MRI – 08.27.2026

Yep, that’s me. And yes, that is an image of my brain.

When I first started experiencing more intrusive schizophrenia symptoms in high school, I had no idea what was happening to me. I didn’t have the mental health education or language to understand what I was experiencing. In the environment I grew up in, conversations about spiritual possession were more familiar than conversations about mental health. So for a long time, I thought I was possessed, being punished, or somehow at fault for what was happening to me. I thought my schizophrenia symptoms were a character flaw. When I got to college and began learning about mental health, and eventually received an official diagnosis of schizophrenia, it was incredibly empowering. Having a framework for what I was experiencing lifted some of the weight, but it also changed the way I thought about my brain. Early in my diagnosis, I found myself going down YouTube rabbit holes about schizophrenia and the brain. I remember thinking about those old anti-drug campaigns that showed an egg frying in a pan and said, “This is your brain on drugs.” I became afraid of what my brain looked like. What had happened to it? What was schizophrenia doing to it? Was my brain permanently damaged? Over the past decade, I have worked in the mental health advocacy space and have had the privilege of learning from and working with incredible researchers and scientists presenting their work at conferences around the world. That exposure has helped demystify the brain and reduce some of the stigma I once carried.

But knowledge also brings questions. How might long-term medication exposure affect the brain? How do recurrent episodes of psychosis affect it? What about prolonged psychological trauma? What about head injuries? What about oxygen deprivation? I have intentionally kept my own treatment choices such as names of medications private throughout my advocacy work from day one. And I keep my current status of whether I take medication or what type or dose private as well. That is a decision I make for two reasons: privacy and responsibility. Just because I share my experience with schizophrenia publicly does not mean I have to share everything about my schizophrenia online. Actually, there are many parts of my life that I keep intentionally private.

As for responsibility, I primarily work with students who are early in their treatment journeys, and I never want to influence someone to choose, or reject, a treatment simply based on my opinion of what works for me. You will never see me promoting a specific medication, diet, fitness trend, etc. This is something I have stayed consistent about from day one of my advocacy. What I will advocate for is more variety, education, and acceptance of treatment options. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to schizophrenia. People have different bodies, circumstances, values, goals, symptoms, resources, and definitions of quality of life. Even an individual’s needs can change throughout their journey changing their treatment choices overtime. I believe people deserve patient-centered, informed shared decision-making. Whether that means medication, no medication, or something in between, people deserve dignity, autonomy, information, and a variety of choices. Although I have not experienced extended periods of severe schizophrenia symptoms since 2018, my concerns in recent years have centered more around executive functioning, burnout, and the impact of experiencing trauma while working in the mental health field and sharing my story publicly online. You see both the best and the worst of people in the mental health field, and social media can fester disturbing toxicity. With that said, I am proud of choosing to see the beauty and realness of humanity throughout this journey without it impacting my decision to help people. To the healthcare workers and people who work in the mental health space who show up every day: please give them a little extra kindness. This is not an easy space to work in, especially for those of us who also have lived experience.

Going into this MRI, I also carried questions about my own history. As a teenager, I experienced a concussion that required extended bed rest. I was also born after experiencing oxygen deprivation; the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck, and my mom would tell me the story while I was growing up about neighbors rushing her to the hospital when she went into labor in the car. She would point to her faded blue jeans when describing what I looked like. I try not to fall too deeply into the question of “Why do I have schizophrenia?” But throughout my years in advocacy, I have heard research presented about possible associations between psychosis and factors such as birth complications or head trauma. There is also the important conversation around how psychological trauma can impact someone, which I am no stranger to as a teenager who ended up in a domestic violence shelter in high school. Naturally, all of this made me curious about my own brain, but this post isn’t about claiming that any of those things caused my schizophrenia. It isn’t an explanation of what a brain “with schizophrenia” looks like. And it certainly isn’t diagnostic. It is about something more personal: What happens to your relationship with your own brain when you live with a psychiatric diagnosis and spend years exposed to research and conversations about the brain? For me, seeing this MRI image was profoundly emotional and surprisingly healing. I don’t know exactly what I expected to see. Maybe I imagined that I would somehow see evidence of everything I had experienced, like popping the hood of a car experiencing car trouble and seeing smoke billowing out, sparks flying, and something visibly broken. Instead, I looked at my brain and thought: It just looks like a brain.

There was something incredibly beautiful about that ordinariness. Of course, an MRI image does not capture everything about a person’s brain, and subtle differences can have profound impacts. Invisible disabilities are also real, and you do not need to point to something on a scan, chart, or image to prove that your experience is valid. I can only speak from my personal experience, but there was something powerful about finally being able to look at my own brain. I know not everyone has access to brain imaging, and I recognize what a privilege it is to have participated in this research. I am still waiting to see the images from my PET scan, and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to learn more. 

