Well, my birthday is coming up. On April 24th I’ll be 35 years old! Ouch! So old! haha. I can hardly believe that it will be 20 years since I’ve been 15 years old! 20 years since I first went crazy. 20 years of getting to know schizophrenia. How did I get to be so old? I still act like a kid and still feel like a kid in many ways. I still remember those first days of illness. It seems like time has stood still in many ways, like I’m still that 15-year-old sitting on the cold cement leaning against the brick wall of my high school watching the sun come up and not really being aware of what time it was or where I should really be. I remember some sense of unreality, like the world was opening up to me in some special, weird way. It was weird, the illness just seeped into me and into my life. I didn’t suddenly become schizophrenic one day. Maybe I was really always schizophrenic. Was it inevitable? Was I put on this path during some malfunction in my mother’s womb? How did I get to be this way? I often wonder if there was anything I could have done differently to prevent this. Maybe if I hadn’t gone on that crash diet or maybe if I hadn’t gotten chicken pox so late in life. What if I hadn’t been fat while growing up? Would that have tipped the scale to the other side? The side where I turn 15 and 16 and 17 and nothing goes wrong and I don’t go insane? I’d almost like to know that from the moment of conception I was put on this path and that there was nothing that I did to make things worse. I don’t want to go around guilty and feeling like I caused this all myself. Like, what if I accidentally did one thing wrong and I ended up like this because of it?!? Damn that would suck!

Anyway, I’m turning 35. Birthdays are always good for pondering your existence and wondering about life in general. I’d write more, but I need coffee instead. I need to get some before I completely collapse here. Here’s to 20 years of schizophrenia! Maybe the next 20 years I’ll deal with it all a little more gracefully!