Never Give Up: Buddhism, Family & Schizophrenia: One woman's story of hope and courage.

By Jennifer L Myers

"A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of all humankind."
- SGI President Daisaku Ikeda

In August 2011, Jennifer Myers created a blog to chronicle her daily experiences dealing with the symptoms of a mental illness she was diagn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer L Myers
• Release date: Nov 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9780986269202

Book preview

Names and identifying characteristics of individuals in this book have been changed to protect their identities. The book makes occasional use of composite characters as well.

Never Give Up: Buddhism, Family & Schizophrenia. Copyright © 2014 Jennifer L Myers. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, write: Jennifer L Myers at [e-mail].

Cover design by Donald Saunders. For more information, please visit www.Fiverr.com/webmark or www.WMCPublishing.com.

ISBN-10: 0692222871

ISBN-13: 978-0692222874

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I am strong, because I have been weak.

I am fearless, because I have been afraid.

I am wise, because I have been foolish.

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DEDICATION

This memoir is dedicated first and foremost to my husband and my family. Of course, without my Buddhist practice and the Soka Gakkai International, I would have given up years ago. My husband's family, my friends and neighbors, my doctors and therapists, and many others all offered their support. I hope my experience is a source of hope, encouragement and inspiration for everyone who reads it.

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No more turning away

From the weak and the weary

No more turning away

From the coldness inside

Just a world that we all must share

It's not enough just to stand and stare

Is it only a dream that there'll be

No more turning away?

Pink Floyd

On the Turning Away

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A great inner revolution

in just a single individual

will help achieve a change

in the destiny of a nation,

and, further, will enable a change

in the destiny of all humankind.

Daisaku Ikeda

SGI President

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Prologue

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Buddhism

I met my best friend, Rose, during my junior year of high school in 1986 when she transferred from a private high school in the area and joined our cross-country team. I don’t know how we became such close friends so quickly, except that we enjoyed each other’s company and made each other laugh. Rose loved to talk to people and make new friends. We spent time with our mutual friend Lilly in between classes and ran on the cross-country team together with other girls who subjected themselves to the same daily physical punishment that we did.

  Not long after we met, Rose shared with me her Buddhist philosophy—a philosophy that I came to believe in and that ultimately played a crucial role in my ability to change my life for the better. I might never have learned about Buddhism without Rose’s friendship. When I first started practicing Buddhism, my interest in the religion had a lot to do with my friendship with Rose and how I felt about her. In her I saw a beautiful, warm, mysterious, exotic, and unique individual. We were complete opposites in terms of personality: she was outgoing and vivacious and could talk to anyone about anything; I was reserved and shy and rarely talked to anyone, even my own family. We made a good team that way. Shortly after Rose and I became friends, she invited me to my first Buddhist meeting. She told me that she had been raised Catholic but had a friend who had told her about Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism¹ a few years earlier. Rose started practicing Buddhism when she was fifteen, which is a young age to start making independent decisions about which religion you are going to practice. I didn’t think anything of it at the time—at least, not until I told my parents I wanted to start practicing Buddhism, too. Before long, I was accompanying Rose to local Buddhist meetings. I enjoyed going to the meetings not only because Rose and I were such close friends and had so much fun together, but also because I met many people at these gatherings who shared stories about the tremendous obstacles and illnesses they had overcome through their Buddhist practice. One man had survived cancer, a young woman in San Francisco was battling leukemia, and another woman’s family prayed for her recovery from anorexia.

  The first time I did a Buddhist chant was also with Rose, one fall afternoon after cross-country practice. I drove us to her parents’ house in Sunnyvale, and since no one else was home, we walked down the hallway into her bedroom to chant. The sun was beginning to set and the sky had started to darken outside Rose’s bedroom window. As we walked in, Rose flipped on a ceiling light that made the room she shared with her younger sister glow a warm, comfortable yellow. I looked around and saw Rose’s altar in one corner, near the doorway. A small, square, black-and-white marble table sat directly beneath her butsudan.² The dark maroon–colored butsudan was fastened to the wall about three feet above the marble tabletop. I also saw two white candles, a small rectangular dish with ash for burning incense, a black plastic water cup, and a small vase with a few green plant clippings in it.

