Pretty soon I began to get more used to life on the outside. Following the rules at Search for Change wasn't so difficult. It wasn't such a big deal to make my bed every day before I went out. Doing my chores twice a week became routine. Cooking for nine residents and two or three counselors became a fun challenge. And at day hospital I began to learn one important lesson: how to live without the Voices.
For as the Voices began to recede, something startling happened within me. After years of begging them to go, to leave me in peace with my own thoughts, when they finally did leave, I found to my surprise that I missed them. They had, over time, dissipated into a kind of background static, only occasionally coming back with their full-force chants. I should have been happy. Instead, I felt like there was a neon vacancy sign flashing. My head felt so empty. Without them, I felt lonely.
I began to reminisce about them, to think about them wistfully as one might an old friend who has died. Now that they were mostly gone, I wanted them back. So I brought them back: I willed them back into my life. I turned my mind inward, searching in its dark recesses to find where the Voices lurked and imagined their presence. Hiding among the static I found them. By focusing my attention on them I was able to coax them out. I welcomed them like lost friends. They were horrible, cruel and profane, but at least they were familiar.
This went on for a long time before I realized what I was doing. I wanted to get well. I wanted to live normally. I wanted to relate to normal people as an equal. Yet here I was walking backward, down the road to sickness and madness again. I was choosing my sick Voices over a healthy reality. I must really be crazy!
After that, I began to turn outward more. Part of the problem was that, once the Voices left, there was nothing in my head to think about. The Voices had dominated my brain for so long that they had left no room for any other thoughts. What brain space I had left over all those years was devoted to fighting off the Voices’ overpowering attacks. What's more, as a full-time patient on a locked ward, even if I had had more space to think, I had nothing much to think about. The dreary sameness of my daily life gave no foothold for thoughts to grow and take root.
Obviously what I needed was a life.
So I began to devote my energy to building one. I used every tool they offered me at day hospital. I met with a counselor, usually every week, and together we worked on an elaborate goal sheet.
I had trouble articulating myself verbally in sessions with the other patients and counselors so I practiced giving one piece of feedback per session, and kept up with my writing, which was a helpful form of self-expression. If I overloaded myself with activities and became too stressed, then I set specific hours for each activity and worked on not obsessively exceeding those limits. If I heard the Voices lurking in the background or if the temptation, to follow them back into their world became too strong, I fought them any way I could. I would listen to my Walkman, talk to my friends, take a shower, take a walk, ask for help.
I had been isolated for so long I had to work hard at reconnecting. I was still paranoid, fearful of people, down on myself for my perceived failures. I set myself the goal of deliberately thinking good thoughts about myself, and of checking with other people if I thought they were angry with me.
I had been out of the world for so long that I had no network of friends to fall back on. So onto my goal sheet it went: I will initiate two telephone calls each week to someone outside my family. I also joined the other patients in a social group, going out to eat, going to the movies, going to the beach. I had to practice all over again what it meant to go out and have fun.
For years someone else had taken the responsibility for managing my life. My medications were doled out four times a day. My meals were ready at regular hours. The only money I was responsible for was the pocket money my father gave me. If I was going to make it on my own, I had to relearn how to do things on my own. I got the job as meal planner at the halfway house. I learned how to plan meals and shop. I learned how to put aluminum foil in the bottom of a pan when cooking steak or chicken to make cleaning up easier. I learned how to budget, and to plan how I was going to spend my money. I relearned how to balance a checkbook, something that had once been easy for me. I began to learn how to structure my time myself, without depending on the hospital's routine of medication times and meetings to rule my life. When I arrived at day hospital I was given a pocket calender and began to write down all my appointments and obligations. I even began to take responsibility for my medications for myself. Starting with one day's medications, and gradually working up by adding a day at a time, I learned at Search for Change how to count-out the doses into a multi-compartment box the size of a fat paperback I carry, and to remember to take them religiously four times a day.
The responsibility was scary. Before every big change, I found myself growing anxious. I was afraid of failure, afraid of finding out that I could not do a task, afraid of each step that took me further away from the security of the hospital. But I also reveled in my accomplishments. I was taking big steps back toward having a life of my own.
To my great delight, too, my weight began to drop. It had begun dropping in my last months in the hospital, from 170 to 166 to 164 … slowly, steadily, a pound at a time, the layers of fat that had encased the old me began to fall off. Lower and lower my weight dropped—160 to 158 to 155 to 150, to 147 to 143. By my thirty-first birthday, less than six months after I had left the hospital, I was under 140 pounds. Out shopping with my mother one day, I bumped into someone. When I turned around to apologize, I realized it was a mirror.
I didn't recognize the stranger looking back.
