15 Things You May or May Not Know About Me

I'm doing things a little bit differently today and I am going to tell you some fun facts about myself that you may or may not know.

1. I am currently on 6 different medications. I have morning, afternoon and night meds and I often feel like an old person with my little pill box.

2. I donate plasma and platelets once a month because I believe it is a simple way to give back to the community and to help save lives. I also am a registered organ donor.

3. I play piano. In the past, I've played clarinet, acoustic guitar, recorder, harmonica, harp and french horn. Ever since I was little, I have always loved music.

4. My Bible is literally falling apart because I love it so much. It's over 10 years old and it's been with me throughout many hospitalizations and it's carried me through a lot of pain and hard times. Everybody says I should get a new one, but I refuse because this Bible is like a friend to me.

5. You may think I'm a little kid with these art supplies, but I still love to color and draw. It helps relieve my stress and express myself. It also reminds me of the good times I had as a child....makes me feel like a kid again.

6. I love to read books. I read 14 books in May alone. If I am interested in something, I will most likely read about it. If I had a choice, I would live in a library.

7. When I was little, I used to make jewelry out of small beads and sell them at the boardwalk. Funny thing is that I have never really liked wearing jewelry. One summer I made over $1000 in one week at the beach. I think that beading helped me to cope with a lot of the challenges I faced. I love doing things that are repetitive because they are soothing to me.

8. Through the Charity Miles app, I've walked and ran over 470 miles since May 3rd. I've raised over $100 for different charities. I've fed over 250 people!

9. Maybe it's because I grew up poor and was even homeless at one point, but I love everything that I have. I use everything I own until it breaks or I can't use it anymore. I get the most "bang for my buck", as they say. For example, the last pair of sneakers I had lasted me a whole year and by the end, there were holes.

10. Music is my life, in case you didn't know. I can't live without music, literally. I go nuts. I am always listening to music. When I'm in my apartment, I listen to the radio. When I'm out and about, I'm in my own little world with my headphones blasting music. 

11. This may or may not surprise you, but I LOVE Gospel music. Sometimes I even dance to it when I'm alone (never in front of others). Gospel music has helped me be tough and get through a lot of things.

12. I absolutely love photography except I've never had a professional camera. The photos I take are from smartphone cameras. I love using simple technology to capture the beauty of this world that God has created. There is a lot of beauty in simplicity.

13. I consider myself an artist. My perceptual reasoning (visual) skills are in the 99th percentile and I try to use those skills in my daily life through my art.

14. Along with being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and PTSD, I have been given a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome twice this past year.

15. This list of things about me had to have a multiple of 5 things, because I love the number 5. I have an obsession with 5's. Everything that I do involves the number 5 somehow.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have.

Being and Doing

It makes sense now. It all makes sense.

That “it” is my survival. For many people, it hasn't made sense how I could survive many years of multiple traumatic experiences. But now, as I finished reading Surviving Survival by Laurence Gonzales, it makes sense.

He explained how many different people who have gone through traumatic experiences pick something that they can do, often something that has a repetitive pattern, such as knitting. By doing these activities, they activate an area in the brain that has to do with reward.

When I was going through multiple years of abuse and neglect, I chose to do many things that had repetitive patterns. Patterns have always been a strong point in my life. I do not function unless I have order or some sort of structure. For example, I have been on summer break for almost two weeks and I already have set up a sort of schedule for myself.

As a little child, I spent hours doing puzzles, trying to take my mind off of the traumatic experiences. And it worked. For a little while during the day, I forgot what was happening. I escaped into the world of pieces that needed to be put together. I felt an accomplishment when I finished the puzzles. In a way, as I put those puzzles together, I was hoping to piece together my life. I also escaped through music. Some of my earliest memories are of listening and singing to kid’s songs on my tape player. I spent many hours escaping through music. As I sang the songs, I forgot the abuse. I didn't think about what was happening. And years later, as I deal with the aftermath of my traumatic experiences, I still escape through music. I listen to music everywhere I go, because it helps me to stay in the present.

You see, music has patterns. There’s a verse, a chorus, a verse, chorus, etc. After my father left the house, I began to learn to read music and eventually taught myself how to play the clarinet and piano. As I tried to forget the abuse, almost being killed in a house fire and watching my mother be almost murdered in front of me, I found beauty and life in the patterns. I do not think I would be here if it weren't for music.

Last summer, I went through neuropsychological testing, which involved getting an IQ test. My score for the perceptual reasoning skills was in the 99^th percentile. The psychologist said I have a real gift. I see patterns in everything, which has helped me greatly in school. School has been my escape for most of my life. In his book, Gonzales explains that learning itself can help greatly with overcoming trauma.

During the great majority of my sophomore year in college, I spent it in deep depression. However, I went to classes and received straight A’s. During my second semester in sophomore year, I received 11 100’s on exams. My nickname became "robot." But when I attempted suicide in my junior year, everybody, including my professors, was shocked. 

To the outside world, I seemed like I was functioning well. People saw my grades and had no idea what I was hiding beneath the grades. They said that they had never seen  a student do so well in spite of such deep depression. But inside, my mind was in turmoil, being depressed nearly every day. I suspect that the reason that I did so well is that I was desperately trying to cope with what was going on in my life- the PTSD, the flashbacks, the depression- and so I threw myself into my work. I found it easy to memorize numbers and equations. I found comfort in physics, chemistry and biology because it had nothing to do with my trauma. I learned to deal with the pain in a positive manner, except that I did not let anyone in to the pain I was enduring.

Having my psychotic episodes this semester was very traumatic for me. I have flashbacks of many events in my life and now sometimes I have flashbacks of my psychosis. But what kept me going and what keeps me going is learning and having something to do. I always need to be occupied, whether it’s running, walking, going to the library, reading, listening to music, taking photography. I find my escape from the reality through doing these things. I find my escape from my flashbacks through these things.

I process by expressing myself, whether through music, writing or photography. Writing this blog helps me to process what is going on with my brain and my life. It helps me to process what has happened and what is going to happen. Not a day goes by that I am not scared that I am going to have another psychotic episode, but the further away it gets, the better I feel.

Sometimes, very rarely, I express myself through art and drawing. I do not draw usually at all, but I am very good at it because I pay a lot of attention to detail, something that comes naturally with good perceptual reasoning skills. I drew the following picture during my depression in college. It is supposed to represent my inner child. Inside her eyes, I imagine that her depth of her sadness lies. Her pain can be felt by looking into her eyes. You can see in her face the silence but the want to talk- the need for a voice. I believe I have been given my natural artistic abilities so that I can deal with all of the trauma I've been through. Without art, without music, without photography, without writing and poetry, I would not be able to cope. I would not be here.

I want to leave with a quote near the end of Surviving Survival because it beautifully illustrates what it means to live beyond trauma:

“We are, all of us, desperately here, desperately trying to be and do here; and if we are not in passionate pursuit of our doing and being, we’re missing the entire show.”

-Laurence Gonzales, Surviving Survival