  We sat down cross-legged on the floor next to each other. Rose lit the candles with a match and briefly stuck a fragrant black incense stick into one of the bright yellow flames, until the tip caught and burned bright orange. A smoky, perfumed scent calmed me, and thin tendrils of smoke curled into the air as she pressed the stick softly into its own ash. At that instant, I fell in love with incense.

  I gazed up at the butsudan as Rose solemnly opened its two small wooden doors outward. Since it was the first time I had ever chanted, I turned to Rose and asked softly, Should I close my eyes? I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to look at what was inside.

  Rose smiled at me warmly and shook her head, Focus on the Gohonzon.³ she told me, and I saw a paper scroll hanging in the butsudan’s interior.

  In Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism, the Gohonzon represents our own life. The Chinese and Sanskrit characters written on the scroll are a reflection of our lives and everything they encompass, particularly our Buddha nature. When we open the doors to the butsudan and pray to the Gohonzon, we are opening the doors to our own life.

  That afternoon was the first time in my life I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.⁴ We started slowly, because I didn’t know how to pronounce the chant. Rose initiated it with her strong, lyrical voice, and I accompanied her more quietly, hesitant and uncertain. Eventually our voices blended together and we found rhythm and harmony that fall evening, chanting side by side on her bedroom floor. Rose and I chanted together for an entire hour, and she was so proud of me, she bragged about the experience at Buddhist meetings for months to come.

  After I graduated from college, I left for the Peace Corps and Rose and I grew apart, but over the years, my own Buddhist practice grew stronger. I studied more, read more, and learned more about the teachings. I believed in what I was practicing, and I never stopped believing in it. This is what has kept me practicing for the past twenty-five years.

  Prior to chanting and learning about Buddhism, I had spent time reading about other philosophies in my search for a teaching that made sense. I read about New Age spirituality and the power of crystals, about other types of Buddhism, including Zen, and a little bit about astrology. Nothing ever made sense. When I read about other Buddhist sects, the ideas and concepts were unclear. In Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism, the concepts, although not easy to grasp, made perfect sense at the deepest level of my life. Looking back, I realize that I was attracted to the Gohonzon even when I knew very little about Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism.

  I perceived Buddhism as deep, profound, and mysterious. The teachings aren’t intended to be a mystery, but I was moved by the profundity of what I read, especially when I was in high school. I also loved the altar—the smell of the incense, the bright yellow glow of the candles, the bell ringing sonorously after each silent prayer had the perfect sort of exoticism. The teachings were endless, and there was always something new to learn. Although the introductory guide Fundamentals of Buddhism⁵ states, "There are a bewildering array of Buddhist teachings, which are often referred to as the ‘eighty thousand teachings,’ the purpose of all Buddhist teachings is to enable human beings to overcome suffering and achieve happiness.⁶ The teachings are meant not to confuse people but simply to help us understand ourselves and live happier lives. I’ve always considered myself a Buddhist first and foremost before anything else.

  Not long after I started chanting with Rose, I bought a few books from the bookstore at the local Soka Gakkai International (SGI)⁷ Buddhist center in San Jose and started reading about Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism. I subscribed to SGI’s weekly and monthly publications,⁸ both of which offered personal experiences, encouragement from SGI president Daisaku Ikeda, and in-depth explanations of Buddhist concepts. In the evenings, I read in bed. My favorite study material was from a letter⁹ titled On Attaining Buddhahood,¹⁰ written by Nichiren Daishonin:

