Control: Mental Health Check-In…
I, Dalton Lewis, am crazy. I’m nuts. I have paranoid schizophrenia. I haven’t talked about it for awhile, and it’s a central part of who I am — so I wanted to reiterate who I am and what my situation is and has been.
It’s been twenty years since I was a young man in Tucson, Arizona and then Las Vegas, Nevada. I worked as a temp employee helping with office work doing receptionist work and printing copies and other secretarial office work. I had just graduated from college and started to try to make it as a novelist and failed. I wrote two novels that no one liked. I tried to get an agent and had no success. After a lifetime of succeeding at school I had become a failure in the real world, the work world, and that made me hate myself a little bit. I needed an escape from a reality in which I was a failure.
I got bored at work. Work was long and boring. I decided to try to create a story in my head during work — to get through the monotony of doing nothing for eight hours a day and getting paid. I needed something to deal with a reality of working at something completely unimportant that helped no one. I started a story that began to take over my mind. I realized that I wasn’t including enough dialogue in my story. I started talking to the characters in the story. I would talk to each of the characters in the story. They started to talk back to me. I stopped controlling the people who were talking to me.
This should have raised so many red flags but did not.
The next few months got bad.
I started to argue with the other side of the conversations about whether or not I was innocent or guilty. The other side of the conversation maintained that I was guilty of horrible crimes. I had a huge argument about this for the next few years. I couldn’t win and prove my innocence to the voices talking to me in my head. I screamed in my head over and over that I was innocent.
People fired me over and over. Slowly the realization occurred to me that something was wrong. I walked through Las Vegas at all hours of the day and night, unable to function or hear when people talked to me. The voices started to drown out real-life conversations with real people. I couldn’t hear real people when they talked to me because the voices drowned them out. I was mentally ill. No one had gone over the details of paranoid schizophrenia, but that was what the diagnosis would be.
I didn’t do well. I had a complete mental breakdown.
My dad drove me back to Illinois to live with him and my mom to get better. I spent a few days in a mental health ward of a hospital, trying to get better.
Flash forward twenty years.
I have medications that I take every day. They allow me to hear when people are talking to me. They allow me to have normal conversations with people. I work out. I read and write. I have friends. I play strategy games. I have a full life.
Mentally ill people can live a full life. We can take our medications and live a normal, healthy existence. We can overcome our conditions.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