At first, I was very self-conscious about approaching my old friends. They had all gone on to accomplish such impressive things. They had good jobs, nice families. It was like they were the grown-ups and I was still a little kid. I felt inferior to them, and afraid they would scorn me. When I overcame my fears and called them, I discovered that, although our lives had taken very different paths, they are still the very oldest friends I have, and that I need that connection. Lori Winters, Tara and I all got together in Connecticut for lunch and laughed like the old friends we were. Tara and I met once in Florida where we were both spending a brief vacation with our families, and she's always asking me to come to Washington to visit. Lori and I get together once in a while for lunch and gossip. I even spent one Christmas with Lori and her husband and two little boys.
Gail Kobre Lazarus tickled me with her response to the new, improved me. “She's baaaaacck! Lori's baaaaaack,” she said, mimicking a horror movie—only this time not Carrie, the movie that haunted me so.
I've been reaching out, trying hard to make new friends. I've rekindled friendships with buddies from high school. When I have friends over, I cook dinners of chicken and pasta and make brunches of bagels and lox. I've tackled the bar scene. I attend singles dances and discussion groups. Sometimes I'll go by myself, sometimes with a friend. The goal is to meet other people; and it's fun. It sure beats being in the hospital.
At first the only thing I knew was my illness, my medications and the halfway house, which didn't make me a very interesting conversationalist. But as time has gone on, I've become more adept at talking about more general things—about family, and friends, and relationships, and things in the news, and vacations and movies.
Nothing about dating is easy these days for any thirty-ish single woman. But I've even come to think it's fun. Now that I'm back to my college weight—118 pounds—I feel chic and pretty again. I dress casually in jeans and a sweater, spray on my favorite Calvin Klein Escape perfume and head for local hangouts. Since I don't drink, I usually sit at the bar and order some food, to keep myself looking busy while I scout for a good-looking guy who's alone. I've met a hot dog peddler, a fax machine salesman who owns his own company, an IBM computer programmer, a General Motors plant supervisor and a cemetery executive.
I very badly want to get married and have kids. But with all the medicati
ons I take, I think I would probably be better off trying to find a ready-made family. So I'm looking for a nice divorced or widowed man with kids of his own. It's going to take a very special guy to realize how much I have to offer him. But I know when I find him, he won't be disappointed. (That's a glimpse of my personal ad.)
When we're making small talk at the outset of a date, it isn't always easy when the moment arrives to come clean about my past. A lot of guys just can't take it. In retrospect, some of their reactions are even funny. For quite some time I dated a guy I met who worked where I was having my car repaired. We got along well and had a pretty good time together, so finally I decided to tell him. I took him to my apartment and showed him an article I had written about my history.
He finished reading the article, then looked at me in disgust.
“You don't have schizophrenia,” he said.
“Yes, I'm afraid I do,” I replied.
“No you don't. You're just making it all up,” he said. “Why did you write that? ”
When I showed him the box of all the medications I take, he became angry and threatened to call my parents.
We kept on meeting for several weeks after that, but he never became convinced. I decided I couldn't continue seeing someone who had such a hard time accepting me for who I really am, so we broke off. I never saw him again.
As for drugs, real drugs, street drugs, I have never taken up the offer to get high with anyone since the cocaine incident at Futura House years ago. I've come too far and accomplished too much to waste it all by sliding back into the shadowy world of drugs.
I meet with Dr. Doller twice a week. She helps me monitor my medication. I take twenty-six pills a day for my psychotic symptoms, my mood swings, for anxiety and for the side effects that the drugs cause.
We have a great partnership these days. I carry a little tape recorder with me wherever I go, to record anything that happens during the week that I feel I need to pay attention to. With Dr. Doller's help I have learned not to be overwhelmed by the emotional swings I am subject to. I have learned to weather the low points and to realize that good times will return. I have also learned not to let myself follow too enthusiastically the manic highs.
Dr. Fischer and I kept in touch with each other for about a year after she left the hospital. Then one day I received a letter telling me she was about to have a baby. I couldn't take it. I destroyed all the letters she had sent me, and never wrote her another one.
I'm sorry we lost touch. I want her to know me as I am today, and see how well I am doing. I want her to see what her work has helped me to achieve. I want her to be proud of me, and proud of herself as well. Just recently she wrote me a letter. I know that one day I am going to be able to summon up the courage to write back.
I'm still very close to my parents. We spend a lot of time together. I love them and respect them. I'm grateful for all their help. At the same time, I've learned I can also get angry at them. But when I do, I can express it without getting out of control or worrying that I'm driving them away. I now understand how powerful an emotion love is.
I've even suffered a bit of a relapse and recovered.