Sometimes healing isn’t about finding something wrong. Sometimes, it is about looking at the thing you have been afraid of for years with curiosity and finding beauty in the ordinary. I have had a love-hate relationship with my brain for as long as I can remember, but this experience has strengthened a more positive relationship. She has carried and protected me over the years, and I am grateful for this beautiful mind.

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Dad – 04.19.2026

Being stuck at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. last month brought my dad to mind in a way I did not expect. Growing up, he was a flight attendant, and Dulles was the airport he flew out of. Even now, I tend to avoid flying out of there; it still feels like stepping into his workplace. On my way back from Italy  last month, I walked out through the exact same doors where this photo was taken, the same doors our team came through in 2012 returning from Russia after helping represent the United States in the International Space Olympics. 

I have been reflecting on the tools my upbringing left me with. As a mental health advocate, my story often centers on the harder chapters: ending up in a domestic violence shelter in high school and growing up in a turbulent home. Those experiences are valid and impacted me, but that is not the whole story. In this post, I want to focus on the parts that equipped me, the skills and qualities that came out of a complicated relationship with my dad. For example, growing up in a flight attendant family, I spent a lot of time flying standby to visit extended family in Montana. I learned early how to navigate airports and travel. That familiarity turned into a strength later on when I first started building Students With Psychosis because the world felt smaller. Long travel times were not only less intimidating but actually felt normal, and I learned to just go for it.

One of my earlier memories about my dad was also related to him being a flight attendant. Like many people in the United States, I remember waking up on 9/11 when a neighbor called and told my mom to turn on the TV. We watched in horror as the second plane went through the tower. We learned that it was a United flight from Boston to Los Angeles. I remember my mom panicking because my dad was doing a series of domestic connections and remembered that he was going to both Boston and California during that stretch. The TV news kept repeating that clip on loop. At one point, the neighbor on the phone told my mom that the kids should not be watching it, so we got sent to our room. My younger sister and I shared a room growing up. She was five, and I was turning seven in less than two weeks. She was too young to really understand what was happening and kept crying on her bed, repeating “dad’s dead.” 

This was a time before my dad had a cell phone, and my mom understandably could not get any information from the airlines. She then started to go through piles of books that she was reading for our homeschool curriculum and found a piece of paper she had used as a bookmark. It had the hotel phone number for my dad. She called it, and my dad picked up in California just waking up jetlagged and in a later timezone. After much pushback from my mom, who did not want my dad to get onto a plane home to the D.C. area so soon, my dad just wanted to get back home and was stuck on the West Coast. For the only time in United States history, the entire national airspace was closed. To this day, I do not know if the following was a lie to make mom feel better about him getting on a plane to the Washington, D.C. area, but he told us that he was going to volunteer on a flight where it was only FBI agents who needed a crew. We were all so happy when he got home safe. I often think about that day because of the obvious reminder of living in New York City. Even though I am now an uptown girl, I lived in lower Manhattan for a large stretch of time in the Financial District next to the World Trade Center and passed by the memorial every day. I think about how if my dad called now, I would not pick up. That comes with a strange feeling of guilt because I know how many families could not get ahold of their loved ones or reunite with them.

Our lives changed drastically after 9/11. During that time, we were in the middle of building a house, and with many of the major airlines going bankrupt, money was tight even though my dad was able to hold onto his job. From the outside, our house looked complete, but for most of my childhood it was half built on the inside, which now feels like a metaphor for how often domestic violence can remain hidden from those looking in. Growing up, I did look up to my dad as resilient, carrying drywall upstairs and building the house piece by piece when money came in, and helping him hold trim and nails as the rooms came together. Even though my dad commuted to Washington Dulles, we lived over an hour away in an agricultural town because housing prices were better there. When things got tight, my dad ended up picking up not one but two other jobs in addition to being a flight attendant. He worked as a farmhand at a local cattle farm and also as the person who would check in farmers when they came to cattle sales, where cattle were brought into an arena as an auctioneer took bids.

I admired how hard my dad worked, and it helped instill a strong work ethic in me from a young age and an ability to figure things out and do hard things. Some of my happiest memories with my dad were our fishing trips. My dad seemed calmer whenever we were out in nature. I did not enjoy hunting with him as much as fishing. But like a coming of age movie, I believe hunting with my dad and often seeing gutted deer and animals hung in the garage toughened me to be able to face difficult but necessary realities that helped put food on the table. One particular trip stood out to me. It was my job, when going dove hunting, to run and collect the bird after my dad shot it. This time, though, the shot did not kill the dove, and when I ran up to pick it up, it flew back up. In an instant, my face was covered with blood. My dad shot one more time and wiped the surprisingly warm blood off my face with his sweatshirt. Of course, he was laughing as I stood frozen, trying not to taste the blood on my lips. I often talk in my advocacy about how sensitivity is a good thing and how going numb or calloused can be detrimental. I also hold the belief that one can still feel intensely and keep that sensitivity while also having life experiences that build the capacity to hold difficult and unpleasant things. This was one of those moments that helped build that capacity.

