Schizophrenia by Moonlight
I lie here listening to the noises of the night. It’s 2am – no more sleep for me now. Yesterday I was afraid. I felt my mind was running but my body was transfixed and inert and I therefore had myself trapped in a state of terrifying turmoil.
I could hear voices and was troubled by visual hallucinations and they are here again this morning. I had hoped to have a longer sleep to give me some respite. For 34 years now I have endured frequent episodic psychotic attacks and I feel powerless like a tiny row boat being tossed about in a raging sea of pain.
Thoughts and impulses taunt me to harm myself and I find it hard to emerge from my room. I don’t want to dress, shower or eat and yet there are days when I must because I have a part-time job and also am going to university. It’s so lonely in this capsule of fear. I look into the mirror and I don’t see my face – it has become demonic and the voices say I must cut myself – for to bleed will rid my body of some of the poison but I don’t. I want to kill myself – the ultimate act of finality. One day I will, but my family would suffer as a consequence and who am I to have the power to bring them such pain.
So I am trapped in a timeless void. I want to scream for someone to help me but I have no voice. My worthlessness is succeeded only by my ineptitude. I can hear them discussing me now – the demons who control my soul and the faceless ones have come to cause me more pain. I feel alien to this world.
I feel like an ancient woman but I am a lost child still searching for the love I never had. I am surrounded by love now but, somehow, the deep well inside me is empty and it is through these psychotic episodes that the true me emerges free from the masks I have learned to wear.
Death seems the only answer. “Do it, do it” chant the demons. Satan laughs. The room spins and I am trying to hang on but I am slipping into the chasm and falling deeper and deeper into the abyss. Someone is laughing – it is not me. I am feeling nothing now. I am unreal. Merely hanging on to the thread of sanity I have left. Someone please help me.