I'm not good at titles, okay?
Pittsburgh was an absolute shit show. My fiance grew a goatee while he was away and I took one look at him and wanted to go home. But, just like with everything else, I kept this to myself. My mom and stepdad unloaded my things and headed back. I was out on my "own" for the first time. For the purpose of the story, we will call my fiance Rat. It'll make things easier and believe me, he'll live up to the moniker.
Anyway, Rat was in school full time, and had a job working in a hotel restaurant. He was out of the apartment a lot, so I had a lot of time on my own to deteriorate. I wandered from room to room, seeing signs in the woodwork and shadow people in the windows. I washed laundry in the tub and would wind up arguing with it, the voices emanating from the folds of wet clothes. I would light a cigarette and then forget to move until it burned down to my fingers and the heat woke me out of my catatonia. I would try to drown out the voices with music, but the hidden messages in the songs would drive me to tears. I was well and truly fucked and I knew it.
There were hallucinations and delusions that stood out. The time Rat had a friend over and I locked myself in the bedroom and there were glowing blue penises all up the walls and on the ceiling. Or the local newscaster speaking directly to me, telling me how the signs I was seeing were important, if I could only crack the code. Or the time the voices demanded I throw up my dinner. But mostly it was just a bunch of noise and nonsense. The worst thing was never the hallucinations, or even the delusions. It was how my thoughts didn't quite match up, I couldn't think. Like a circle track with a link missing, my thoughts just couldn't complete themselves.
One evening I was sobbing uncontrollably. I'm not sure what in particular set me off, but let's be honest, I had plenty to cry about. This was probably about 5 or 6 months into being in Pittsburgh. Rat started yelling at me. "Why are you crying?" I don't know how many times he asked, but I was sobbing so hard I couldn't have answered him even if I wanted to. Suddenly I was prone on the floor with his hands around my neck. "WHY ARE YOU CRYING?" I remember my entire body feeling like pins and needles. Then he was up and out of the room.
By this point Rat was blowing off classes. A few months later his father informed him he wouldn't be paying his tuition any longer, so we made plans to move back home. I was secretly relieved to be going. Surely something would change.
The night we arrived home friends were waiting for us. We partied, as was the custom. I completely lost touch with reality, and by the time my parents arrived the next day to help us unpack, there was no hiding the fact that I was absolutely off my head. My mother drove me to the ER and begged me to sign myself in. A nurse tried to speak with me, but I couldn't hear her. They begged Rat to tell them what I'd taken, but he wouldn't. One of his friends told the doctors that he thought I'd taken some acid (I had). A few hours passed and I could hear people talking to me again. I signed myself into a 72 hour voluntary hold. They found a bed for me at a hospital and off I went.
They put me on antipsychotics the next day, and things started to even out. I spoke with the psychiatrist daily, told him my whole story as best as I could at the time. That's when I got my diagnosis, paranoid schizophrenia. I hear they don't type any longer, it's just schizophrenia or it isn't. But this was something like 25 years ago, so there you go. Anyway, dear reader, that's the story of how I got my diagnosis.
