Different Shade of Normal: A Journal of Schizophrenic Thoughts

By Jacob Glidewell

A schizophrenia sufferer describes his journey behind the “thin scrim of glittery, cotton-like fog” into the world of delusion. He includes mental, interpersonal, theological, and medical reflections for patients who suffer from schizophrenia and those who love them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aspire Productions
• Release date: Oct 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458122131

Jacob Glidewell

Jacob Glidewell is a writer and actor whose previous work has been published in The Wittenburg Door.

Book preview

Introduction

Don’t drink that water, a voice says. It’s poisoned. I look at the tall glass of water the waiter has just handed me. A lemon wedge floats on top bumping against the ice cubes. I’m thirsty, but I hesitate.

That water is poisoned. Look at the bubbles. Water shouldn’t bubble. It’s poisoned. If you drink that, you’ll die right here. Then what will happen to your wife and kids? Order a soda. They can’t poison soda.

Excuse me, I say just as the waiter starts to walk off. I’m sorry, but I need to order a different drink. The voice laughs in my mind, and I cringe.

I’m schizophrenic, which is to say that I suffer from schizophrenia, also known as split-mind disease, even though this label has caused a lot of confusion with multiple personality disorder, which is not the same thing. The symptoms are common, yet you won’t find two schizophrenics who are alike. This illness affects us all differently because we all think differently.

As far as I can tell, I’m a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies and extreme social anxiety. Author Sylvia Plath described the mental chaos as existing within the eye of the tornado—still and practically void while everything else is ripped, ridded, and devastated all around you. This I can agree with.

Schizophrenia hits a person in three areas or categories of symptoms: positive, negative, and cognitive.

Positive symptoms (so called because they add to the experience of the person, not because they are positive within themselves) are the hallucinations and delusions—the things people think they see, hear, smell, and sense as well as the situations in which they believe themselves to be trapped. For example a hallucination might consist of a person seeing a pack of dogs wandering outside their window, whereas a delusion might consist of a perception of a conspiracy against that person by another person or body of people, like a corporation or the government.

Negative symptoms (so called because they subtract from the experience of the person) can consist of social withdrawal, affective flattening, poverty of speech including made-up words or word salad, inability to properly dress or care for one’s own personal hygiene, and other social awkwardness.

Cognitive symptoms happen within the brain and can affect learning, fine motor skills and thinking processes.

A journal of my thoughts is contained within these pages, sometimes coherent and concrete, other times not so much. On deciding to keep this journal of thought I promised myself that I would edit only for grammar and spelling as well as clarity—at least as far as I can help, though one or two entries might not read too coherently. The rest will be 100% honest thought. Everything recorded here is true, even though a lot of it never actually happened. No lies, no exaggeration. There’s no need for that kind of thing anymore. My mind is interesting enough as it is.

The Preliminaries

I can’t blame my parents for my schizophrenia other than the possibility that my illness is hereditary. A grandfather, uncles, and cousins also had and have this junk to some extent, and so do I. It’s as simple as that. But it is old-fashioned thinking to blame the parents for this disease. What happened to me is not my parents’ fault any more than it’s my fault.

But when I examine my past, my childhood, I do find that I was alone more often than not. I played well by myself. There’s nothing wrong with that except that I had trouble playing with others if I wasn’t in control of the story. My best childhood friend helped me get beyond all that because I liked his ideas and we played well off of each other, but even then I led the games more than I followed.

Other than playing with him and his little brother, Patrick, I did had few friends.

My mother taught me to act it up, to joke and laugh and be included, but in all honesty, I would rather have stayed in the back of the room and sat quietly, either reading a book or drawing in a sketchpad.

Around that time I started writing stories.

I look at old family photos and I notice that I’m either not in them or I’m off to one side. I remember a picture taken of my father, his friend from work, that man’s ten-year-old son, and me on a skeet-shooting trip. The three of them were grouped together with Dad and his friend standing side by side, the friend’s son standing in front of them in the middle, and then standing three or four paces to the right of everyone is me. It looks like I accidentally wondered into the frame of someone else’s family picture.

Don’t think that I felt envious of that kid or anything. In fact I thought he might have been partially retarded. He laughed silently with his mouth wide open and eyes squeezed shut, like a donkey with a hernia. And when he peed he had to drop his pants around his ankles. He couldn’t pull it out through the zipper opening like anyone else.

I also remember that I wasn’t particularly happy on that trip. But still, that was only one of many photos and videos.

My mother still watches some old family movies made with one of those giant, shoulder-carried cameras. She has one of what she calls the March Birthdays—her father, Daddy Joe, and two of my cousins all share birthdays with me in March, and she would throw one big group party for all of us.

In the video my cousins are opening their presents, as is Daddy Joe when he’s not filming. And there, every so often, over in the distance, you can see Jacob (me) quietly opening his gifts. I wasn’t left out, but I wasn’t as involved as the rest. And that never bothered me. I wasn’t depressed about it or anything.

I tended to play in my room alone with my toys. Sometimes it’d be with the stuffed animals, other times it’d be with the action figures. My games had elaborate setups, plots, dialogue, the works. I once played a game about a werewolf that scared me half-to-death. I had to quit in the middle of it and go find other people.

I had a poster of a black panther on my wall around that time. It leapt out at you from the jungle behind it. It terrified me after a few days of owning it, as it seemed to watch me while I played and its head turned to follow me as I walked around.

One time I was leaving my room because it had scared me again, and as I went to turn off the light, I saw its head had turned in the mirror to watch me.

I nearly fell down the stairs I ran so fast. But I’ve always been a bit jumpy.

Remember, I’m not blaming my parents or family members for any of this stuff. I’m just explaining some of the background before I dive into the meatier parts.

I have a clear memory of my mother telling me that she hated me. She’s proved many times over that what she’d said was an angry mistake and I know she loves me very much, but that doesn’t erase the memory.

She sat at her makeup table in the upstairs bedroom of our old house. She’d pulled her hair back so she could put on her face as she and my Mimi, her mother, would say.

I don’t remember what I had done or said, but whatever it was it had upset her. She had just taken a headache medicine, BC Powder I think it was, and turned to glare at me.

Jacob, she said. Sometimes I think I just hate you.

I must have been young because I started crying and ran out of the room. She didn’t chase after me.

My father and I have always had a strange relationship. It’s better now, but it took some time to become so. He used to come into my room at night and say sleep tight and kiss me on the forehead. Then one day he stopped.

Dad could never say I love you. The closest you would get would be either love you or love you, too. He only hugged with one arm.

But it’s not his fault at all. Dad’s dad was one of the other schizophrenics in the family. He killed himself one night without any warning. Sent his wife, my Mamaw, into the kitchen to make him some hot chocolate and boom—bullet through the head.

So Dad grew up without a strong male influence as to what fatherly love should be.

He took me to Indian Guides, and on camp outs, and other stuff like that. We had fun together. He about killed himself working with my uncle and cousin to build a small basketball court in our backyard for me one birthday.

When I was still young, we would watch scary movies together on Sunday afternoons.

But to me all of those things lacked emotion. Dad went through the movements of being a father, yet it always felt somewhat cold. I know he was trying. I don’t doubt his love for me. At least I don’t now. I did then.

Dad was always gone away somewhere doing other things. I thought he might have had a second family somewhere else and went to