Imaginary Things: (Inside the Mind of a Schizophrenic) From Darkness...To Lunacy...To Light

Schizophrenia: A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation. -Oxford Dictionary. I'd like to say I just have a big imagination, but at the age of 23 I was diagnosed with this illness. I live in a nice neighborhood in Mahwah, NJ. My father is an optometrist, and my mother a successful dog breeder. I am the oldest of three children, having a younger brother and sister. I had a good and relatively normal childhood. I graduated from Full Sail University in Florida with a degree in recording arts, as I have a passion for music. The events I'm going to describe took place when I came back home from school. You might say things got out of hand and I took on a world of my own. In this account, you will travel with me as I navigate and grow through my struggle. I want you to take a journey through the eyes and mind of a schizophrenic. On the outside, it probably looked so simple: He was depressed, angry at life, frustrated, and had a breakdown. He just lost it. Going through a tough break up, barely making it through college, and now back home struggling to find a job. He couldn't deal with it. The pressure was too high, and life was too heavy. Shattering a mirror in the bathroom with a baseball bat, and then a cop car's window later on. Driving all over town like a maniac and not pulling over for the police. You might say "eluding the police," which is what the charges stated. Being held at gunpoint in front of his family home, while waving the bat at police. Ending it all by spending the night in the Bergen County Jail. It was quite a day to say the least, and a lot led up to it. However, it was the beginning of a new life and the birth of a new creature. It wasn't like I just snapped, which is what some might think. It was a gradual build up of insanity from feeling a lack of meaning and purpose in my life, which ultimately resulted in triggering all the symptoms of schizophrenia. From this point on I want to take you into the mind of the schizophrenic. As you travel with me into that day and the days that followed, keep in mind that there were many days before this that I was suffering from the illness. I chose to start from this day because it changed everything.