Jun 25, 2015 | Just Ramblings, Memorials, Schizophrenia, The Past |
Dear Mother
Hey it’s me… your son… the one you were supposed to protect from harm and give love to… remember me? I remember you…
I remember when you tied me up and showed food down my throat… sometimes it wasn’t even supposed to be eaten… or something so hot that my mouth and my throat would hurt for days… Sometimes my tummy would hurt so much I almost couldn’t move…
I remember when you woke me up in the middle of the night…. screaming at me… telling me I was lazy for sleeping… and you would push me down the stairs… I still have occasional pain in my right foot… and when I do I’m reminded of you… but I’ve learned to leave out the delusions you planted in my head… your delusions… They are not mine anymore… maybe they never really were… but instead just something that your special ability to convince people you were always right that made me believe you for so long… I just didn’t know any better…
Yes, I remember your words and for a long time… for way too long …when I left home for the first time I did what you told me to do… and for a long time after that…. I listened to you for way too long… and I didn’t go away even if I could… I came back… I believed you for way too long… or maybe I was just too afraid to find out if you were right or wrong…
I remember being angry at you for leaving me… you made me believe I had to take care of the “it”… When Karen left… you made sure I remembered it was my fault… and then…the way you left… it made me even more convinced…
Now… almost 23 years later… I know you weren’t well… you weren’t yourself… I also know I wasn’t really well either… I know all of “it” was your illness… blinding you… preventing you from being a mom…
I remember times where you and I had together… times where you didn’t feel a need to hurt me in anyway… I remember being able to sit on your lap or beside you and you would put your arms around me and tell me you cared about me… that you loved me… and even though some of those occasions there were people around… I know you meant it…
On your good days you did show me love… You told me you cared… I remember you telling me you didn’t want me to be taken away from you… that you never wanted me to leave because if I did you would die… and you cried and you told me you loved me… I believe… or at least I want to believe you had some kind of conscience… some kind of awareness of what you were doing… but fear kept you from doing anything about it… Maybe your own childhood just made you too ashamed of admitting your illness…
I remember you telling me at 17… When I left for school to don’t let anyone know about what’s going on inside my brain…. “They will lock you up” …you said… and you told me they would fill me up with medicine that would make me drool all over myself and make me feel like a zombie…
Well yes… I’ve been “locked up”… and a few times actually…. but they’ve let me out again…. every single time… and honestly… it isn’t as bad as you made it out to be… I don’t know if you ever had this experience or not… I don’t know if you were ever in a mental hospital… and maybe… this was probably the reality once…
But let me tell you something… you and I may have the same illness… not all the same symptoms or delusions though… but I would rather die than make my children go through what you put me through…
You told me once I wasn’t allowed to take my own life as it would only make ‘it’ more powerful… and within someone else who wasn’t as ‘lucky’ as I was… well I didn’t care about that when I upgraded your methods… silence and burn… in an attempt to stop my pain….
I’m not angry at you though… not really… not anymore… well… sometimes maybe… but when I am… it only makes my thoughts go places I don’t want to go… so I try not to…
I may not be the most perfect father in the world and maybe… and for a while didn’t realize I had this illness… but I did have someone in my life that helped me realize I needed help… someone who loved me with all my flaws and cared enough to do everything in her power to get help for me… To fight my brain in order to get my heart back…
I am sorry you didn’t have that….
