"95"

This is my 95th article on Vocal.

This year is my 4th year as having The Schizophrenic Mom as a business.

This year will be the 7th year of motherhood! <3 A dream that I am oh, so very grateful that I'm able to live!

This year marks the beginning of the second year of owning my own home.

This year is the 5th year of having a truly amazing best friend who hasn't fled my life... thankfully! Shh... no one tell her that that is an option... haha

This year is the year that I turn 30 as I was born in '95! *grins with excitement*

This year has, unfortunately, had more changes and grief for my family (not just me and my kiddos, but our extended family too) so far than all of last year put together... and we just barely completed the first 3 months of this year, so I am a little nervous of how the rest of the year will go...

That being said, this year has also been the most successful at my blog that I have had since I started my business! I am really hoping that once I finish dealing with some bigger changes and issues in my life, that I will be able to expand my business.

This year I got another major health diagnosis that explains so much for me, but has left me reeling in between moments of joy "ah ha! That makes everything look so much different and makes so many things make SO much more sense!"; moments of anger "You mean that this whole time I could have been accommodated better and I wasn't simply being difficult?!"; moments of grief "You mean that this is just who I am and I will likely never be able to fix certain things because some things you can't just change?"; and moments of fear "How can this be used as a weapon against me in the same way that other things have been used against me?"

I feel intense anger and sadness at the diagnosis because now that I know... that the professionals should have seen it when I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but no one looked into it as an option. It shares many traits with symptoms of schizophrenia - and there is no doubt that I have schizophrenia - so part of me wants to forgive the professionals for not seeing it sooner while another part of me is just angry that when I asked that I was just given platitudes and reasons that I didn't even need to look into it because "isn't having schizophrenia enough for you?"

I'm not quite ready to share what my new diagnosis' are, so instead I will share about my own struggles with schizophrenia as it pertains to the definitions provided by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Symptoms of schizophrenia are divided into three main categories: psychotic, cognitive, and negative.

Inside the psychotic category there are thought disorders, hallucinations, and delusions. When I was diagnosed, I was told that I had all three of these symptoms... only I wasn't ready to share more about some things that had happened to me.

• Turns out that being scared of men in uniforms isn't delusional and instead is actually a symptom of PTSD as well as being completely understandable when I finally felt safe enough to explain the why I was terrified of them. You see, a man in a uniform raped me when I was a teenager and I just let everyone else come to their own conclusions because I was so ashamed and thought that I was going to be in trouble for it. I have some other strong beliefs that could be described as delusional, but religious matters are not supposed to be considered delusional even if some people think they are irrational. I have been told that my feelings of danger were paranoia and delusional thinking, but it turns out that if I am able to explain the why regarding how I came up with that thought process... well... it is no longer a delusional thought pattern or major paranoia. It might still need therapy to address, but it is not "delusional thinking".
• Turns out that hallucinations are not "normal" and the fact that I was so open about them was highly concerning. For me, hallucinations have been a part of my life since I was really little. As long as my stress level stays down, the hallucinations aren't upsetting to me. That recently changed end of February when the "bad hallucinations" and I came to an understanding and I realized that even "bad" has its own place in my life. It has recently changed again, but some things that were really traumatic happened so I expect this to simply be a temporary issue: I haven't had any of my hallucinations for over a week now.
• As for thought disorders, I do have difficulty collecting my thoughts and organizing them coherently. Only with schizophrenia it is supposed to be across the board, but I can organize my thoughts just fine in writing a majority of the time (and everyone can struggle occasionally) when I am not trying to hide something out of fear or shame. I do stop talking in the middle of a thought, jump from topic to topic as well as occasionally stop speaking entirely for a while, however, those are explained a bit better with my newest 2 diagnosis' than with schizophrenia. I will admit that there is quite a bit of overlap and the main reason I disagree that I have trouble with this in regards to my schizophrenia diagnosis specifically is that it is typically an illogical thought process and I do not have trouble with logical thinking! *smile* As for making up words? I do enjoy the thing-a-ma-bob and thing-a-ma-gig and the occasional word like "Adoraland" but it isn't a major issue in my life.

Inside the cognitive category are problems with attention, memory, and concentration. I do struggle with learning new things that I need to apply to my life, and some concepts are harder for me to learn. And following conversations has always been hard for me, but explaining why is where I start having difficulty.

