Carbamazepine Dream

I can't fight this insomnia anymore. Fine, I won't sleep. I'll be brilliant by night and dull by day until eventually I don't believe that the sun is real anymore. That's what people don't get about schizophrenics. The trouble is not: can they tell what's real and what's imaginary? It's can they tell when what's real feels imaginary and what's imaginary feels real. People that haven't experienced it don't know what they're talking about. It feels the same at some point. Both sides beg you to come back, to stay. You have to choose. Red pill? Blue pill?

I choose the carbamazepine dream.

But the ancient, brain-stem dream has its fingers around me, too.

Here's this for anyone who wants it:
http://www.playlist.com/overflowingcoffers

Some of my favorite songs.

I tell everyone this story. If you've known me a month, I've told you this story, about how when I'm depressed or anxious, I fall into some catatonic state on the couch in front of the television and watch hour after hour of syndicated reruns on TBS or WB or whatever. Anyway, one night I was watching a rerun of Becker, which was by the way, the most endearing character Ted Danson ever played, and, for those who are not familiar: Ted Danson plays Dr. Becker. He has his own practice in Brooklyn or somewhere and he's a crank but he's thorough. Anyway, Steven Wright guest stars on one episode and he plays a schizophrenic who talks to God, whom he calls Larry. This infuriates Dr. Becker and he goes on one of his signature tirades. He says he doesn't really talk to God, it's just the dopamine receptors in his brain, blah, blah, blah. (Like I know. I should know, but I don't.) And his receptionist, the capable and wise sidekick, the voice in his head, says, and this I can quote, "Well, how do you know that when God wants to talk to someone, that's not how he does it?"

That was a poignant moment for me, sadly. I truly thought that right then God was trying to talk to me... through the television.

I was talking to my therapist, who by the way is nothing like the therapist stereotype you've conjured in your brain. Alright, he's the prototype really, the subdued, active listener who everytime you ask a tough question, articulate some crisis point, he breathes hard out his nose and stretches his mouth, looking perplexed, and says, "Yeah, what about that?" But you have to know a lot about therapists to get how transcendent and effective and even refreshing that is. Believe me, there are many other, far more irritating, techniques.

Anyway, I told him all about how it's so heartbreaking that there are no such thing as soulmates. How my feelings for this guy will just fade and later I'll meet someone new and have all those same feelings again, but for him (or, admittedly, in the opposite order). How nothing has any meaning, save that which you give it. And he, my therapist, replied...

He didn't say, "Yeah, what about that?" He was personally chagrined and I saw it. He faced the same dilemma once and he decided and he hasn't looked back. For the first time ever, he had an opinion about my opinion. He tackled the issue, made me draw all the logical conclusions that follow from that being true: You can give anything any meaning you want. You control, decide your experience of things. You decide if you participate. You can withdraw. These facts can be something sad. They can be something joyous. All that can be something really beautiful if you can see it.

And all the sudden I was in the place where you would withdraw to. And I understood what wasn't working about my schizophrenia all these years.

Most people have two competing strategies for avoiding the present moment. They either dwell on the past or fantasize about the future. Either way is a mind-made illusion. Neither exist. Fantasy. When a person is in a bad mood they dwell on the past. When a person is in a good mood they fantasize about the future. Conversely, the mind can create a mood with images. The mind can create the experience.

Some minds are skilled at this, creating experiences too intense to bear. The mind immediately goes to work constructing an experience that the body can bear, that reconciles contradictions, that anthropomorphizes ambivalences and makes them foes, one the hero, the other the villian. This is called delusion. The next stage of fantasy.

This is a place of Truth. But it's expressed in myth and riddle. It's written in the language our ancestors have handed down Truth to us.

