#actuallyschizoid

genuinely, when i look at posts made by schizoids on the internet, it really does seem like the most commonly accepted and felt emotion by a schizoid is anger. even if its supressed.

i get it, szpd sure sucks sometimes, you wish you weren't constructed like this. and i get that a large part of it is the fact that people in general tend to focus on and remember negative things, but good lord. did you know szpd is the only personality disorder that doesn't require clinical distress? you can live your own solitary life, doing your own thing, making your own habits, creating your own meaning, connecting in the ways you feel comfortable and isolating yourself to the extent you need, and be absolutely fine with it. happy even, dare i say vibing. getting there takes work from you, requires you to take a good hard look at yourself from time to time, but nothing in this disorder implies that healthy coping is some fucking pie in the sky or whatever. you can be fine.

(feel free not to answer this publicly/at all if it comes off as needlessly dismissive to that genre of blog. i can't tell if i'm being "mean," and i can't not mention it, because not mentioning it would entirely miss what i appreciate so much about this blog)

Hi I'll use this ask as an opportunity to tell a bit more about this blog and other stuff !!

I run this blog partly for the sake of others. Anything I share here is not only done as a way to voice my thoughts, but also in hopes that someone would find something they can relate to, or even comfort as i have after discovering there are people dealing with Very Similar Situations which i know as The Szpd. for the longest time i never had any points of comparison for myself while knowing the average person likely wouldn’t impose total isolation and a chronic vow of silence on themselves among other average person things. It was a state of knowing something was off but never being able to put a finger on what exactly. I felt szpd was already as hidden as it is so I figured someone has to try and keep the awareness going. This way I'm also putting all these thoughts to good use.

Your ask pretty much validates the reason why I created this blog!! thank you it means a lot to read this.

And whether someone chooses to focus more negatively or positively on szpd, they’re all valid! Since szpd isn’t known for its pretty sides as with all other pd’s and conditions, that does make it very easy to be fixated on the nasty parts, especially if all it does is making your life miserable. if this has brought me any kind of joy then I wouldn't notice. I'd say the main danger is the risk of being consumed by the misery and getting trapped in a vicious circle.

But yeah. it would be very, very strange if you were to think positively of things like this. I suppose it's one way to tell if you're somehow faking it. The realistic thing to do is to come to good terms with it. Hard, but possible enough.

Hi! it’s your friendly neighborhood schizoaffective and i have a story to tell, a story that’s backed by research.

my psychotic symptoms were early onset. my earliest memory of psychotic symptoms was 6 years old, when my parents were changing the locks on the house and i had an intense belief that changing them would mean someone had broken into our house and hadn’t left. i believed my toys had human emotions and felt sad if i played with another toy, so i refused to buy new toys because i was so scared of making my toys sad.

i had a very flattened emotional response (which i would later learn is a symptom of schizophrenia), and in kindergarten and first grade when we learned about emotions, i learned to fake the look of emotional response. i learned how to put a smile on my face when i felt happy and to put a frown on my face when i felt sad. when i was alone, i would practice, but some days i was too tired to do it and i kept my face in the natural way: flat. it wasn’t that i wasn’t feeling emotions, i just couldn’t express them the way people wanted me to

during my elementary school years, i made up words constantly to communicate. i couldn’t form proper sentences, something was blocked in my brain and everything felt scattered and scrambled (disorganized thoughts and speech). my teachers broke that habit in me, not by helping me learn to organize my thoughts, but by teaching me not to speak unless i knew exactly what i was trying to say.

then came middle school and i started hallucinating and my delusions got worse. but everything i had learned from teachers and tv was that hallucinations are scary to people, and i didn’t want to be scary. i would be laughed at if i told anyone about my strong beliefs (delusions) so i didn’t tell anyone. i didn’t tell anyone that i believed that the characters in my tv show were real and the government was hiding their existence and if they knew that i knew they’re real, they’d put me on a watch list. i didn’t tell anyone i was hearing sounds that came straight out of a horror movie. i hid that.

i hid it so well that i avoided treatment. i had an acute psychotic episode, and all i said was that i was having panic attacks. i didn’t tell anyone about the delusion that school was going to literally kill me, or that i heard blood curdling screams in the hallways and when i was trying to sleep at night. i avoided early intervention.

for other reasons that i won’t get into, i was put on seroquel as a mood stabilizer, but as many of you know, it’s also an antipsychotic. this was the first time in my life i felt some kind of relief from my symptoms. i didn’t connect the dots because my psychiatrist called it a mood stabilizer, not an antipsychotic, so i didn’t know why i was feeling better in those areas.

it wasn’t until 10th grade when i was taking a psychology class from a teacher i trusted that i connected the dots. by this time i knew i had psychosis. i had access to the internet and i had googled what was wrong with me, but it wasn’t until a class where he emphasized getting help that i thought ok, now i should bring it up.

by this point, i had had 2 more acute psychotic episodes that kept me out of school, but because i was taught to hide everything, i still didn’t tell anyone the real reason why i couldn’t function. “paralyzing panic attacks” became code for “whatever the real reason is that’s keeping him out of school”. but my teacher made me think i needed help, especially because we were learning about schizophrenia in class and i had a sneaking suspicion that i, someone with a family history of schizophrenia, had it.

i brought it up to my doctors and i was started on antipsychotics, this time with the official name of antipsychotics. but it was a bit too late. my psychiatrist told me that if we had caught it earlier, i may have reacted to treatment better.

i’ve been in treatment for years and the longest i’ve gone without an acute psychotic episode is 5 months. i’ve done my research and in patients with psychosis, the first few months after psychotic symptoms are present are vital to the treatment and recovery of the patient.

it’s not just, oh you won’t suffer as long, it’s literally you will have a better chance at recovery. if you catch psychosis in the prodromal stage, it can greatly reduce the chances of another psychotic episode happening.

by being taught to hide my illness from a young age, i lost the chance at having an easier recovery. yes i learned to confine myself to societal expectations and appear “normal”, but i caused myself more pain in the long run.

early intervention is key to an easier recovery, and i’m going to leave a few links to show you what i mean.

ted talk about early psychotic intervention

psychosis prodromal phase

talking with a psychiatrist about early psychosis intervention

early intervention of psychosis

So I have been having trouble figuring out a label for my romantic orientation. And I decided on lithromantic.