How I got to 25.

How I got to 25
A description of where I am in my life, my points of view and their sources, and how I finally feel like an adult.
Some stories and details have been withheld due to the graphic nature of some of the stories and the details. If you have any questions for me, I am willing to attempt to answer them.

The year is 2013, and it is this year that I turned twenty-five. I don’t know where the time went, and many of my previous experiences feel like they were someone else’s. I feel as if I’ve already lived a lifetime, if not two, in my journey to arrive at the point where I am a quarter of a century old. My life has been busy and complex, and it seems that I’ve experienced vastly more things than a typical person would in a lifetime. I’ve always felt as if I was never a child - at least in the way a child has naivety and blissful ignorance about them, for at least part of their life. I don’t ever remember feeling that way.

My journey up to this point includes attempted suicides, mental illness, psychiatric hospitals, jail time, drug abuse, death, vast introspection, self-discovery, street-gained wisdom, observation and understanding of parts of the world and the people that live in such. I’ve lived without want, and with need. I’ve been from a point where money was never a concern, to a point where even every penny counts. I’ve been close to death and filled with life. My life has been full of unique life experiences that I often forget about, and all though they haven’t all been easy, I wouldn’t trade my life and experiences for anything.

As a child, I was strong, confident, and too smart for my own good. My home environment was nothing but secure and supportive, both parents supporting me and always treating me as an individual, not just a kid. My parents, both highly intelligent, always found ways to challenge my mind, such as completing complex tasks only having the pieces, but no, or very few, directions, and supporting my natural talents in creativity. I was a kid with her blonde hair never brushed, large plaid shirts, straight-leg jeans with holes in them, and the classic Chuck Taylor shoes. As a tomboy, I spent most of my elementary school years hanging out with boys and having fun doing absurdly cynical projects for elementary school assignments. Civil War project? I did a report on Andersonville. Alternative energy paper? I wrote it on Chernobyl. From then on, the projects that I actually did were all of such a candor as the early ones were. As an example of that idea, here are a few stories in which my confidence in myself was substantial, before I started middle school.

The Hitler Incident

I believe I was in the third or fourth grade when my teacher asked us to think of ideas about who a hero was and why we, or others, considered them a hero. A friend and I chose the example of Hitler, describing why he was a hero to some people. Needless to say, in a predominantly Jewish area, that was not appreciated, and we were sent to the principal’s office. My friend and I explained that Hitler was not one of our heroes, but certainly was other people’s. Since the assignment had not directed us to choose one of our own personal heroes, our logic was sound and there could be no punishment given for a matter of logic so easily reached.

The Fifth Grade Mafia

Fifth grade was the year I stopped doing homework or trying in school, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have fun with it. My fifth grade class teacher employed a system involving so-called “Bonus Bucks.” You’d get some for doing homework, performing well in class, and other such good-student behaviors. These “Bonus Bucks” were copies of a one dollar bill at 75%, one sided but could display either the front or the back of the dollar. On the blank side, our teacher would stamp a red, seemingly unique, star on it so that counterfeiting wouldn’t be easy. You could trade these “Bonus Bucks” for things like candy, soda, school supplies, and other such classroom things. A friend of mine in my nearly all boys clique of the time, had a copy machine at home that could do size reduction by percentage, and I had the same exact star stamp at home in my craft supplies. We decided we’d go into the counterfeiting business, and quickly produced many “Bonus Bucks,” which were valuable bargaining devices. In order for our teacher to not notice the increase in the supply of “Bonus Bucks,” I controlled the flow of the counterfeits. Our fifth grade teacher never caught on.

I choose you, oboe

In the fifth grade, our school system first offered the opportunity to begin an instrument. They brought in several people to assist us children in choosing an instrument. I had no idea what I wanted to try at the time, so in my child-possessed confidence, when it was my turn to be assisted, I walked forward and asked:

“So, which instrument is the hardest?”

The reply from the assistant was,

“Well, I’d say either the oboe or the French horn.”

I chose the oboe. I ended up excelling at it, going on to win competitions, having solos for band competitions, and the highest scores on individual pieces.

Middle school was when life became difficult for me as my latent mental illness began becoming a huge issue with puberty. Depression and mania began around this time, and started to produce dangerous thoughts. I was on the swim team and in band, but otherwise, I barely passed classes, but I did enough work in my Chinese class to be able to join our class as they went to go visit China. It was an amazing experience, and proof that if the reward was great enough that I could do the work. As for other classes, I was getting a lot of comments like “She’s so smart, but she just won’t do the work.” It was also right when I entered middle school that my parents got divorced, which wasn’t really all that difficult for me, but it was exacerbated by a vaguely appearing psychiatric problems. It became hard to make and keep friends, and at my age in middle school, those sorts of things are very confusing.