For a long time, I wanted to be left alone in the delusion. When I was younger I was a character in the fantasy at the mercy of the forces of will and chance that governed that universe. A couple of years ago, I reemerged in the story as myself, normal, human, mortal Sarah, but acted as God of this fantasy world. From then on things happened on my terms and had to explain themselves. Legends and natural laws and characters were all stripped to basic, concrete forms, to the things they referenced in my experienced environment. Sometimes characters represented feelings I couldn't acknowledge and natural laws represented people whose behavior and treatment I had come to calculate and anticipate.

I thought that if I could just get inside it, I could dismantle it from the inside out. Disembowl it.

My whole life I was hypnotized by voices that danced me around. I did their bidding. The only things I paid attention to in real life were the things that they told me to. I would suddenly get the command, "Look." "Listen." And I would until they drew me back in. Those moments I spent aware of what you all would call real were what the voices called clues.

If there were clues, then there was a mystery. If there was a mystery, there was a solution.

It's when I realized that they wanted to die as badly as I did, that I realized we were one and the same.

One of the clues they gave me was a story from a comic book I heard, a little bit of demon mythology. According to this bit of real world legend, the only way to control a demon was to figure out its true name. Call it by its true name and it will do your bidding.

Then I knew that while the voices were me, the same voices everyone has in their head, except mine were on steroids, the part of me that recognized that was much more.

I learned a lot about myself by going into that nightmare realm and putting cracks in it. I lost and hurt a lot of people in the process, and I'm sorry, but I wouldn't trade it. What I figured out, no book or teacher or therapist has ever told me. And nothing that any book or teacher or therapist has ever told me helped me figure it out.

But the thing that surprised me was that going in didn't kill it. There's simply the aware me, present in the reality, and the unconscious me lost in this fantasy. And it's just a switch, that's all there is to it. A shot of Prolixin D killed the demons, but the fantasy-thinking remained, now it was just about "real" stuff, my real past, a realistic projection of the future. But where I spent my time, in fantasy or in reality, that's just a decision. Carbamazepine makes the decision a lot easier to make.

But it's a muscle, too, a strength. They say with the brain, "what fires together, wires together" and "if you don't use it, you lose it." Our brains like paths of least resistance. That's why we end up doing the same useless, detrimental stuff forever and ever. But you can literally rewire the brain, but the best, least toxic way is simply to do different stuff.

Anyway, that conversation with my therapist about meaning brought me deeper into that aware state that I'm always trying to get in and stay in. And it was there that I had true clarity and insight. I learned a lot about a lot of perfectly disposable stuff when I was in the delusion, but it's only helpful if you're going to try to mitigate the pain and damage caused by the unconscious state. What you learn from a place of deep awareness, that... is transcendence. It's not even learning, it's remembering, re-cognizing.

Knowing this pissed me off at first. It was so easy, so simple. I could've spared so many relationships, the one relationship that meant more to me than anything else, if I had just...

what? Figured it out sooner. Maybe I could've but I didn't. Maybe I'm not meant (heavy, contentious way of putting it) to have that love of my life. Maybe it's my purpose to bring light to the darkness that still shrouds so much of mental illness. Maybe it's my gift to give language to things that... most of their messengers speak in tongues, just glimpses of such leave people speechless... people who observe can only describe consequences.

At any rate, that was certainly my choice. And that's the bitter irony.

When I was a little girl in church, whenever someone said the word prophet, the voice said, "That's you." "Perk up, girl, you're being called on." "Pay attention, this concerns you." And I was so pissed scared that I never learned a damn thing about any of the prophets. I would yell back to the voice that I didn't want it, I didn't chose that life. I didn't want martyrdom or exile or God's eternal disappointment. And the voice always taunted me, you will, when the time comes and you know what you're supposed to say, you will and you will forsake everything else to do it, and it will be your glory.

And everytime, when push comes to shove, I do. I should be asleep now but the words are there. Hanging there for me to pick out of the void and put here.

Now what I'm afraid of is that I will be misunderstood. That I won't speak when I should. That no one will heed what I say.

Such was the madness of the prophets. All that time that I spent not learning about the prophets from the pastor and I would come to understand them better than anyone in that church could ever hope to.