When you are no contact with your family, it can make looking back at your heritage difficult. My dad and I share the same face, and I grew up with people often pointing out how much we looked alike, with the same eyes and nose. As might be assumed from my last name, I grew up Irish Catholic. I have a complicated relationship with Catholicism, which will be its own post, particularly in how it impacted my mental health, especially confusing schizophrenia symptoms early on with being possessed. I am not proud of the complicated history of the Catholic Church (though recently, I have found pride in Pope Leo XIV for speaking out for peace amid the current U.S.-Israel tensions with Iran), but a part of my heritage that I am most proud of is my Ukrainian heritage. When the war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, my dad reached out to me with photos of handwritten letters from his mom about the town in modern day Ukraine where his family comes from. Even though you should not have to have a personal connection to a conflict to care, my heritage made this war feel personal. In a world where many leaders and politicians can feel like distorted caricatures from a children’s story, only far more dangerous, I feel deep pride in the Ukrainian people for their resilience.

Family, religion, heritage, and geopolitics reveal a shared reality: identity is layered, conflicted, and not easily defined. My dad was not just one thing to me, and neither is the life I have built from the foundation he helped lay. There is pain in that history, but there is also strength, resilience, and a set of tools I carry with me every day. I do not measure my story only by what I had to survive, but by what I chose to build from it. We do not get to choose where we begin, but we do get to decide what we carry forward, what we leave behind, and who we become because of it.

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Clown – 02.16.2026

Do I still hallucinate the clown? In 2015, I first spoke openly on social media about my hallucinations. Two years later, I shared that experience very publicly in my 2017 TEDxPSU talk, “I Am Not A Monster: Schizophrenia.” I shared my most prominent hallucination: the clown from the 1990 miniseries of Stephen King’s It.

I don’t know why I hallucinate the clown. What I do know is that long before I ever watched the miniseries, I remember being very young and noticing the movie cover on a shelf at a relative’s house. I saw it again and again while browsing videos at the local library. It scared me. For some context: I grew up mostly watching films made between 1934 and 1968, during the Hays Code. There were a few exceptions, some Disney movies and films my mom’s brother introduced us to, like Spider-Man and The Lord of the Rings, which completely blew my mind. Due to that censorship, it makes sense that the first movie monster I was ever truly afraid of, the one I imagined hiding under my bed or emerging from my closet, came from the 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon. What’s striking, in hindsight, is how visually similar the creature is to the clown: the bald, egg-shaped head. Coincidentally, in Stephen King’s novel, the clown even takes on the form of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Although I was hallucinating at a very young age, around four or five, I didn’t experience truly vivid hallucinations until my junior year of high school. As a child, I saw a shadowy figure my parents called “Mr. Blob Man” emerge from my closet and hover over my bed. But junior year was different. That year, I began seeing a man wearing a cloak covered in raven feathers with very long fingernails. The first time I saw that hallucination, he was walking around the altar during Mass. I was terrified. I had been homeschooled and raised Catholic, deeply involved in the church. After my mom, my sisters, and I ended up in a domestic abuse shelter, I was placed into public school. Because of my religious upbringing, I had met and spoken with priests who had performed exorcisms. Long before I ever knew the word schizophrenia, I became convinced that I was possessed and that I was being punished.

It was during that same vulnerable year that I discovered someone had uploaded the entire Stephen King’s It miniseries to YouTube in parts. I watched all of it. Looking back, it deeply affected me at a time when my hallucinations were intensifying. Words and phrases from the series began looping in my mind over and over again: “float,” “beep, beep.” Not long after, the hallucinations shifted. I stopped seeing the man with the raven-feather cloak. I stopped seeing Mr. Blob Man. Instead, I primarily hallucinated the clown, and it stuck. Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason was how much I related to the kids in the miniseries; the kids were seeing things the adults around them couldn’t.

In college, the hallucinations had worsened. In addition to the clown, I was seeing giant spiders, a girl with a knife, but it was also during this time that I found relief through proper medical care and a strong support network. In the 2020s, my hallucinations and most of my schizophrenia symptoms began to fade significantly. They became fewer and farther between. By 2025, I experienced fewer than a handful in an entire year. Now, they tend to appear only during periods of extreme stress, sleep deprivation, or, somewhat inconveniently, when I’m giving a talk about hallucinations. And even then, they’re different. I’m not scared of them anymore, and they appear more like brief flickers, closer to PTSD flashbacks than full hallucinations, which is a reminder that the experience of psychosis itself can be traumatizing.

