The Neon Exorcist

Don’t make schizophrenia your whole identity. Schizophrenia is something that happens to you, not something you are. If you start defining yourself out from symptoms of schizophrenia, you’ll become even more sick.

So what if you got so sick that you lost your sense of self, hobbies and everything that used to define you - that means you have a clean slate. Try new hobbies, do new things, try a lot of stuff. Don’t focus on who you used to be, focus on figuring out who you can become.

If something raises your quality of life a little, do it. No matter how unnecessary, silly, irrelevant or stupid it might seem. Everything that raises your quality of life a little is worth investing in.

You might romanticise who you were before you were sick, but we all evolve as we age and nobody are the same place at 15 and 20. Nobody ends up where they expected they’d end up as 15 year olds. Not even neurotypicals.

You can get a good life even if you can’t take the standard route. I never went to high school either and today I have a job that I love and a life I enjoy. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that there’s only one way to have a good life.

Celebrate little victories. For me, the success criteria for a good day was that I got out of bed and brushed my teeth for several years. Don’t compare yourself to other people, if brushing your teeth is a struggle for you, it’s worth being proud of.

You can retrain your brain. I wasn’t able to read books for years, last year I read 9. Cognitive tests gives a picture of where you are right now, not where you’ll be in a couple years.

Fuck negative predictions from doctors. I have a very nice paper at home signed by a psychiatrist that states that I’ll never be able to do any kind of work. Now I have a very nice job.

I still have schizophrenia and I have never felt better about myself and my life than I do now. A full recovery isn’t the only way to get a good life.

For the Guardian.

Most movies are so afraid of being “cheesy” that whenever they say something like “friendship is the most powerful force in the world” they quickly undercut it with a joke to show We Don’t Really Believe That! ;)  Even Disney films nowadays have the characters mock their own movie’s tropes (”if you start singing, I’m gonna throw up!”) It’s like winking at the camera: “See, audience? We know this is ridiculous! We’re in on the joke!”

But Lord of the Rings is just 12.5 hours of friendship and love being the most powerful forces in the world, played straight. Characters have conversations about how much their home and family and friends mean to them, how hope is eternal, how there is so much in the world that’s worth living for…. and the film doesn’t apologize for that. There’s no winking at the audience about How Cheesy and Silly All This Is; it’s just. Completely in earnest.