I know my fight isn’t over… I know there will be more battles… but I can’t afford to let you hold me back anymore…
your son
PS. Happy birthday mother… and rest in peace…
C.G.Arsante (06.25.1940 – 08.16.1992)
Jan 3, 2015 | Healing, Just Ramblings, Mostly Me, Schizophrenia |
I know I’m one of those who has set a new year’s resolutions and not kept them… so for the last four years I didn’t set any… but this year… I want to focus on learning to speak better and work with my speech therapist… I’ve already talked (yes talked out loud) with her about this… I realize this is not going to be a 100%, perfect sounding kind of thing for me… simply because of how things are medically… but I know I can to better…. I know I can work harder and without letting ‘my fears’ or emotions get in the way…
Also all of this is written while having some not so pleasant side effects due to the changes of my medication… so this may get out of context, or seem disorganized… or all over the place…. and I have a feeling that I may have the urge of rewriting this at a later date…
I’ve had a stutter since… well… forever… or most of my life… It was a little better when I was kid… at least as far as I remember… but as I grew older it got worse… At least that’s how I remember it… I did have times where it wasn’t too bad… but it defiantly got worse if I was stressed or something going on in my life (which was quite often actually)…
In spite of the stuttering I was able to teach for a few years… what I’d like to call my ‘almost normal’ period… where I had work, no drugs or drinking or other self-destructiveness going on…
Today, and especially when I am anxious… which by the way… is quite often… and especially when it is required of me to speak to someone other than close family… I type a lot faster on my computer keyboard than I speak… and I don’t think I type fast…
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The suicide attempt… left marks on the inside of my mouth… and all the way down to my stomach…. It affected my vocal cords and tissue of my mouth and my throat… the soft tissue at the back of my mouth… like the uvula and surrounding tissue… which is pretty much nonexistent…. That pretty much leaves an opening up to my nose but when I eat I sometimes have problems with food going up there…
Almost nonworking saliva glands are a pain in the ass (or mouth) as it leaves me with dry mouth and when it’s really bad it comes with pain or even bleeding sores…
My vocal cords are also partly paralyzed… not too bad though… but I do have some movement… more in one of them than the other… that and the soft tissue/uvula thing… makes my voice sound somewhat nasally and bit weak and breathy if that makes sense…. however the movement problems of my tongue also do that… breathy… blowy pronunciation thing… sometimes anyway…. (I’m still working on that)
After the suicide attempt I was sent to a speech therapist… but it wasn’t too helpful… maybe because at the time I was very uncooperative and didn’t really see the point… I didn’t really want to speak anyway at that point… and I wasn’t even supposed to be alive… or that’s how I felt at the time…
Before… I had fantasized for a while on how to shut myself up somehow…I didn’t realize it at the time…but I was very sick… and what went through my head back then was not rational…. I did fantasies about cutting out my tongue…. but somehow I never did… until that night…. I felt as I had to do it… That way …at least… I would be able to proof to myself that I could… or that was the reason I made myself believe at the time…
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I have been seeing a speech therapist… at first we focused more on the problem I have with swallowing than anything else… but we´ve also been working on my speech… I have some psychological issues with speaking out loud…. a truck load of anxiety being one of them… you can call it social phobia or whatever… At 13 I stopped speaking at all and didn’t speak a word for about a year at least… and in the past… if I can avoid speaking I will…. I still find myself doing that and I guess a part of me does that out of an old habit…. but I really want to get better at speaking… I guess… I little bit closer to feeling normal….
Lately, in speech therapy I have been doing exercises where I mostly read something out loud… It takes a while just to get through a few lines so we don’t go through a lot each session… but then we brake what I read down to smaller bits and work on that… I know my stuttering is somewhat getting better… at least during the sessions…. I’ve learned to use new techniques on how to… at least… minimize it… and I can as long as I’m not stressed… (which again… is quite often)…. However with tongue mobility problems and muscle spasms …as well as it missing a piece I also have problems with certain sounds…. more with some sounds than others though…
I cannot really taste anything unless I swallow it… but according to my doc we have taste buds in our throat. I have very little feeling in my mouth… on some places like on the top of my tongue…. I have no feeling at all… I can sometimes lose bits of food somewhere inside my mouth and without really knowing it’s there… I don’t always know where it goes when it moves around while I’m chewing it.
Sometimes I accidentally swallow bits that have ended up un-chewed but that’s a pretty bad choking hazard especially since I already have problems swallowing fully chewed food… This is one of the reasons why I don’t like the thought of eating food in a public place or where there are lots of people…. or even just when I am around people… other than my wife or my kids… At least they don’t mind me sticking my fingers in my mouth when I eat… as using your finger makes it a lot easier knowing/feeling where the food is, if it’s chewed properly yet, how much you have left, etc.
…and as I said… I will probably be reorganizing this entry at a later date or rewriting it… but if you have a question or two (or more)…. don’t be shy…
Dec 29, 2014 | Healing, Mostly Me, Schizophrenia, Tummy tales |
I had two doc appointments today…. The first appt was with my GI doc… where among other (boring) things…. I got a brand new tube… yet again… and he joked and told me I was “the tube terminator” which apparently… my loving wife thought was very funny…. but for some reason I have had to have it replaced quite frequently lately….
