“I close my eyes. And I scream. If my whole world is crashing down around me, then I am going to make the sound of the crashing. I want to scream until all my bones break.”
— David Levithan (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
I was always a quiet child, never speaking up, rarely making eye contact, nose in a book or fingers scribbling endless novels on loose sheets of notebook paper.
I can’t remember the last time I screamed. In college, in the girls dorms, I would hear screaming all the time. Screams of joy from excited friends. Screams of indignation for stupid things. Screaming girls clinging to each other while watching a scary movie with each other.
I guess I cry out, sometimes. In shock. In surprise. In pain. But I never scream. I’m not sure I know how. Like when Afina tried to teach me Arabic, but my mouth wouldn’t make the sounds quite right.
My voices often decide to scream in my ears until I want to beat my head off a wall to get them to stop.
But I can’t. Even if I want to, to let out all the pain and sadness and rage and frustration. I am a traumatized child trapped in the body of an adult that’s been suppressed too fucking long.
When I was a child, I was called mature for my age. It was meant to be a compliment. But was I ever a child, truly?
Out of all the things schizophrenia took from me, the worst thing that it took was my voice.
I haven’t screamed since I was a young child because I knew there was no point. No one would hear me. No hero would come and save me. It would be futile. The void would swallow my voice up and I would be left there alone, pressing those crescents of red into my palms with my fingernails.
And now I can’t. I just can’t scream. I can barely raise my voice. If Armageddon began and everything went to hell, I would face it with quiet curses and stifled sobs.
Post 43 in Socially Unacceptable: The Daily Life of a Queer Schizophrenic Wreck (2022)
This is an autobiographical series about my life, something I have wanted to do for a long time. I intend to add new content daily.
For the whole series, follow this link.
The Queer Schizophrenic 