At this stage of my mental health journey, I no longer see hallucinations or these flashbacks as signs of crisis but rather as signals for self-care. Like rumble strips on a highway, they let me know when I’m drifting, inviting me to slow down, rest, and recenter. Listening to these signals has taught me something essential: healing isn’t about never struggling again, but about responding with compassion when we do. Be gentle with your mind. Even though I really would have preferred going through life without the side of terrifying monsters, I appreciate how hard my mind works to try to make sense of the world around me, keep me alive, and, in its own twisted way, protects me, especially during my childhood and young adulthood years. Thank you.

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Elyn Saks – 01.27.2026

When I asked Elyn Saks in 2019 what advice she had for our students at Students With Psychosis, students who were being told their academic dreams were unrealistic because of a diagnosis, her answer was immediate and unapologetic: “Don’t listen to them.” Those words have stayed with me ever since. Elyn Saks is an alum of Vanderbilt University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. Oh, and she’s also someone who happens to live with schizophrenia.

I first learned about Elyn Saks in 2014, shortly after finally receiving my own official schizophrenia diagnosis during my sophomore year of college. At the time, I was a Teaching Assistant for a course called Leadership Jumpstart through the honors college, a class I had loved as a freshman and was invited back to be a TA. But my untreated symptoms had progressed to the point where even leaving my dorm room felt impossible. Struggling to attend my own classes was one thing; struggling to show up for students who were counting on me was another.

I felt like I was failing everyone: the students, the professor who believed in me, and myself. I was not open yet about my diagnosis or the suicide attempt earlier that year. Quietly, I noticed senior TAs stepping in to cover for me. Eventually, I disclosed my schizophrenia to them, my first time ever doing so in a workplace setting. It was terrifying but met with support. One of the TAs sent me Elyn Saks’ TED Talk. That single video changed what I thought people with schizophrenia could still achieve and opened a door to hope. Representation matters.

If there is one thing that I want a person diagnosed with schizophrenia to see from my story, it is that getting a diagnosis is not where your story ends and that you have a whole lot of life and adventure to live. Do not let anyone, including yourself, let that spark of adventure or ambition die just because you have a diagnosis. Sure, I am someone who has schizophrenia, and it is okay to have limitations and need accommodations, but I am also someone with valid dreams, hopes, and goals like anyone else.

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Sitcom – 01.04.2026

When I look back on college and the quiet, life-altering power of finding the right support network, I think of these guys. Watching the Stranger Things series finale reminded me of them. They were the fellow nerds who first introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, and who I watched the very first season of Stranger Things with when it originally aired. The years from 2015 to 2016 unfolded like a TV sitcom in real time: the same cast of characters piled onto the same couch like The Big Bang Theory; nights at our go-to pub down the street, straight out of How I Met Your Mother; and eventually, an emotional good-bye to an apartment so full of memories it felt like the series finale of Friends.

They entered my life the way the pilot episode of New Girl begins: unexpectedly, when the main character walks in on her boyfriend with another girl and needs a new place to stay. In the 3 a.m. hour when I walked in on my first college boyfriend cheating, one of my friends showed up without hesitation. He was also an astrophysics student, a year ahead of me, someone I had done outreach with. He stood up to my boyfriend, helped me gather my things, and made sure I was safe. He let me crash on his couch until the dorms reopened after the summer and introduced me to his roommates. His superpower was calm, and in that season of my life, calm was exactly what I needed. The earlier season of my life had been deeply chaotic. In early 2015, my schizophrenia diagnosis was outed after police wrongfully entered my dorm room over an overreaction to the word “schizophrenia.” During that hospital stay, I also made the final decision to separate from my family, where I had a complicated history and had lived in a domestic abuse shelter for part of high school. So when I caught my first college boyfriend cheating, a visual more painful than any hallucination I had ever experienced, I had never felt more alone. Returning to my dorm and previous friend group, where police had been involved earlier that year, was not something I wanted to return to. My family was no longer an option. And my relationship was clearly over. I needed a reset. 

I needed a new season, a new setting, and a new cast. As we unpacked my things into the apartment, a book I was reading called “Surviving Schizophrenia” fell out of one of the bags a roommate was carrying. My friend knew about my diagnosis, but his roommates, who all were meeting me for the very first time, did not. What followed was an all-night, heart-to-heart conversation, sitting in a circle in the living room, opening up about mental health. We all shared. There were tears and not just mine. It remains one of the more human, meaningful moments I still cherish to this day. I reflect back on that night especially when we talk about the male loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis among men, who are significantly more likely to die by suicide than women. This was a solid group of genuinely good guys. Even after I moved my things back to the dorms, I remained the honorary fifth roommate: still crashing on the couch, with my own shelf in the kitchen; still having late-night conversations; playing D&D campaigns; watching Game of Thrones; marathoning Lord of the Rings; hosting board game nights; organizing Magic decks; getting absolutely destroyed in Super Smash Bros. but dominating at Bloodborne.

