Schizophrenia and Phoenix

Thank you for returning to Dash on Deadline. I have not posted for a while because I have been adjusting. In August I moved to the Phoenix, Arizona area from a small town in Wisconsin. Life here, in addition to the politics, is different.

There are many people in this area but little community feel, something I miss. The manner of speaking is attractive, though: it is more gentle, and the speed of conversation is slower. People take breaths between their sentences, not at all like in Washington, D.C., where I lived and worked for five years. There, individuals in their 50s as well as those in their 20s speak at the speed of light to show youth. I did a survey once and that's what it revealed.

About my friend in Austin, he moved inside in November and seems to have found a place to live that does not provoke his temper. An upstairs neighbor makes noise at 3 a.m. when coming home from work. That's my friend's biggest complaint.

What is more apparent to me than ever is my friend's mental age. At 56, he write rants to his 80-something parents like the kind I stopped writing in early high school. Today he copied me on one he sent to his parents yesterday. Seeing the voice and the anger and the resentment and a lot of other things I spent many difficult hours, days and years coming to terms with brought up a now-dim remembered feeling related to actions long-ago forgiven.

Those challenges and the way I passed through those rites of passage, learning to forgive myself and everyone else, have made me calm. I am no longer the storm. I am at peace with myself.

I have come to Rudyard Kipling's definition of a man, as described in his poem, "If," which was always a favorite. "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."

My friend in Austin continues to blame his parents for all things large and small. His parents can never be good enough.
I wrote back to him and said, "There is no quick fix. One day you will be an orphan. On that day life will be different than it is today. Sit in candlelight for a bit."

I am learning from my friend's schizophrenia. It is helping me take notice and stock of myself. It is making me a better person.
Mayo Clinic defines schizophrenia as "a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses, and to behave normally in social situations."

Perhaps I landed in Arizona to learn how that definition might apply to the "group think" process as well as an individual. There are both real and imagined shootings reported here, for instance, alongside public officials smiling while talking about mass killings.