Sometimes Beautiful

 

Sometimes

I like to run my fingers over

The scars on my legs

And the folds of fat on my back

Because, in so doing, I claim them

As mine

And as beautiful

(I’m scared of

All the things

I could’ve been)

13th Quitversary: Schizoaffective and Smoke-Free

 

I’m schizoaffective, making me a likely smoker, but I quit smoking 13 years ago on March 11, 2012. Let me share with you how this schizoaffective quit the habit.

Looking back on it now, I’m particularly proud of this achievement because it’s something I did completely on my own. My Great Aunt Elsie was a big help, though, because she had quit smoking many years before, and she was my biggest cheerleader. I’m wearing a ring from her right now as I write this. (It’s not the Official Smoke-Free Ring or the Unofficial Smoke-Free Ring, both of which she gave me, because they don’t fit anymore. It is the Ultimate Aunt Elsie Ring with stones of many colors, though, so that counts for a lot!)

Another big cheerleader was my boss at the church office where I worked. She had quit smoking, but she had to go on oxygen anyway. She quit when she was 48. I quit when I was 32. She said she was my future if I didn’t quit. I watched lots of Center for Disease Control (CDC) videos about why people should quit smoking. I also drank lots of Cherry Coke and ate lots of cherry mentholated cough drops in the process. So, I wasn’t really concerned about weight gain. In fact, the best advice I can give anyone who wants to quit smoking is this: don’t worry about gaining weight. What is your priority–to be skinny in your coffin?

Another soother that helped was music. Music helps everything, and it helped me quit smoking. Especially the album Biophilia by Bjork, but also songs by folk singer/songwriter Laura Veirs, riot grrrl queen Kathleen Hanna’s project Le Tigre, and, of course, Tori Amos’ song “Spark” with the lyrics, “She’s addicted to nicotine patches…” I used nicotine patches to quit so the song resonated for me. I also used a book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Quitting Smoking by Lowell Kleinman. M.D., and Deborah Messina-Kleinman, M.P.H.

Seriously, if I can quit smoking, anyone can! I was so addicted to nicotine. I smoked two packs a day at my peak. And let me tell you something: I coped with my auditory hallucinations (or voices) by chain smoking. Smoking was a coping mechanism for everything. Got some bad news? Light a cigarette. Waiting for a phone call? Light a cigarette. Got the phone call? Light a cigarette. Feeling happy? Light a cigarette. And on and on. Writing this is actually making me want my coping mechanism back, but I know I wouldn’t like it anymore. I can’t stand the smell of second-hand smoke now!

I still heard voices for almost 10 years after I quit smoking. I switched to drinking decaf coffee for a while, and then to drinking ice cold water and, if I was at home (or had my noise cancelling headphones handy), listening to relaxing music, like that by my girl Tori Amos or Brian Eno, or watching a relaxing movie. My favorites included a chilled out, intimate Tori Amos concert and the Disney/Pixar film Brave. Maybe sometimes I just need a feisty redheaded lass to help me get grounded--and both Tori and Merida have red hair. It remained a must to take some of my as-needed antianxiety medication to help me calm down. At any rate, a medication change of my mood stabilizer a few years ago stopped the voices for good. For some reason my mood stabilizer works for that but my antipsychotic doesn’t as much.

Three-and-a-half years after I quit, my husband, Tom, bought me a leather Pandora charm bracelet from which dangled a silver number four for my fourth anniversary smoke-free. That evolved into a rose gold bracelet with lots of charms on it. I wear it every day I go out. (Some days I never leave the condo we live in, but that’s another story.) As of this writing, we’re going to Pandora next weekend to get another charm for my rose gold Smoke-Free Bracelet. Each charm on it marks another year since I quit smoking. I called it my Quitting Smoking Bracelet for years after I quit, and a year or so ago I finally started calling it my Smoke-Free Bracelet. Just like I did with the rings from Aunt Elsie. Because I’m not quitting. I quit years ago, now. I am Smoke-Free.

A Schizoaffective's Quest to Find Frida Kahlo

My husband Tom and I went to see a play about the legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. I want to discuss how the play affected me as someone with a chronic illness and as someone with a disability.