The second appt was with my p-doc… Last time I was there he talked about switching my meds…actually he has been talking about it since August…. but this morning he gave me my first dose of Invega which will hopefully work for me… The downside is however that I will have to swallow pills for the next 4 to 6 weeks as I’ve never taken those before… I must admit when I saw the pill he wanted me to swallow I didn’t think I could do it… as it was HUGE… but …with a ton of water…. I did it!
Now we just have to wait and see how it goes tomorrow… and the next day… and well… until we know how my body reacts…. and if all goes well I can have IM injections, like with the old one…
Aug 8, 2014 | Mostly Me, Schizophrenia |
Yes… I’m back from the psych-ward… for now at least… I actually got back yesterday…
I am feeling better than before I was admitted… though anxiety is still there… worries of side-effects… some of which I have already…. some that are controlled or minimized by medication…. and some that may show up later…
Now…. instead of being on a low dosage of one med I am now on six different medications…. Anti-psychotic at a higher dose… the same I was on before though…..and…. the rest is mostly to help with side effects… and anxiety….
Jul 29, 2014 | Healing, Just Ramblings, Mostly Me, Schizophrenia, The Disordered Files |
So this is what’s been going on with me… the joy of having a chronic mental illness… – Make a notice of the sarcasm…
I am standing face to face with my brain…. heading into a battle… and I am going to win it… once again…
Yes… I have slowly been heading into a relapse of my schizophrenia … At the same time… I realize I’ve been lucky as I have been mostly symptom-free since mid-2012… For about a year now my medication has been at a minimal dosage…. just enough to keep away symptoms …and for the most parts… low enough for not giving me nasty side-effects to deal with….
There has been a lot of things going on with my health lately… starting with my stomach quitting on me again in April/May and getting the tube… and the tube making my stoma overactive so I had to wake up in the middle of the night to empty the bag… or I’d wake up with poop all over the place … For the most parts that’s all better now… but I still wake up during the night after 3-4 hour sleep… though most of the time I can go back to sleep right away… However it’s not the same as the 7-8 hours I clearly need…. and I’ve been having random pain/inflammation in my gut… and then esophagus spasms and other problems with my upper GI…
This is sort of the same thing that happened (Pain and GI problems of some kind) when I was first diagnosed with Schizophrenia… that is… starting with my physical health going downwards…. except I wasn’t on any meds for psychosis at the time and well ….I was being secretive about it then… and didn’t tell anyone though it was obvious that something was going on especially in the end…
But yes…. Lately I’ve been having some old familiar symptoms of my schizophrenia… more than usual… It’s actually something I can always expect and nothing unusual if you have schizophrenia… I’m still fighting it and well…. I am still here and mostly…. realizing what is real and what isn’t… I’m also making sure everyone around me knows what’s going on inside my head… ‘Everyone’ being my family… my wife and my kids…
Over the last couple of days… truckloads of fear… I know I am slipping… and fast… Right now I’m still here… obviously… I have been having problems sleeping…. I didn’t sleep much last night or the night before that… Right now I’m on an emotional rollercoaster on overdrive… I am hearing voices in my head telling me to do bad things (to myself)… and it feels like everything is my fault somehow… For those who have been following my blog the longest know from my past history that this is a big red blinking warning sign…
I can assure you that I am NOT going let that happen…. I will do anything in my power not to hurt myself…. ever again… and I really do believe I can win that battle… and with that said I know what I have to do to prevent that from happening… This is why Sunna has made a call to the psych-ward…. I can come in tomorrow afternoon (after 1 o’clock something)….
I don’t know how long I will be there …but I will be back…
To all of you out there…. Thank you for being you…. Just because….
May 22, 2014 | Healing, Mostly Me, Schizophrenia |
First off all my physical health is giving me hell… first… problems with the tube going out of place… so I had to go and have it fixed… then I had an infection nothing major though… just painful and I had to go back yet again… and well my mental health is not that great either at the moment… Therefore I don’t know if any of this comes out the way it is supposed to but I need to at least try…
I want to continue something I started over 15 years ago… I want to try to write a book about my life… Really this was just an idea 15 years ago… However back then, I didn’t even know everything I know today… I do have some pages or events written down already… but I can’t really tell if that’s usable or not…
I feel I do have a problem that I have to face… and that is my inability to tell what is real and what is not real… I know though, that everything I have ever written in the past, for this journal or my handwritten journaling, is what I have felt or thought about at the time it was written… I also know that even though I have tried to be open in my writings there are some things I don’t write about…
I have several entries here in my WordPress that I never posted back in my Thought-Space journal… entries that are either not complete… or entries that are too embarrassing, too ugly or unreal to be out there for the public eye…
I have handwritten journals that go way back to when I was a child… something that I have a very difficult time reading… so that is going to take some while to go through… maybe even too long…
With that said there is also the question of where to begin… and how much to tell, not in terms of revealing secrets but rather the quantity… As I sit down and try to make some sort of a frame or structure to go by I have a feeling this project will end up over 4000 pages or at least more than one book.