With them, I found a support network, but more importantly, I found my voice. They were the first friend group where I truly felt like I belonged. And in 2016, when I gave my very first public talk about living with schizophrenia, they showed up and cheered me on. I remember us squeezing onto this couch beforehand to take this photo for my slides, a snapshot meant to highlight the importance of finding a support network. Not everyone gets a “sitcom season” in their life, especially in today’s social-media-driven world, or as adulthood reshapes friendships, jobs, and relationships. I am deeply grateful to have had that season in 2015–2016. It became the foundation that grounded me as I stepped into 2017, when I delivered my “I Am Not a Monster: Schizophrenia” TEDxPSU talk, marking the moment my advocacy took center stage and forever changed my life. Grateful to these guys who showed up, stepped up, and had my back when life got tough. Thank you.

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Reiner – 12.19.2025

On December 11th, I shared in an Instagram post that a childhood fear of mine was unaliving my dad to protect my mom and how that fear later manifested as a hallucination of a girl carrying a knife. Three days after that post, I saw the reports about Rob Reiner , then I began seeing conversations unfold linking serious mental illness (SMI) to the tragedy. To be direct: this is a complicated topic. I have lived on both sides of this reality. As an adult, I have been physically attacked (more than once, and twice with a weapon) by someone experiencing serious mental illness. I was also once a child experiencing abuse who had violent thoughts that terrified them, thoughts I never acted on, but didn’t understand and didn’t feel safe naming. This conversation matters because yes, absolutely, we need better safeguards, earlier intervention, and stronger support systems to help prevent tragedy, but we must be careful that this urgency does not come at the cost where people struggling with violent thoughts are scared to open up or seek out care, especially for young people experiencing abuse. 

I first spoke about the hallucination of the girl with a knife in 2015, and again in 2017 very publicly in my TEDxPSU talk “I Am Not A Monster: Schizophrenia.” It wasn’t until 2024, though, that I began to actively work through and speak about how this hallucination was rooted from a childhood trauma and wasn’t until 2025 that I felt ready to speak about that connection openly. What I know from lived experience is this: fear of being labeled or associated with tragedies like Rob Reiner kept me quiet. Holding that trauma allowed it to grow into a hallucination that haunted me for over a decade which deeply impacted my quality of life and delayed the care I needed.

So as we talk about the Rob Reiner tragedy, let’s do so with care. Let’s be mindful of how our words and policies can open a door or close it for someone who is struggling with violent thoughts to seek help. If we truly want prevention, we must make room for honesty, nuance, and compassion because silence helps no one, and understanding saves lives. The good guys get SMI too, and the overwhelming vast majority of people living with serious mental illness are the good guys.

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Knife – 12.11.2025

When I explain my hallucinations to people, I often compare them to nightmares or flashbacks. For me, hallucinations often take the shape of my deepest fears or unresolved trauma made visible. One of my hallucinations was a woman who I would refer to as “the girl,” who carried a kn*fe around with her, a figure born from my most terrifying childhood fear: that I would become a monster, that one day I might unalive my dad to protect my mom. That fear shaped the landscape of my childhood, and the trauma behind it followed me for more than a decade, manifesting itself in this haunting hallucination.

The hardest conversation I’ve ever had was telling my dad about that fear. How do you even have that conversation? That conversation happened in high school. At the time, my mom, my sisters, and I had just moved back in with my dad after staying at a domestic violence shelter and then staying with a family from our church. The shelter staff discovered we were keeping our dog and cat in the minivan, parking overnight at the church lot, and walking to the shelter. After that notice, the four of us (my mom, two sisters, dog, cat, and I) lived in a one-room studio above a family from our church’s garage. Ultimately, we lost that too and ran out of options. My mom would receive legal paperwork that a police officer would drop off where we were staying. Since the family had kids, they were not comfortable with us staying there anymore because of that.

All of this happened at the same time I entered public school halfway through freshman year after being homeschooled most of my life. I remember the confusion on the guidance counselor’s face as he tried to figure out what grade level I belonged in. They wanted to place me in Algebra I Part 2 as a freshman, even though I had never taken Part 1. They did not offer any Part 1 classes during the second semester, and it was the middle of the school year. Neither of my parents went to college, and no one at home knew algebra. But the counselor wanted to place me with similarly aged peers and didn’t want to hold me back. I told them to put me in, and I would figure it out, which is a mentality that explains a lot about how I approach life.