When I got to high school, things got even more difficult for me, as all the friends I’d managed to make and sustain during middle school spread out to find their own high school niche, leaving me alone. I attempted to find a spot for me, and for a while, hanging out with the nerds was actually very fun. They started fading off as friends when, at age fifteen, I attempted suicide, shortly after beginning to date my now husband, following a visit to Toronto to see a Josh Groban concert. I was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where I was first diagnosed as bipolar with psychotic features, and was put on a vast array of psychiatric medication that made me gain weight, sleep all the time, and in waking I was never sure I was actually awake. I spent two weeks there and had much support from parents and my now husband. From then on, until after high school, I barely remember anything about high school. I slept in most classes, and spent the times I was awake to artistic endeavors using my school’s vast assortment of art supplies.

By the time I was sixteen, I had smoked marijuana for the first time and had developed a cigarette habit that pulled me into corners around my high school campus where it wasn’t easy to be seen. I made a trip back to a psychiatric hospital, where I was diagnosed schizoaffective bipolar type. At 17, I eventually got caught smoking cigarettes on school property, and when my purse was searched, they found a small amount of marijuana in a sample jam jar. They called our school detective, and I was charged with possession of marijuana and was denied the privilege of attending my senior prom. The summer of 2006 held my first court date and conviction, which put me on probation, having to take random drug tests once a week, and having to attend outpatient addiction group therapy once a week. With the threat of drug tests, I took it upon myself to quit smoking marijuana due to how long it remains in your system. This easily led me to a cocaine habit, having made friends in my group therapy that dabbled in harder drugs, and my inability to smoke marijuana. Over time, I experimented with many drugs, so long as they’d be out of my system by the time I had to take a drug test. Addiction soon followed, and it impaired my judgement, because of which I got two more charges and violated the probation I had been sentenced to such that I had to serve the maximum sentence attributed to my possession of marijuana conviction, which was 90 days in jail.

I served 53 days in jail in the fall of 2006, shorter than my sentenced 90 days, but was released due to overcrowding issues. Spending time in jail, the punishment mostly being boredom, allowed me to do some very needed introspection, as well as an understanding of a new human social hierarchy among the jailed. I figured out a lot about myself and a lot about basic human behavior. I had already spent plenty of time in psychiatric hospitals, so jail wasn’t a completely new concept to me. I treasure my days in that place now, and all the lessons I learned from it. In fact, I felt sad that they stole that last month from me.

When I got out of jail, there was still a conviction I had to do things for, like community service and daily breathalyzers. I was constantly on probation from the summer of the year 2006 until the spring of 2009, having to watch my back and behavior as any illegal anything is considered a violation of probation, even a traffic ticket. Eventually, I made it through, having conquered my drug addiction and curiosity to explore that world, the idea to stop being clear once I suffered an accidental overdose, and had to spend five days in a hospital. My habits had also led me, again, to a short stay at a psychiatric hospital. Eventually, my final diagnosis ended up as being schizophrenic, the illness that runs in my family.

At home, starting when I was about 12, I began to dabble in the internet. I taught myself HTML, PHP, CGI, MySQL, CSS, and Javascript, beginning with an “HTML for Dummies” book, and I eventually ended up doing web and graphic design professionally from the age of 15 until the age of 24. It was easy to pursue such a thing as my father was a technology consultant and my mother a programmer. I was raised as a computer whiz, but mostly indirectly. I’ve always had a fondness for technology, and it made sense to me to pursue that type of future for myself, and my first attempt to go to college, after having gotten my GED, was to pursue a graphic design degree. That was a path I didn’t complete, along with my attempt at a cosmetology degree. After those, I decided to get an associates degree in science at my local community college, and ended up receiving no grades lower than an A-. I finished, getting my degree, and quickly applied to go to Michigan State University for their bachelors degree in astrophysics. I was accepted, but it turned out to be more complicated, more stressful, and more expensive than I had come to think. After a small amount of time, I came home.

Being home again, with no job, forced me into the introspection mood I default to instead of being bored, having developed the skill while in jail. I noticed that my mental illness was working itself more and more into my personality, the anxiety and fear of overstimulation having faded into the background. My hallucinations, both auditory and visual, seemed to be quieted, but delusions of grandeur, persecution, and entitlement, as well as paranoia, began to work themselves deeper into my psyche, and even now, I grow more and more eccentric as time goes by. I still fear the degenerate nature of schizophrenia and how, as I grow older, my illness will most likely worsen. At least I am married to someone who has been with me since I was 15, and took this whole journey with me, wanting to come along for the ride for the rest of his life despite knowing the sad prognosis of someone with a mental condition such as mine.

As I feel myself mellow out a bit, figuring out even more about who I am, and with many of my friends having a child, or are pregnant, started my husband and I, having been married for 5 years, to began to think about children of our own. I have made the switch to thinking about the future in a broad context, and less thinking about me and the time I’m in now. While it is a big concern of mine that my children may inherit the genetic form of the tendency to be schizophrenic, and will have to go through the hell I’ve had to go through, but who else would be better suited to help them if such a thing occurred?

I don’t know what the future holds. However, whatever is in store for me, easy or difficult, I accept your challenge, life. Bring it.