What then does myo signify? It is simply the mysterious nature of our life from moment to moment, which the mind cannot comprehend or words express. When we look into our own mind at any moment, we perceive neither color nor form to verify that it exists. Yet we still cannot say it does not exist, for many differing thoughts continually occur. The mind cannot be considered either to exist or not to exist. Life is indeed an elusive reality that transcends both the words and concepts of existence and nonexistence. It is neither existence nor nonexistence, yet exhibits the qualities of both. It is the mystic entity of the Middle Way that is the ultimate reality. Myo is the name given to the mystic nature of life, and ho, to its manifestations. Renge, which means lotus flower, is used to symbolize the wonder of this Law. If we understand that our life at this moment is myo, then we will also understand that our life at other moments is the Mystic Law. This realization is the mystic kyo, or sutra. The Lotus Sutra is the king of sutras, the direct path to enlightenment, for it explains that the entity of our life, which manifests either good or evil at each moment, is in fact the entity of the Mystic Law.

Our Buddhist chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo had such incredible meaning. The more I thought about it, the more I believed what I read. Life really was an elusive reality, and I believed that everything known and unknown—all people and animals, trees and mountains, city street buses, the white cement of our sidewalks, every house and building, the blue sky and the sun, the planets and the stars, and everything in all the oceans—was a manifestation of this Mystic Law. And the more I read about Buddhism, the more I liked the philosophy.

  I had stopped attending weekly Sunday services with my parents a few years before, when I had started high school. There wasn’t anything in particular about my parents’ Presbyterian church that I disliked; I just found the worship services boring and could never relate to the teachings. The idea of God was strange to me. Whenever I pictured God, I had an image in my head of a tall, old white man with a long white beard, wearing long, flowing white robe, and carrying a gold cane. I have no idea where this image came from. I asked myself, Why is God a white man? Why isn’t God a black woman? Where does he live? How could he have possibly created every single thing on Earth, in addition to our solar system, the galaxy, and the rest of the known universe, in one week?

  I never discovered the answers to these questions, and a year and a half after the day I first chanted with Rose, I started practicing Buddhism wholeheartedly, gave up on the idea of God, and never looked back.

  At the time, I never imagined that, more than twenty years later, the intriguing and profound Buddhist philosophy that I adopted as a teenager would become my guiding light and enable me to illuminate even the darkest despair in my life with bright rays of hope.

Chapter 1

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UC Santa Cruz

  I don’t remember when I began feeling unhappy. Maybe in college, or even before that time, only I wasn’t aware of how I was feeling. In my early twenties I saw pictures of myself at my cousin’s wedding in Nashville. One picture was taken when I was about ten years old. My dad and I looked very happy in that picture. I was smiling, with a big, huge grin on my face, and so was my dad. I was wearing white soccer shorts with a Snoopy bathing suit, and my hair was braided. I looked completely happy and at ease sitting on the family-room couch with my dad.

  I also saw another picture that was taken a few years later, when I was twelve. This time I was at my great-aunt’s house in Independence, Missouri, for a family reunion on my mom’s side. I was in my aunt’s backyard with my cousins, standing next to a tree swing. In this

picture, I was wearing a soccer shirt, and my hair was braided in the same style, but the expression on my face was not a happy one. I looked angry at someone, maybe the person taking the picture. Although I do remember our family reunion that summer in Missouri, I was young enough that I didn’t remember the pictures being taken, let alone realize that I was becoming less happy as I grew older.

  It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties, after I had moved to Washington, DC, that I became more consciously aware of my own unhappiness, and even that happened only because my mom brought up the subject one afternoon on the phone.

  You sound depressed, she said. I was in my room, sitting on my twin bed, staring despondently out the window that overlooked Park Road below. You’ve been living in DC for almost three years, and you still haven’t found a job, my mom continued. Maybe you’re feeling depressed about the job search. My mom explained to me that my dad had suffered from depression a few years earlier, while I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, and that he had been taking antidepressants for his depression. Maybe you should see a psychiatrist about taking an antidepressant, too, my mom suggested.

