A welcome and an explanation

My wife is mentally ill. She has schizophrenia.  These are hard words to write, to read, and especially hard to live.  But I’ve had to embrace them, to accept them as true and to deal with them.  This blog then is part of that process.  I have been encouraged by a friend whom I have helped to create this blog.  I feel silly saying I’ve helped him – really I just listened to him, as did others in the support group.  But our stories were very similar, and it helped him to know that others have gone through very similar experiences and lived through them, just like it helps all of us to know that our suffering is not unique.  So I guess by my  living the closest thing to a normal life I could I have helped my friend see how he might do the same.  

The purpose then of this blog is two-fold.  One purpose is a sort of self-therapy -- writing therapy to help myself.  The second purpose is the same trite but useful purpose all personal stories have – to let others know that what they are going through has been gone through before.  So the entries you read here (if anyone in fact does ever read them) will be the story of my descent into the maelstrom of mental illness.  The title is from the Edgar Allen Poe story “A Descent into Maelstrom.”  I named it this because being a part of a loved one’s slide into mental illness is very much like Poe’s description of being pulled into a vortex of whirling water.  The panic at the beginning, the terrible pull towards what seems certain disaster, the clarity that comes with accepting and then observing the happenings – and then the hope that arises when you see things escape destruction – all of the descriptions from Poe’s story seem to be a perfect metaphor for this terrible journey.

The future entries will be my attempt to chronicle what has happened as well as what is happening.  I will be writing the truth, though I realize the truth can look different depending upon one’s viewpoint.  I hope I don’t make myself look like some kind of saint or martyr.  That’s not my intention.  Just getting all of this on paper and trying to make it all makes sense is all I am looking for.  If anyone out there stumbles upon this blog and finds something useful in it, that is more the better.

Thanks for reading.