I decided to get some work done tonight. I'm just about out of smokes, so in effort to preserve them until tomorrow, I have chosen to eat instead of smoke. I have no food in my place, so I went to Perkins—a family diner in the area. Because it was about 1:30AM, the place was almost empty. Three booths were occupied, but otherwise the place was empty. I ordered a salad and a diet Coke and then got to work. After a few minutes, a group of young college kids came in and sat in a booth across from me on the opposite side of the restaurant. The were laughing and joking around, and then they started cracking jokes about me. They didn't think I could hear them, but they were quite loud and boisterous. I won't go into the details of what they were saying.

Having been out of high school and college for a while now, I had forgotten that people act like that. Or perhaps it is because I surround myself with such nice people that I haven't witnessed such a thing for some time. Having been laughed at tonight made me feel uncomfortable, obviously, and the whole time I felt like going over to them and explaining myself and my situation. They are just too young to realize the severity of real problems or to have gained wisdom from real suffering. While I am generally a happy person (and was before becoming ill as well), because of the suffering I have endured for years, something in my soul is changed. Psychotic people often times have a reptilian-like stare . . . a flat and empty and even piercing gaze. That stare is the outward manifestation of the part of the soul that has been changed due to incredible suffering. Perhaps a psychiatrist would say something else causes that stare, but I know better. It is the result of feeling unyielding terror, of watching dying dreams, etc. It is the result of the slaughter of youthful innocence. Like Nietzsche wrote, "Beware when you wrestle with monsters, lest you thereby become one. For if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss also stares back into you."

I know I have stared too long into the abyss. I have seen and endured so many things, and much of them at an age that is just too young to deal adequately. I remember when I was engaging in my very dramatic, high risk suicidal behaviors, I noticed something interesting: my life never flashed before my eyes. I was about to die, and there was nothing going through my mind but emptiness. Perhaps I was dead already. I'm not going to try to take my own life again, but I wonder if things would now be different. Much has changed since those early days of the illness. I now have faith, and while I'm not a bad person turned good, I am a dead person come alive.