Even though my experience with homeschooling did not prepare me well for algebra, something that I am grateful for in homeschooling is that it taught me the skill of how to self-teach. Give me a textbook or YouTube tutorials, and I will learn it. I passed the class. Not having a computer in the one-room apartment made starting school challenging, especially since I had to handwrite my first essays for English class. Freshman year felt like sink or swim. I leaned into school with everything I had because in a life where a chaotic home situation felt like I had no control, school felt like one small piece of life where I could steer my own fate, but that survival came at a cost.

Panic attacks started, so severe I would collapse at school. Eventually, my dad sat me down on the couch and asked what was going on since he would be called by the school to pick me up. And that’s when I told him the truth. I told him that growing up, I wanted to protect Mom. That I’d believed she would get in trouble if she did anything, but I was a kid, so maybe I wouldn’t or not as much. I told him about the plan I used to rehearse: taking a kitchen kn*fe and stabbing him in his sleep. I told him I meant it. I also told him, though, that when the moment would come, I could never go through with it because that wasn’t who I was. But I felt like I was failing everyone by not protecting them, and if I did, I was becoming something that I was not, and that guilt and fear tortured my mind. He cried. I had only seen him cry twice before: once in his pickup truck parked in the garage, and the second time during mass when my older sister sang a solo in the church choir. My relationship with my dad was complicated. I do have good memories with him and remember our inside jokes, and my favorite thing to do with him was go fishing; however, this was the same man who would put my actual sh*t on the garden wall for display after I clogged the toilet and laughed about it among other things.

This unhealed childhood trauma manifested itself into a hallucination that followed me into adulthood, a reminder of a chapter I barely survived. Over time, as I did the work and healed, the hallucination began to fade: slowly, quietly, like many of my hallucinations. Still, on days when anxiety pins me to the bed and my chest tightens under the weight of old memories or tasks of the day, I still feel sharp pains in my chest, uncertain if that is just my body responding to the anxiety or lingering tactile hallucinations from that childhood trauma stabbing me. Regardless, that pain still serves as a reminder of that time.

If I could speak to my younger self, I would tell her this: You did not become her. You never were her. And it was never, ever your job to carry the weight of a chaotic home. And to any kid growing up in chaos, or anyone who has had violent thoughts that scared them: your thoughts do not define you. Your family does not define you. Trauma does not get the final word. You get to write your story. You get to choose healing over fear. You get to choose a life that reflects your values. Put your oxygen mask on first. Protect your peace. Nothing, not even family, is worth losing your sanity or integrity for. Do not mistake me for the monsters that I hallucinate; I am not a monster.

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Seen – 12.06.2025

I used to be terrified of the dark. At night, my hallucinations were amplified: glowing figures, giant spiders crawling across the ceiling, and monsters coming out of the closet. My mind would spiral when I would try to fall asleep. The last time I camped in a tent overnight was in 2014, the summer before my official schizophrenia diagnosis. It is strange, because some of the brightest memories of my childhood were outside: running barefoot through the woods behind my house, riding horses at the stable where I worked, backpacking with my scout troop along the Appalachian Trail. Nature used to be the place where I felt most free.

In college, I wanted to keep that part of me alive. Freshman year, I backpacked next to the Olympic Mountains in Washington State along the Pacific Coast. But the following summer in 2014, my untreated schizophrenia symptoms became much more amplified. I hiked Mount Nittany with my first college boyfriend, and as night fell and we made camp, something shifted. The familiarity of someone who grew up so much in the woods now felt out of place. Every snapped twig or rustling leaf became a warning, and I darted the flashlight around to see what was there. The boarded-up ranger cabin looked like something out of a horror movie set. The hum of cell towers on top of the mountain kept me up.

The tent already felt small when shared, but the walls felt like they were closing in. My hallucinations were so much more vivid back then, and I was still scared of them. I remember turning and seeing the clown hallucination inside the tent with us. I panicked. I started hyperventilating and shaking, moving around the tent, too scared to stay put and too scared to get out. I felt trapped like a bug stuck in a web. My boyfriend turned on every flashlight, and what was meant to be a hug felt more like a tackle.

