me think I could never accomplish. I am graduating thanks to the free rent my family provides, kindly donated scholarship and grant money, federal pell grant financing, the acceptance of my fumbling, nervous manners by my professors, and the County, who provided me with medicine and a counselor, or my handler, as I think of him, as though I were some kind of asset! ;)

Anyways, I am not bragging, I just wanted to end this entry on a positive note!

Not just anecdotal evidence: Schizophrenics as Mostly Non-Violent

With recent news about the killer who committed the atrocities in Norway now diagnosed as an alleged paranoid schizophrenic by 2 psychiatrists, I am afraid you will think all the stories I have about being a functioning, non-violent skitz to be purely anecdotal. By this I mean, I am afraid you are thinking that maybe, if I am non-violent, then it is just a fluke, and that most schizophrenics have violent tendencies. If you are to believe the media, every shooter is a schizophrenic and schizophrenia is synonymous with violence.

While I am all for the punishment and imprisonment of so-called schizophrenics who attack and murder, I want to be clear that they are not the norm in the skitzy community. The only thing I can tell you is what I know first hand and provide you with more links to books on the schizophrenic community. While some say this is pure anecdotal evidence (by that they mean that one instance does not prove anything), I urge you to stop yourself from jumping to conclusions about the personality traits of schizophrenics.

Imagine listening to the radio 12 hours a day, with no ability to turn off the radio. Sometimes the radio plays soothing music, other times it plays horrible messages about people coming to hurt you, or saying that you are a bad, evil person. Imagine that unstoppable radio playing for 12 hours a day for months on end. According to http://www.schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm, 2.2 million Americans suffer from schizophrenia. Yet, despite this imaginary radio playing hostile messages 12 hours a day for months on end, 2.2 million Americans do not hurt or kill another human being. This is not anecdotal evidence, this is statistics.

So what do 2.2 million Americans do? Different things. All people react to stress differently, so one coping mechanism might not work for the next person. I know a man who would keep journals of everything the voices said. He had boxes and boxes of journals with all the statements made by his illness' voices. He had no history of assault (drug use, yes, but not assault). I know another man who would make bracelets out of beads to calm himself when the voices were being particularly mean. Also, no history of violence. I know another woman who would sit and giggle to herself in response to what she heard. No history of violence. I know that I would write down rebuttals to the voices when I was having auditory hallucinations. I would also paint pictures. I would also read as many books on schizophrenia as I could, so that I would understand what was happening with my brain chemistry.

Some people need to hide from the world, while others feel that they need to be highly scrutinized by family or colleagues so that their paranoia doesn't seem so ill-based. Personally, I believe the latter statement is the underlying reason why I keep an online diary/blog. I believe that somewhere in my subconscious there is this little piece of logic that says if people are really listening into my thoughts (albeit, via a blog entry that I myself post) then I won't be so paranoid after all, and this helps me cope with my illness. Also, in some backwards logic, I feel that if I am under surveillance, as my illness would have me believe, then it is best to get the entire story out there. So, if you are reading this, welcome, reader. Thank you for taking the time out to read my little diatribe.

Diary Entry: An April Fool

Today is April Fool's day and I can tell you I feel like one.

Diaries are usually private. Mine is not. Mine is so open and leaves me so exposed that I have to hide under an alias; a fake persona. Why? I live as a schizo-affective in secret. Only my shrink, family, and my ex-boyfriends know. I make them all pinky swear not to tell anybody else. I know one day my secret might come out to my casual friends and professors. I brace myself for the moment that happens. I will try my best not to run into the distance, towards the safety of my warm bed, to hide under my covers and cower.

My last entry made me a little sad when I reread it today. The article I read on the NY Times blog was so positive and hopeful, but I let all those nasty comments at the end get under my skin. I made a pact with myself not to delete any entries I make, even if I am totally upset at the time, because that would be like artistic dishonesty. Instead, I will just post and let it stand as a moment that I cannot take back. Despite wanting to go back and delete the part when I get all agitated over the article's comments, I won't delete the last blog entry. You are free to judge me based on what my fingers type at any given moment. Just don't send me any hate mail, I am too sensitive and your words will sting deeply.

This entry is just a moment of ephemeral vulnerability. As soon as I finish posting this I will go take a walk along the canal banks and listen to industrial music. I will dream of being able to state my mental disability without fear of scorn. I will daydream about going to graduate school and doing research papers that will get high grades. Some people daydream about winning the lottery---I daydream about writing an amazing paper on linguistics. Funny, huh?

Thank you for reading! :)