forget about being guilty, we are innocent instead
for soon we will all find our lives swept away

(and you know how it is)

so last night, my mom was in that same strange mood i blogged about earlier. but add to this the fact that she somehow felt it necessary to go out and drink a few martinis on an empty stomach...oh boy.

she couldn't stop talking about my brother. she kept crying. she was talking to me about that period two years ago when he was first admitted to the hospital, and flashing back on specific visits we had with him and all these terrible, horrible things that i really just don't think about because it's still way too fresh and way too painful. and i know it's even more so for her. when your child is in pain, all you want in the world is to be able to do all the suffering for them.

i never really talk about all the went down with my brother. i guess my online friends got more of it than anyone else, because it's so much easier to type and write about horrors than actually discuss them with people. i'm still amazed at how clueless most of my friends are about it...because i just didn't talk about it. it's nearly impossible to convey the horrors of watching your brother go through psychotic episode after psychotic episode...visiting him in mental hospitals where you can physically see panic attacks sweep over him, where he questions why you can't just read his mind and where he asks you if he's going to hell and if you have spoken to the aliens who visited him last night.

i mean, it's stuff that is just comical to the average person. but it's pretty much the most horrifying thing you can witness when it involves someone you love. god...for that first year, my mom would burst into tears every time anyone would ask about him. or any time she spoke about him. it was just a horrible horrible time for us. and because people's understanding of schitzophrenia is so limited, it becomes worthless to talk to them about it because then you have to explain all these little details, and....yeah.

still to this day i'm amazed at how many misconceptions there are. this is not a behavioral problem. it's not multiple personality disorder. if you were to have a mental hospital divided by floor, from least serious mental illness to most serious, it would go something along the lines of mild depression at the bottom, eating disorders somewhere in the middle, and schitzophrenia at the very top. this illness completely robs the person of reality. they can't grasp it. and newer studies are finding a larger problem: there is a part of the brain in schitzophrenics that is defective that doesn't allow them to recognize that they have the disease. same thing happens in people who have strokes - the dr. will ask them to raise their left arm, and they'll think they did, because this part of their brain is telling them they did. but they didn't. and it makes it even *more* difficult to get the patients to accept treatment.

anyway. what was my point? i don't know. just hearing her talk about it last night made me realize how not ready i am to think about that period of my life. luckily, i dealt with it exceedingly well, as i have a way of compartamentalizing stress so it doesnt effect my every day life...but when i get too close to these memories it makes me really really uncomfortable.