Now, when people ask me how to respond to someone going through an episode, I think back to my boyfriends in college because they saw so much during a period when my hallucinations were more frequent and severe. The one that stands out the most, though, was with a different college boyfriend later in 2017. I was staying over, and he had sliding mirrored closet doors in his bedroom. It was earlier in our relationship, but I did not know how to tell him that I was scared of the closet. Our first date was actually the same week that I gave my TEDx talk “I Am Not A Monster: Schizophrenia,” and we met because he was the cute guy from math class who knew all the answers, the same math class where I had hallucinated a spider on my desk and jumped up, interrupting the lecture, so I was open about my hallucinations from the beginning but I was still self-conscious of them.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night scared because one of my auditory hallucinations kept saying she was going to come out of the closet. I tried my best to not wake him. I started putting things in front of the closet, trying to barricade the door but not getting too close because I hallucinated a hand reaching out that was trying to grab me. I tried to drag the tall dresser across the carpet to put in front of the closet but was struggling because it was too heavy. That was when he woke up and sat up in bed and looked at me. I froze. I knew how it looked, but I will never forget the kindness in his eyes and how he didn’t look at me like I was crazy and didn’t confront me that the hallucination was not real. Instead, he sprung up and helped me barricade the closet door like it was the most normal thing in the world and covered the mirrors with a bedsheet.

I felt seen, because even though I had the insight to know the hallucination wasn’t real, he acknowledged that the fear I was feeling was real and chose instead to respond to that to make me feel safe. I wish more people held that kind of compassion for those who hallucinate. Would you feel scared if you were awake inside a nightmare?

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Dream – 11.22.2025

People with schizophrenia have hopes and dreams too. This photo is from 2012 in Korolyov, Russia, outside Moscow. A balloon had popped on my head, and we were about to write our hopes and dreams for the future on little white slips of paper to bury under a tree during the opening ceremony of the International Space Olympics.

2012 was a pivotal moment in my journey with schizophrenia. The pressure of that trip and the competitions were a lot, and it definitely exasperated my symptoms. It was the first time I quietly acknowledged the severity of what I was experiencing and how my condition might impact the dreams I had just planted on the other side of the world. I remember what I wrote on that slip of paper now one with the soil. I still wonder if that tree ever grew. And if, like my dreams, it took unexpected twists and turns over time, finding its own strength to weather every storm. Sure, I have schizophrenia, but it does not define me. Never stop dreaming.

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Run – 11.09.2025

There is a drastic difference between how you run when you are being chased and when you are in a race. The day that I arrived at the shelter as a freshman in high school started out tense. I remember sitting in the cab of my dad’s pickup truck, talking to him while waiting in the parking lot of dance class, when we saw my mom drive up and loop around with the minivan. The way the parking lot was set up, it wrapped in a circle around a gazebo outdoor area. I got out of the truck on the side closer to the van than my dad, which gave me a head start. I hate how I knew, without any heads-up or warning, what was going on. I knew the moment I saw the side door of the minivan swing open, seeing the van packed to the brim; I knew we were leaving my dad again. The van only slowed down and didn’t stop, and I saw my mom and sisters’ terrified faces screeching, “RUN!” It was one of those moments when you can’t give yourself time to think; you just act. The quickest way to get to them was through the center of the parking lot, cutting through the gazebo area in front of friends and their parents waiting for dance class to begin. Even in my cross-country racing days, I had never run so fast. I remember not slowing down, knowing that I was going to hit hard and that I was just going to have to deal with it, too afraid to slow down or look back, jumping and ducking to clear the doorway of the moving minivan. When I landed, I felt the sting but was abruptly jolted in a different direction as my mom hit the gas to accelerate out of the parking lot, with one of my sisters struggling to get the sliding van door closed as we pulled out into the street. The next stop: the shelter. We never went back to dance class.

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Pomegranate – 11.03.2025

This time of year, as Thanksgiving approaches, I often think back to a woman I met when I was a teenager living in a domestic abuse shelter. She was pregnant, deeply traumatized, with a fresh scar on her neck where her husband had tried to c*t her throat. She came to the shelter with her young son, who was elementary school age. I remember how she would cry uncontrollably, screaming through the fear that she was going to lose her pregnancy because she was spotting blood.

I was a freshman in high school trying to process the reason I was in the shelter and also now shared traumas of the people around me. I would often babysit her son around the shelter. It was this enormous old house built during the Civil War, the kind with creaky floors and rumors of ghosts in the basement. There wasn’t a real shower, just an old porcelain tub and a handheld spigot on the level of the house where I was assigned. We all had chores, but it was the kind of place where no matter how much you scrubbed, it never really looked clean. The boy would follow me around while I worked, telling me about his day, asking to play games, or just wanting company. All the other kids there were older than him, and he often felt left out. I tried to make him laugh whenever I could and spend time with him. None of what was happening was his fault. He didn’t really understand why he was there.

I think of him and his mom every November. She noticed how often I looked out for her son and wanted to thank me. She didn’t have any money, only SNAP benefits. So she used them to buy me a pomegranate. That was her “thank you” because I said that was my favorite food item. Since then, every year around this time, I buy myself a pomegranate and eat it alone. When you grow up in a dysfunctional home and spend much of your young adulthood moving from place to place, you create your own traditions. This one reminds me where I came from and how far I’ve come. Nowadays, I spend the holidays in Saint Louis with people who feel like family.

