My downstairs neighbor is an older woman with a grown son who has schizophrenia (at least). He does not as far as I can tell live here, but he often visits and rambles around the neighborhood smoking cheap cigarettes. Sometimes he asks me to drive him to the Mercedes dealership to pick up the car he has just ordered, but I rarely hear him speak. She works multiple jobs. They check in with each other, sometimes, through a sketchbook in the stairwell, for drawing seems to be a mutual interest. Last night when I came home:
Back in a bit. Went to look for you.
He is schizophrenic. He spends a lot of time on the front patio sketching, sometimes he's quite good, sometimes it's clear his heart isn't in it. That day he was struggling with potent inner demons and using the sketchpad to prop up his will. I believe he failed, so he disappeared out into the night with his shitty cigarettes and trench coat. She came home from her second job only to find the above on the sketchpad they use to communicate. She left the note in the corner in case he circled back, and went out to look for him instead of relaxing in her room, eating dinner, watching tv. My first cousin is schizophrenic, and his parents made constant sacrifices in order to be able to afford the drugs that kept him in a state where he could interact with us and have fun at family reunions. In the past, without drugs, he had attacked his mother and brother. It is eminently clear from her living situation that my neighbor cannot afford drugs for her son. Instead she uses a sketchpad and cheap cigs and it doesn't always work.
There's obviously no way to get what wasn't said in this instance but I'll try to give an impression of the emotional state from a bipolar II and anxiaty perspective. Imagine yourself standing in chest high water and being hit by a breaking wave. You're knocked off of your feet and are being whirled around by a chaos of microcurrents. All you see is sand kicked up by the wave, it's unclear where up and down is yet as your inner ear is as chaotic as the water around you. You hit the bottom a few times but you lose it's direction along with contact. You are probably in no danger, you've been hit by waves before with similar results. But you don't feel safe at the moment, your sensory input makes is mostly noise and your instincts tell you to go for air right now, even tbough you have plenty, but you don't know where to go. You're not exactly out of control of the situation but you're most certainly not in control either. Knowing that helps you little. In the middke if this you realize that your mom is worried about you. You were going to leave her a note about a dozen waves ago but the waves were calm for a while and you were just enjoying the sun and the breeze and you didn't get around to it. You could wait for another lull but what are the chances of that happening when you need it. With luck you will catch a breath without inhaling water before the nezt one hits. The waves always get bigger, or so it seems. You whip out your whiteboard and underwater marker. You're holding it remarkably steady for being justled around in murky water, this is good, at least something is going right today. And then you realize you mumble when you're trying to figure out how to clearly put down your murky and tumbling thoughts. After some mouthfulls of water and some panicked flailing you change your plan of attack, as much as it is possible to formulate a plan in your current state. Draw your situation... .Well, that certainly is appropriately chaotic. Whatever it is. Another person being jostled around by a wave might be able to get the gist, if not the specifics, of it. You think. Squinting at the picture you're not entirely sure what, if anything, you were thinking. Maybe just write down exactly what you are thinking, no composatory mumbling -- no drowning sensation. You proceed with that. A few disorienting headbumps later you finish blinking out the sand that snuck into your eyes halfway through writing and read it over. It vaguely resembles the kind of thing a person would write while their head is playing bongo witb the ocean floor. No one could possibly understand what this garbage means. It makes no sense even to yourself and you know what yiu were trying to say. Why does it always go this way? What are you doing wrong? Why can't you even do something as simple as this? I'm sorry if this didn't make any sense.