I know the only way for me is just to write and worry about everything else later… but I guess I’m still trying to find myself in a way… A long time ago I wrote about being trapped inside of my own head…
“He feels ‘out of place’ again… different from every single person he knows… different from everyone who he was once able to have a conversation with or the people he usually “hangs around with”… They have things to do… places to go… while all he has is being trapped inside of himself… alone with his obsessive thoughts of pain, self-destruction and self-hatred…”
I still feel that way sometimes… like now… but now it’s not about pain, self-destruction or self-hatred… Now it’s more about grieving the childhood I never had… or even those…uhm… almost 49 years of life without fear… without the feeling of having to self-harm… and without guilt… and wanting to tell according to my mother… everything that I’m not supposed to tell….
Really, if anyone reads this… I guess in a way I’m calling out for help on this…. I’d like to hear tips or tricks on how to write ones story… every little thing is welcome… Either go to my contact page or send me an email at gabriel.j.arsante @ gmail.com… I know I’m not really a writer…. and my spelling and grammar are bad… all I know is how to write in my own words but all at random and according to my wife I also have dot syndrome 😉
May 17, 2014 | Healing, Mostly Me, Schizophrenia |
Sometimes I am too…
I realize now that my mother was ill… and her illness made her brain turn her into a monster. I have the same illness she had… but I am not a monster nor am I any of what she said I was…
I am not who my mother wanted me to be and I am proud of that… As I sit here and type these words… I am proud that I have found it within myself to be proud of what I have accomplished…. After all that I have seen felt and lived… the ugliness of life… I can proudly say I am a survivor.
I have schizophrenia… an illness that people are afraid off… mostly because they don’t know better… I admit, sometimes I am afraid of it too even though I’m living it… Maybe, because I’m living it…
There are some things that I may not tell… mostly because they are either very private or they are way too ugly to expose to another human being… or maybe both… For years I was afraid I was somehow “becoming my mother”… I had the symptoms… but doctors called it something else… said I was depressed, anxious and had dissociative identity disorder and Post Traumatic Stress disorder abuse of the abuse and the loss of my children…
So… I have an illness called schizophrenia… and I am not afraid to say it out loud.
May 16, 2014 | Healing, Just Ramblings, Schizophrenia, The Disordered Files, The Past |
There is something that I feel I need to get out of my system… something that happened 9 – 10 years ago… To people who are coming here now… those who did not know me back then, this may seem out of context or difficult to make sense off…
The forums I speak off – which remain nameless in this post – is a place where I had the trust of hundreds of members as an administrator… They saw me as someone who was strong and they looked up to me… but for me this was my lie… I didn’t feel strong at all… I was just a terrified little human and I felt I couldn’t do anything to make ‘them’ understand that…
I need to get as much of this out as I can. I fear this is the very reason why I have been having difficult time to write on here… I have always had fears of what other people may think of me… and I keep excusing myself over and over again… for everything…
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I don’t know what you think of me… or who you think I am… I am trying not to care but I can’t help it… I do care…
I don’t know if you realize how sick I really was back then… especially the past year or so before I disappeared ….probably even longer than that, maybe before our paths crossed… I worked hard to keep my chin up… but inside I felt it was all a show… I felt I had to “put on a show” for you guys… I gave people as much support I possibly could… but held back when I should have reached out for support from you…
I honestly don’t remember a lot off what went on at the forums right before I left/disappeared… but I was tired… Tired of having to fight for life… In addition to my mental health going way down the drain I was also having problems with my stomach that was giving me a hard time as well as the rest of my GI tact… I had two major operations done around that time… one of them (as I felt at the time) leaving me ‘deformed’ and even more ashamed of my body…
I don’t remember in detail what I said or did… or what people thought I had done…. but people started to question me… I had already made a plan to kill myself and what went on there only made it easier for me to leave… I was selfish… and I didn’t care… I didn’t really think at the time as I had already made up my mind… I didn’t think about anyone except myself… except …maybe I did care a little… in a way transferring my own experiences to others… as at the time I felt it was better if people would just hate me as then they would not miss me and/or grief…