This year, the memory feels heavier. So many families across the country are facing threats and uncertainty around their SNAP benefits, the same program that gave that woman a small measure of dignity and helped me later on in life get on my feet as a student going in and out of the hospital while struggling with schizophrenia. People using SNAP are already going through difficult situations. Don’t make access to food one of them.

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Convenience – 09.29.2025

I am increasingly alarmed by how normalized the “reopen the asylums” rhetoric has become among mainstream social media personalities, politicians, and pundits. As someone living with schizophrenia, I want to remind people of our humanity. The photo in this post is from my last and final psychiatric hospitalization in 2018. While today’s psych wards are a far cry from the infamous institutions of the past, they remain far from ideal and can vary dramatically, even between staff shift changes. I’ve experienced everything from units that felt like an off-kilter summer camp, to the stereotypical cold white walls with the sterile smell but sticky floors of a hospital, to settings that resembled a carceral environment: strip searches, lining up for meals, barbed-wire fenced “fresh-air” area for people who smoked, etc.

One of my proudest moments inside the psych ward was when fellow patients and I organized a collective walkout from group. Staff had decided an older patient, who wore depends and sometimes went on long but harmless tangents, was too “disruptive” and isolated her to another wing. Through the nurses’ station window we’d see her watching us go to group. It was heartbreaking. In a place where power dynamics are exacerbated to the extreme and you often feel disempowered, we reclaimed our power. By refusing to attend groups until the isolated patient returned, we compelled staff to let her come back. We won. I will never forget her tearful face when she realized she was welcome again.

Early in my advocacy journey, I visited a shuttered asylum whose grounds held rows of unmarked graves. A local advocacy group was trying to restore names to those forgotten. Many will remain nameless forever. I’m acutely aware that had I been born only a few generations earlier, I might have ended up in one of those facilities, the very institutions some public figures now romanticize. But consigning people with serious mental illness to asylums is a simple solution of convenience to a complex problem, reflective of labeling someone as disruptive and isolating them just because they smell unpleasant due to having depends and speaking out of turn. People living with psychosis or other serious mental illnesses are still people. Hiding us away does not solve the problem; it merely makes it easier for society to look away.

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Rose – 04.26.2025

Earlier this year, I revisited my alma mater, Penn State. It was a bittersweet journey. In college, I had a private tradition on my hardest days: I would return to a spot where, at one point, I had planned to take my own life. Instead of following through, I would bring a flower and drop it off the side of the building which was a symbolic act of acknowledging my pain, letting go of it, and choosing to stay. Standing once again atop that snowy, icy parking garage after nearly six years, I felt my chest sink when I saw a tall chain-link fence had been installed. I couldn’t help but wonder if someone else had lost their battle with mental health here. A part of me hoped the fence was just there because of kids being reckless like me and my first college boyfriend once were, dangling our feet over the edge and stargazing until we had to outrun a security guard who chased us off. Because of the fence, I couldn’t drop the flower over the edge like I had intended. Instead, I tucked it into the links. I stayed a while, sitting with the cold, dark night and the emotions that flooded in. That moment taught me something: you don’t have to fully let go of pain to move forward. It’s okay to coexist with complex emotions and to feel both hurt and joy, fear and hope. One doesn’t have to die for the other to live. If I could speak to my younger self, I’d tell her: I am so proud of you. You are living your dream. Even though depression doesn’t care if you’re living your dream, know that I care. Even though it might be cliché to say, but it’s okay to disappear for a while until you feel like yourself again. Thank you for continuing to see the beauty in the world despite all the ugliness you’ve witnessed. It is true that there’s so much strength in the silent battles and in pulling yourself out of dark places when no one sees. Focus on that strength. Follow your joy. Surround yourself with good people. Today, I’m fortunate to be in a place where I know my own strength, found joy, and have an amazing support network. Even on days when the darkness creeps back in, I trust that I’ll be okay. Progress isn’t linear, but the trend is still upward. Proud of you. 

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Catalyst – 02.09.2025

I do not regret being open about my schizophrenia, but I strongly believe that individuals should have the right to choose when, how, and if they disclose their diagnosis. Visiting Penn State brings back a range of memories with some positive, others more difficult. Passing my former dorm, I am reminded of the day I was escorted by police into a squad car in plain view of my peers. Despite posing no threat, officers debated whether to handcuff me just because I was a person with schizophrenia and needed a mode of transportation to the hospital. This overreaction was not only unnecessary but also a violation of my privacy. It reinforced harmful stigma, making it even harder to seek support. When I returned, I had no choice but to disclose my diagnosis, not on my own terms, but in response to a situation that should never have escalated as it did. It was this event that prompted me to become an advocate.

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