• Almost everyone I know would agree that I don't have any trouble with remembering things, instead I have trouble figuring out what is relevant to what I am being asked to remember - and I need a cue to pull up a memory. For example, I might not go directly to the appointment that a receptionist scheduled with me yesterday because I am too distracted by the memory of the phone clicking down before she called my name, the smell of her shampoo drifting towards me as she flicked her hair over her shoulder, the sunlight making her black hair appear as if it had reddish streaks in it, the texture of the floor under my feet, the sounds of other people talking, the man in a dark green plaid jacket and black jeans with steel-toed boots who walked past me and all of his facial features, etc.. With everything that I can pull up in each moment of my existence, it is exhausting trying to find the relevant information to the question - especially when times and dates are not a strength of mine. But if you give me a cue and give me parameters to narrow down what you are looking for, then I can pull up the exact information that you are looking for as long as I have enough energy to finish the task. If I don't have the energy or a cue or parameters, then no... I can't remember the information that either I am looking for or those around me are looking for as that is simply a needle in the haystack I call my brain!
• Concentration has been an issue for me for a long time and it has only been recently that I have started discovering what helps and what makes it worse. I have great concentration some of the time, but it has been difficult trying to control it. It's an executive functioning problem that I have had for as long as I can remember... but it started showing up as potentially problematic in high school: I could sit down and do hundreds of assignments in a matter of a few hours, but I wouldn't be able to concentrate on the day's assignments when they came up as scheduled. That has not improved (without the help of some new diagnosis')!
• Attention is like concentration only I can control it... to a point. It takes an immense amount of energy to focus it. Otherwise, my attention is taking everything in which is fairly overwhelming on a regular basis.

Negative symptoms would include loss of interest or enjoyment in activities, lack of emotional responses, withdrawing from social life, loss of motivation, and difficulties in normal functioning.

• Loss of interest or enjoyment in activities is something that I struggle with depending on what all is going on - or at least that has been something I thought that I struggled with only now I can say that I still have the interest in the activity, but I don't have the energy to spend on it or the energy to figure out what all needs to be done to decrease my overwhelm in order to actually be able to enjoy an activity. It is one of the best things that my mom helps me figure out on a regular basis! *smile*
• Lack of emotional responses is something that I do have to admit I struggle with - despite personally disagreeing. I mean, I personally believe that I have plenty emotions (I'd prefer less of them actually...) and get intense emotions, but I don't feel them in the moment usually. It takes time for me to be able to process things and there is a delay. Sometimes this doesn't happen, but ... it often does. The main reason that I agree with it is that I have often been asked if I was actually happy about something. I get comments on a regular basis that no one is quite certain of what I am thinking or feeling as well as coming across as "cold." Those who know me well have made the observations that while once you get to know me, I am usually warm and welcoming, but that warmness takes time for me to build with new people. It also is dependent on my stress levels as when stress levels increase too high, my emotional reactions typically decrease.
• Withdrawing from social life is something that I do whenever I start getting overwhelmed. Part of the issue is that I am more introverted than extroverted and part of the issue is that I miss social cues or don't understand what I am meant to do in social situations which is explained better through one of the new diagnosis'. Social situations are stressful and so increase other symptoms while also draining me. That being said, with the people that I feel safe around and who I trust, I am a bit more extroverted than most people get to observe! *smile*
• Loss of motivation is something that I regularly struggle with and have been working for years on how to fix that as an issue. One of the treatments that I started in October of last year for one of my newer diagnosis' has actually been quite helpful overall in this area, but it is still a struggle. I just realized that it has been 6 months on this new treatment and that it has been really helpful - even though I still have mixed feelings about the diagnosis and the treatment...
• Normal functioning is often difficult (if not impossible) for me to achieve with everything that I have to deal with in my life, so I would have to agree with this being a major issue and I can't narrow it down to the fault of a specific diagnosis as ... well... what truly is normal functioning anyway? *wink*

Please leave me a comment if you have any questions about my symptoms with schizophrenia or how I deal with things because I am always looking to help with understanding and to (hopefully!) decrease the stigma associated with schizophrenia.

I hope to be comfortable enough to share my newest diagnosis' with my readers later this year, but for now, I would just like to take a moment to share how grateful I am for those who have been reading my posts. In 2024, I had about 405 reads for the entire year (which was mind-boggling to me!) - and in the first quarter of 2025, I somehow had just over 520 reads!

Thank you all so much for sharing and for reading my stories. I hope that by sharing my stories I am able provide insight into things that others may not have considered and aid in helping others not feel alone in their own journeys. It is thanks to you, my readers, that I am able to keep my dream alive to one day be able to support my little family by doing what I love to do: writing about things that are important to me. *smile*