I don’t know what went on at the forums after I left… but I know I involved a very dear (offline) friend of mine to all of this… someone who was kind enough to allow me use her web server for my websites as well as the mini-forum… I had full access to the server… I was able to do whatever I could think off; including reading her (and her family’s) personal email and/or even reply as her…
For a while I just “worked with the flow” of pretending to work on my recovery as I wanted to prepare myself and do some serious writing before I went through with my *plan*… I was even on medication that did help with a lot of stuff that had been going on like organizing my thoughts, hallucinations, paranoia and more… which BTW helped me to write what I wanted to say to those I’d leave behind… my wife, my children, my sister and a few more people… all people I knew in the “real 3D world”…
Finally it was time… and well …I failed
I’m not going into any details… but I was in hospital for almost three years total afterwards…
By the time I got out my domains had expired… I didn’t have a backup at hand… I had no idea how to get a hold of anyone I had known online… and quite frankly I still didn’t care… I wasn’t going to get back online after all of this and hurt people all over again…
In a way I learned that I had given people the wrong impression of me… people looked up to me for some odd reason… I never understood that and it made me extremely uncomfortable, especially in the end… then again, at the time I also truly believed that I was exactly what my mom said I was… I don’t think I have to write that out here as I brought this up quite a lot back in the day…. but I guess that’s one of the reasons off why this seemed so easy for me…
I knew people would get hurt… I didn’t care
I knew people would get angry with me… I didn’t care
I knew if people would try to get in touch… I’d just ignore them
…but…
I have learned a lot of things about myself since then…
I have learned that no matter how strongly you believe something it can just be your brain playing with you… and by discovering that… I have also learned that life without having to hurt myself is indeed possible.
I have also learned that I have a long way to go in some areas… In the past two or three months I’ve tried to reconnect with some of my old online friends… With some it has worked and for that I am grateful… However, I don’t really have much to go on other than nicknames for quite a large group of people… some may even still hate me and are not going to reply… That doesn’t matter… really… their choice… but for me… I have to get it out of me…
May 11, 2014 | Just Ramblings, Mostly Me, Schizophrenia, The Past |
Fortunately most people have good childhood memories regarding their parents. That however is something that I don’t really have… My father was never really there as his job required him to travel a lot… but when he was home he locked himself in his office.
Then there was my mother… I used to be able to write about her… about what she did to me… but somehow I am struggling with finding the words… I ask myself questions about forgiveness… whether I should forgive her or not…
Its mother’s day today… It’s hard to hear people talk about their mothers and how much they care for them… All of this reminds me of the hell my mother put me through… pain and torture… and leaving me with horrifying memories.
In the past I’ve wondered why my mother was different… I’ve wondered about the REAL reason for her to take a knife and make cuts on my body… I’ve wondered why she made me stay outside in the cold, night after night… not giving me food for days… making me eat things that weren’t made for eating… I could go on…
I know I can’t proof anything now, but I do believe my mother had schizophrenia… I suspected that long before I was diagnosed… and I knew I had this illness too… also long before I was diagnosed… For years I tried to hide my illness and was actually quite successful at it… Different diagnosis and medication helped. I admit now the main reason I wanted to hide this was because I was scared to death of somehow becoming my mother…
The other day I posted a list of what I have experienced through schizophrenia. I didn’t list everything… there are things that are too ugly and disgusting to share… I’ve seen a lot of those in my mother too… Disgusting/ugly things that both of us experienced or felt… So I ask myself… should I forgive her because she was sick?
Happy mother’s day mother… where ever you are…
May 8, 2014 | Healing, Schizophrenia, Tummy tales |
Yes… I really am OK… or at least OK-ish… I’m just having some tummy/GI problems at the moment as sometimes they want to “play dead” on me and/or do what they are supposed to… and now my GI doc is talking about a j-tube…
Been there… done that before so no big deal really….
Because of this my meds will have to be changed a bit too…. I don’t want to go all psychotic on people online so I might not be around much if that happens… However it’s not really likely that will happen but you’ll never know for sure… and I want to be on the safe side.