When Kahlo was 19, she suffered a terrible accident while riding a bus. A handrail pierced through her hip, fracturing her pelvis and spine. She had to stay in a hospital for several weeks, wore a full body cast, and was prescribed several months of bed rest. She started painting to ease the mental and physical pain. (fridakahlo.org) Her most famous works are self-portraits (in fact, the play is called Frida: A Self Portrait) that often depict her feeling broken. “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint,” she said.

I was 19 when I had my first psychotic break with reality, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, later to be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. My break happened while I was a student at The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After the episode I transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) both to be closer to home and because it was a better fit for me artistically and academically. I received a merit scholarship to SAIC. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone to SAIC right out of high school instead of RISD. Would I have had a psychotic break? At any rate, I was a Girl, Interrupted (as author Susanna Kaysen so aptly named her best-selling memoir of madness in 1993). My life changed drastically from what I thought it would be. Frida Kahlo was a girl interrupted, too.

A lot of broken people find solace in Frida Kahlo. Vanessa Severo, the solo actress in the one-woman play she wrote certainly does. “I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you,” Severo said in the play, performed at The Writers Theatre in Glencoe, a suburb north of Chicago. Severo admitted toward the end of the play that she’d recently found out this quote may not actually be Kahlo’s.

She said earlier in the play that the quote compelled her to get on a plane and fly to Mexico City to Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, or La Casa Azul. That’s how she began her quest to find Frida Kahlo. And I think I may have begun my own quest to find Frida Kahlo with Frida: A Self Portrait.

Can a Person with Schizoaffective Disorder Have a Successful Marriage?

 

I am writing this on the weekend of the 18^th anniversary of meeting my husband Tom in person. I say “in person” because we met online, as so many in our generation (the tail end of Generation X) and in later generations do.

I could have just said it was our first date, but the way we met online is so humorous. We discovered each other on a social networking site called MySpace. It was one of the fledgling social networking sites that launched before Facebook. I had had my MySpace page locked (no one could see it besides my friends) but randomly decided to unlock it. That was right when Tom decided to search the site for photographers, and I had just earned my master’s degree in photography from Columbia College Chicago. My page was covered with banners from the Rape,Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) and other mental health-related organizations. But Tom stumbled upon my page and noticed we liked the same music. Then he sent me a characteristically to-the-point message asking if I had ever been raped (I answered no). And, then, he asked if I had a mental illness and I said I had bipolar disorder, shorthand for my schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. When I first meet people, I tend to say I have bipolar disorder instead of going into the more specific diagnosis because I feel people are more initially threatened by the “schizo” aspect of things.

So, our first date arrived on February 1, 2007. We met at a sushi restaurant in between the Chicago suburbs where we both lived. I liked that he lived so close. He had sent me a picture. He never uses pictures of himself on social media, he often uses drawings he’s made. I had my profile picture that he had already seen.  I had just read A Return to Modesty by the neo-conservative author Wendy Shalit. It’s a book that convinced me to not jump into bed with any guy I had just met. Moreover, it inspired me to save myself for a guy who respected me and who just quite simply made me feel good–not just sexually, but emotionally, although the two are related, for me anyway. I had not been on a date with anyone in over a year before I met Tom. Even before meeting him, I thought very highly of him.

On our second or third date, Tom came to the house where I lived with my parents. What really impressed me was that our cat George liked him so much he jumped right up on his shoulders! In fact, that sealed the deal for me.

What’s our secret? Well, sometimes my great Great Aunt Elsie would grab Tom by the neck in a German grandma’s vice grip, pull him down to her level, and ask him, “Do you still love her?” and Tom would say, “Yes, Aunt Elsie, of course, I still love her.” She would respond, “Good. Because she takes a lot of patience! This I know!” So Tom and I decided our secret is patience. I have that engraved on the inside of my 10th wedding anniversary band (which Tom actually gave me at our 6th anniversary. He’s always early with presents.)

Tom and I celebrate both Valentine’s Day and our first-date anniversaries together, since they’re so close to each other. This year, it was hectic because we’re still moving into our new condo, but we are going to see a play about the iconic artist Frida Kahlo for Valentine’s Day. We trust each other, we respect each other, and of course we love each other. As Tori Amos once sang, “The sexiest thing is trust.”