  I could tell by her voice that she was concerned.  I wasn’t sure how she could tell that I was depressed just by talking to me on the phone, but she was right—I was. Every evening after I came home from work, I was so tired I went right to sleep. I would sleep for a few hours, then get up later to eat dinner. After I ate dinner, I went straight back to bed. I did think it was somewhat unusual for me to be doing that, but I didn’t do anything about it until the day my mom called. Up until that point, I figured that as soon as I found my dream job, I would be fine. I would be happy. I would have achieved everything I had set out to achieve with a master’s degree and my Peace Corps experience. Yet, three years, two internships, and countless temporary assignments later, I still hadn’t found my dream job in Washington, DC, or anywhere else. I still hadn’t found happiness, or at least what I perceived happiness to be.

  I finally took my mom’s advice and applied for an insurance plan that my parents paid for. I found a female psychiatrist in the DC area, and she started off by giving me free samples of Zoloft and Wellbutrin. When I rode the bus to work in the mornings, the buildings and city streets looked softer and less harsh, especially in the winter, when the weather was colder and there was snow on the ground. I felt a little less dejected trudging along the downtown sidewalks covered with ugly, gray, slushy snow. We eventually decided to combine the two medications, because the Wellbutrin gave me more energy, while the Zoloft helped with the depression.

  I first began experiencing symptoms of depression when I was a junior in college at UC Santa Cruz in 1991. At the time, I didn’t recognize what I was experiencing as depression, and I never put a name to the feelings. I transferred from Foothill Community College in Los Altos Hills, California to UCSC as a junior and chose environmental studies, with a focus on policy and planning, as my major. I enjoyed my classes, and I liked doing research and writing papers, but sometimes I felt weird and self-conscious walking around the beautiful campus, especially when I was alone. I felt as if the other students were staring at me when I walked past them in between classes among the tall redwood trees. Even though I wore long skirts, occasionally dressed like a hippie, and listened to the Grateful Dead, I still felt awkward and out of place

  Initially UC Santa Cruz seemed like the perfect place for me to go to school, so I still don’t know exactly why I became so sad. Everyone thinks that if you go to school in Santa Cruz, you can’t help but have fun. With the beautiful ocean so close, all I had to do was take off for a day and listen to the soothing, rhythmic sound of the waves crashing on the shore. Unfortunately, as much as I loved the ocean, I rarely took advantage of Santa Cruz’s natural, scenic beauty. I spent most of my time in class and studying.

  I had three roommates my junior year, two of whom were also named Jennifer. I went by Jen; the other two were Jenny and Jennifer. Our fourth roommate was Lisa. I rarely saw my roommates, other than Jenny. She was in my environmental studies policy and planning program, and we ended up taking quite a few classes together. Jennifer was a biology major who had horses in Los Gatos. She drove between Santa Cruz and Los Gatos frequently during the week and stayed with her horses on the weekends. I don’t remember what Lisa studied or where she came from; I never had more than two or three conversations with her during the entire year I lived in that apartment.

  I set up my altar, participated in the local SGI Buddhist group in Santa Cruz, and chanted softly in my room, but there must have been an underlying sadness inside me, because I felt mentally trapped in my dark little room, and ultimately I gave in to what later became a habit of fleeing challenging or uncomfortable circumstances.

  One fall evening I was alone in my room, listening to the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir singing Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. I had the candles on my altar lit and the lights turned off. My room was dark except for the shadows flickering against the walls from the candlelight. Weir’s voice screamed Dylan’s lyrics into the darkness: ‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the joker to the thief. ‘There’s too much confusion. I can’t get no relief.’

  It was exactly how I felt at the time. I had to get out of there. I had to get out of my tiny, apartment bedroom and my confused state of mind. Emotionally I felt boxed in and isolated from everyone I knew, both mentally and physically. I couldn’t explain how I felt to anyone, not even my best friend, Rose. I didn’t even know why I felt that way. I never thought about why.

  Weir’s screaming continued: ‘No reason to get excited,’ the thief, he kindly spoke. ‘There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.’

