I love to write. Stories, they’re so human. They expose all the rage, love, lust, and beauty of our everyday lives. Of course, when you pick up a book, you don’t have to live it. I wrote a story in my mind, but it’s not a fake one. This part, the part I expose, is real. Even when I fear I am losing my mind.

When I was six months old, conversations tumbled out of me before I even knew I had said them. I was wondering what I was and where I was. I was in curious awe of everything. It was like I was psychic or something. Thoughts just came out of nowhere, knowledge of things. I was so excited that I must have soaked everything up….I could have swallowed the world. And then there was this space, this loneliness.

I felt alone in the world. I felt so oddly different than other kids. In the second grade I talked about maturity to my classmates. I was slower and more meticulous, I struggled at math and perfecting my coloring. I never could fit in, though I knew I could if I wasn’t so shy.  One minute I was acting like an adult, and the next I was suddenly playful and young like a kid should be. I couldn’t figure out which one I was.

Something sped me up while slowing me down. It was my drive, my eagerness to learn, and the smallness of who I was. I couldn’t let go. What was I holding onto? What was so important about describing everything to myself, and in detail? What was so important about memorizing events and days, and playing in the sunshine? What was so important about imagining things, and what was so wrong with being alone in this magical world?

I managed to find friends; they were always the outcasts (like me). Of course it wasn’t always that way. For a time I was like the mother, and I would sit and tell adventure stories to other kids. They were stories that came from the imaginary world inside my brain. Then I became a tom-boy, and I spent all my time outdoors hiking and exploring forests. I did this on instinct, but I also have a rare muscle condition-CMT. CMT is when the myelin around your nerves wears thin, causing your muscles to be weaker than most people. For some reason, I got it a lot less bad than most people.

Among my friends were stories. I’d see a picture- and the picture would become a place. The place would become a scene from a movie. The movie would become an urge, a place to escape to where I didn’t feel so alone. It would be a place where I wasn’t depressed.  You can only escape for so long.

My parents bought me a porcelain doll for my eighth birthday. I named her Christina. Christina sat in my room with all my other toys. I loved my dollies.  It’s hard to imagine a girl who loved dollies also loved playing with cars and power rangers. Thinking back to when I was little, I was always someone different and someplace new. Sometimes I acted like a tom-boy and sometimes I was just a young girl.

 I had very epic dreams, and a few reoccurring nightmares. The nightmares consisted of me being driven in the car with my dad or mom, and suddenly my dad or mom vanished. I was driving the car and the steering wheel had a life of its own. Those dreams scared me a lot. When I was little- my freedom was never-ending, but the real world was nowhere near mine. I was young, and I wasn’t independent. I wanted to stay a child, but I also wanted to control my life.

That same year I turned eight, my mom had become increasingly paranoid. She had false memories, false beliefs, and wasn’t herself at all. I was kind of angry at her for abandoning me. I wondered why she suddenly acted like she didn’t know me or couldn’t talk to me. She was taking Prozac.

 My dad told me she was overdosing, but I’m not sure if that’s fact or fiction. I know she was taking Prozac, and I found out when I was seventeen that she had tried to kill herself. For my entire life until then, I never knew. I always thought that she had run away to a bus station, like my dad had said.

I also had this scary impression that she had electroconvulsive therapy. I don’t know if she did or not. These questions can only fuel one’s paranoia. These lies can only fuel one’s fear of one’s family. How could this perfectly normal mom suddenly turn into a maniac? What had changed so abruptly? Was it my fault? Whose idea was it for her to take Prozac in the first place?

My mom has false memories; do I have them as well? When I was seventeen I was taken to an adolescent psych ward. One day I was taken aside for a meeting with my councilor- who told me that schizophrenia meant that I will have false memories. Maybe that’s why I always try to remember everything, because if I didn’t—How would I be able to write this right now? Without our memories, how can we tell fact from fiction? I was born in love with a world that didn’t seem to grasp my concept of it.

False memories….I don’t think I have false memories. But some things happened when I was experiencing my “crisis” that would scare a normal person too. It was as if my memories were always under attack, as if…as if they didn’t want me to remember. Why? What was there left to forget? Sometimes I wonder, if it was God they wanted me to forget. I didn’t forget about God, I just wish he talked to me once in awhile. Why would anyone try to make you responsible for something you hadn’t done?

I was born on Friday the 13, 1989.  You could say I’ve had my stroke of bad luck in life. That doesn’t mean I’m not fighting to reverse that damage and pay my karmic debts. There is mystery, for sure, in the beautiful madness of it all and of my mother. Today, she is living in a fantasy world. In some ways, it’s almost comical. Her beliefs are random. Yet here, in WV, you cannot hospitalize someone unless they are dangerous. Well, there is a reason for everything. Maybe if I put my faith in God this will all work out.

There is that thin line…that thin line between this world and the next. It’s that place in between spaces where you lose yourself, and wonder if you’ll ever make it back. I’ve managed to survive through all this hell. Catch me when I fall. I was there through it all. There I am, and I am seeing it you see. We must be saved, before the calling of eternity. Today, everything fell apart. Today I lost my mind and decided that I should have saved my soul instead.

Imagination-land it what I called it: It was my secret place where anything you wanted came true. I was so fascinated by art, science, music. I listened as my dad played guitar for hours on end. It was an adventure. I was just too amazed. There was so much love. But then I was forced to learn that outside my happy little world, things were just so different. My mother was my shelter, my advocate, the one I looked up to for everything and I lost her at eight. She came back…and then she was gone like a magical star. She was the spark that never really died…

She used to say, “It only takes a spark to get a fire going.” Well my mother will always be that spark. She’s still my inspiration….even when she doesn’t know exactly how important she’s been to me. It’s hard to fill that vacancy, when the spark goes out and you’re feeling blindly through the dark for an answer to why, why can’t I just help her. Why is she so upset and why doesn’t she make any sense? Why can’t she just wake up from her reverie and be there for me?