Alone With Schizoaffective Disorder – My Fears, Experiences, and How I Cope
As I closed the door, I could feel the flutter in my stomach. The timer has started. I am alone. With my cat and my dog, I guess I’m not entirely alone, but it’s not the same as having a person with me. There’s frustration – though this month will find me alone more often than not, it’s just a few days at a time. I’ve lived alone for as much as two years at a time. Yet, despite my frustration and against reason, there is a part of me that is afraid. It’s not a fear of others, but rather, a fear of myself. Being alone is one thing, but for me to be alone with schizoaffective disorder is a whole different animal. I’ve developed coping mechanisms, but they don’t erase every scribble of fear on my mind.
The fear began in college.
The onset of my schizoaffective disorder was not the first time I had felt alone in a crowded room, but it was different. I knew no one around me could truly comprehend what I was going through unlike my struggles with depression. In college, I felt similarly until I developed strong relationships. But during my senior year, I had my worst episode to date.
I clung to my boyfriend like a life raft, and when he had to travel for work, I didn’t know what to do. Who would help me determine if things were real or symptoms? Who would make me feel safe as the shadow people paraded around me? So it was lights and music on all night. It was me crashing on some friends’ couch and hoping on the train after class to watch TV with a friend until I boarded the 11pm train home. But I made it through.
Aloneness took a new turn when I struck out on my own.
When I ended that relationship a year later, I was surrounded by newness – new apartment, new city, new job, and a need to find new friends. The anxiety twisted my gut in its bony fingers. But I had no choice.
Pictures, concert posters, and notes tied to inside jokes papered the wall above my bed. I unpacked each load of boxes as I moved them. There would be no blank walls and box cities in this place. I needed it to feel safe immediately because I had no one with me to offer me that feeling.
But life with schizoaffective disorder can be exhausting. After a trip to the ER for abdominal pain and three days in the hospital later, I returned home to my very anxious dog. I didn’t have any close friends to look after him. Thankfully two nurses came to my rescue and took care of him on the last day. When I returned home, tears were streaming down my face as I scrubbed the soiled floor. I had never felt so alone, and I felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I was still building friendships, but found myself browsing a dating website. He said all the right the things, but it got out of hand the minute we met.
Being in that relationship was a new kind of alone.
No one understood my schizoaffective disorder, including him. And no one understood what was happening behind our door. I took care of myself, my dog, a cat, and a severe alcoholic. There was no time for coping mechanisms. The aloneness burned hot, making me lash out sometimes.
When I crawled out of that relationship, alone never felt so good, but the fear remained. I had no one to help me confirm what was real and what was not. But I had lights. And I had music. And I had a TV that occasionally blared overnight on particularly rough days. My bed faced away from a window to avoid looking too deep into the night sky as I fell asleep, but the living room flooded with sun in the morning, making waking up a bit more inviting. But exhaustion still hung heavy on my shoulders.
At a certain point, I had my dog evaluated and we began service training. Because of him, I felt that I needed a human a little bit less. Moose could alert me to rising anxiety, minimize the effects of panic attacks, and was trained to interrupt self-harm or retrieve the pressure wrap I had tucked away if all else failed. Pressure wrap was a coping mechanism I developed organically. I came to realize that, by wrapping from my wrist to my elbow firmly, but not too tight, I could significantly reduce any urges to self-harm, though there weren’t many.
Despite this history, the fear is alive and well.
I have my human now. I have my service dog. And I have a tangle of life experience that involved isolation to some degree. But I still worry and it’s hard to talk about why.
At two points last year, my psychiatrist was moments away from dialing the hospital to find me a bed. It’s hard to say I’m afraid of myself. Things are significantly better now and my history of self-harm sits far back in the past, but I know what I am capable of. I know the things my brain can make me think and see and feel. The fear drags me down at first, but, now that my front door is closed and I am alone with my pets, my sights shift. Lights, music, tasks – let’s do this. So I challenge myself to be more productive, to push and pull the house back in order, and to do more to take care of myself if I have the time.
I still feel alone in crowded rooms. I still fear being by myself for days at a time. But, deep down, I know I can do this.
I am lucky to have people at all corners of the nation supporting me. Chances are, I won’t take full advantage of the support they offer, but knowing I have a safety net is all I need in most cases. And, of course, I have a psychiatrist on whom I can depend. The pressure wrap is ready should I need it, but as the clock ticks farther and farther from the time my front door closed, I feel more and more prepared.
For more articles on schizoaffective disorder click here.
Want to hear me tell my story and answer questions? Check out my guest appearance on “Schizophrenia: 3 Moms in the Trenches”. Click here to listen or watch the video here.
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