It happened over the summer when I was working on this book, dredging up old memories of the time between my first two hospitalizations. It was a particularly difficult period in my life and very painful to recall. At the same time, other stressful things were going on in my life: My brother Steven had married and moved with his wife Ann to South Africa. I missed him and was anticipating missing Mom and Dad, who were retiring and moving to Florida. I was feeling abandoned by my other two strong supports as well: Dr. DoUer was taking a maternity leave, and my caseworker Jacquie was returning to school. At the same time, Dr. Doller and I were experimenting with lowering my medication. It was all too much for me.
Within a week I began to feel strange, all buzzy and unstable inside. Within two weeks, I was having a full-blown attack. Amanda, my writing partner, was climbing into my brain. She had seized control of my thoughts. What's more, she wanted me dead. For over a year we had been talking with each other several times a day, laughing and joking and enjoying each other's company. Suddenly I was terrified of her. I fled from her. I stopped answering the phone. Even the sound of her voice on the answering machine sent tremors through me. She was trying to control me, to ruin my life. Days went by.
Such a psychotic episode could have easily spun out of control. It didn't. What stopped it? I did. I knew something was wrong. The illness had seized a portion of my brain, but it hadn't seized all of it. I knew I needed help. I raised my medication back up to its normal level. I called Dr. Doller. I talked to my parents. At first I scorned what they said. My Voices and I knew better. But I never became completely consumed. Over the years I had learned to trust Dr. Doller. So if she said I was experiencing a psychotic episode, then I probably was, no matter what the Voices told me.
Soon the medication took hold again, and my fears subsided. I picked up the phone myself to call Amanda on her birthday. A few days later, we met in the city. When I treated us both to two huge bowls of steamed clams and melted butter at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station it was more than just her birthday we were celebrating.
I still hear the Voices from time to time. I try to take my own advice. I distract myself, lecture myself, and focus on the outside world. I have taught myself to use a little mantra when they reappear: “These Voices are not real. Don't be frightened. Don't get upset. They are not real. Don't let them overcome you. Try to think of what happened just before you heard them. Is there some emotion you can isolate that will help explain why they are here now? They are not real. It's okay. Don't be afraid.”
When I hear the Voices, I shake myself back to reality by using all my senses. If I'm riding the train to Manhattan, for example, I concentrate on the taste of the Diet Coke and the smell of the perfume I am wearing. I look out the window at the changing view, and listen carefully to the sound of the conductor collecting tickets. I feel my own ticket flipping back and forth between my fingers.
Some people can tell when I'm hearing Voices. I wish they couldn't. I don't mind talking about the Voices, but knowing that their presence is evident to others feels like an invasion of my privacy. If people let on that they know I am hearing Voices, I sometimes think it's because they've heard them too, and not because a particular expression has flitted across my face.
Nonetheless I find talking and joking about my symptoms helps keep them in their place. So I do it all the time. Like the time Anne Schiff, my father's secretary, questioned me about a current news item.
“What do you hear, Lori?” she asked.
“Oh you know me,” I said. “I hear all kinds of things.”
When Amanda lost manuscript pages or forgot to return phone calls, I would chide her: “I'm supposed to be the daffy one, not you.” When she needed to impress someone important, I offered to lend a hand: “I'll have the Voices write you a letter of recommendation,” I said.
For years I tried to hide the Voices because I assumed they would horrify people. As I have found out recently, that is not always the case.
When one of the mailmen who serve our complex expressed an interest, I showed him an article about me and my history. He was a young guy and I watched him carefully as he read through it. At the end, he looked up.
“You hear voices?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, sometimes I do,” I said, and waited for the look of horror to cross his face.
The look was, instead, one of pure admiration.
“Coooooool!” he said, with tremendous enthusiasm.
I wanted to hug him.
Writing this book has been painful and exhilarating. It was painful to force myself to remember things that I would just as soon forget. But it's been exhilarating to see how far I've come.
Dr. Doller told me once when I was in the hospital that I could never go back. I could never again be the girl I was before that dark night at summer camp.
Looking over my life, I know now that I don't want to go back. I want to go ahead. I look forward to a future filled with accomplishment, learning and the love of my family and friends.
Many people helped me get to where I am now. Now it is my turn. Painful as it has been, I've written this book hoping that my story can help others the way I was helped. If my life and my experiences can help other people find their own ways out of darkness, I will know that I have not wasted the great gift I have been given: the chance to begin life again.
“FASCINATING̵UNDOUBTEDLY WILL FIND A PLACE IN THE CHERISHED LITERATURE OF FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS OF SUFFERING AND RECOVERY.”— Washington Post Book World
THE QUIET ROOM
At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child—the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her. Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage.
“CANDID…COURAGEOUS.”— San Diego Union-Tribune
An Alternate Selection of The Literary Guild® and Doubleday Book Club®
Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room
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