  The next morning I woke up, pulled my big hiking backpack out of my closet, and started shoving clothes into it. I didn’t pack much—a few pairs of pants, socks, shirts, sweatshirts, and my purple sleeping bag. My roommates weren’t around, so there was no one to tell that I was leaving. I put my backpack in the backseat of my car and began driving toward Nevada. When I left my apartment and my roommates, my family and friends, I wasn’t thinking about anyone else’s life but my own.

  I drove through Auburn and slept in my car that night at a truck stop along Interstate 80 somewhere in Nevada. It was already dark when I pulled into a restaurant parking lot filled with big semis and smaller cars whose occupants were inside, eating dinner. The street lamps around the parking lot gave me enough light to see what I was doing as I pulled down the backseat of my VW Fox so I could lie down. I felt very small, very alone, and very scared as I crawled into my sleeping bag that night. In the morning, I woke up and kept driving.

  One of the things I took with me when I left was a book on Buddhism called Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth and Death: A Buddhist View of Life, by Daisaku Ikeda. I found solace in this book as I made my way to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I sat in the car with the window rolled down at rest stops, alternating between reading passages of text and gazing glassy-eyed out the front windshield, staring at soft blue sky, neatly manicured grass, and faded brown picnic tables.

  This book covers Buddhist concepts in quite a bit of detail, and I was especially interested in reading the parts about life and death. In particular, I wanted to know what Buddhism said about suicide; I couldn’t decide whether or not I should kill myself. In the book, Daisaku Ikeda discusses the Buddhist view of the eternity of life. Rather than seeing birth as the beginning of life and death as the ending, Buddhism views alternating periods of birth and death as part of the larger cycle of life itself, much like sleeping and wakefulness. Just as sleep prepares us for the next day, death prepares us for the next life.

  Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth and Death describes life as waves upon the great ocean. The life of the universe is like the expansive, endless ocean, and the ocean is continuously breaking in waves upon the sand. Each individual life is a part of the universe, much like each individual wave is part of the ocean. The birth of a new life can be compared to a wave forming and cresting on the ocean, while death is simply the wave merging back into the boundless depth of the sea, or the life of the universe, until we are born again as another life, or a wave that ultimately crashes upon the sand and washes back out to sea. I found this description to be a much more pleasant and reassuring way of looking at life. The idea that a person’s birth and death are both part of the greater life of the universe was both meaningful and profound to me, and I was reassured when I read that I was part of the eternal life of the universe yet was also an individual with my own unique existence. I also read about how my own life and the lives of other people are all closely interconnected, but at that time in my life I didn’t feel connected to anyone. I didn't feel connected to my mom or dad, I didn't feel connected to my roommates or to my best friend. I couldn't talk to anyone about how I felt and didn't know why. I felt as if ending my life was the only way to deal with my suffering, although I wasn’t aware of what was causing it.

  I drove to Wyoming not only because it was far away, but also because I knew the route through Nevada and Utah. We used to take family vacations to my grandparents’ house in Thermopolis every other summer, and it’s pretty much Interstate 80 the whole way. I didn’t end up in Thermopolis but drove to Jackson Hole instead, although I don’t remember exactly why. I bought a blue polar fleece in a local ski shop, since the nights were getting colder and I was now at a much higher altitude than I was in Santa Cruz. I drove a short distance out of town and parked my car along the side of the highway. I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I was going to do, but I ended up hauling my backpack out of the Fox and hiking a few hundred yards up the side of the mountain. My feet crunched softly on the forest floor, and there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. The mountains were sparsely populated with trees and bushes, and I wondered how people used to live off the land centuries ago, hunting animals in the forest and using plants for medicines.

  I sat down and pulled on my blue fleece. I took a few things out of my backpack and arranged them around me on the ground. It was still light out when I crawled into my purple sleeping bag I looked at the woods surrounding me and wondered if there were bears. The air was fresh and clear but cold, and the mountains to my left rose up out of the canyon, reaching high above me like jagged teeth. The highway below me was silent. I looked down, but I couldn’t see my car from where I was sitting. The forest was completely and utterly quiet. I heard not so much as a bird singing. I thought briefly of going deeper into the forest to live there for as long