Learning to Live with My Schizophrenia Diagnosis

I didn't receive a diagnosis for myself, I think my parents may have, but I didn't receive a diagnosis for a couple of years. While I was coming to terms with everything, and I was seeing a psychiatrist, and I was living at home, and just trying to get a handle on things, I think my parents were the ones who told me that I was schizophrenic from what they had heard from my psychiatrist.

At this point, this was probably a year or two into it and I was fully accepting that I was having trouble. I was taking my meds, just trying to get better, and I think the diagnosis itself sort of was a label for me, something to put my thoughts into, for me to just figure out fully what was wrong with me.

I think the label is a good thing but it can also be a bad thing because it's pretty easy to live with your label. It's pretty easy to let that word take control of you and give in to the fact that you're crazy instead of working hard to overcome this illness or whatever it is you have.

So, crazy has sort of negative connotations, but I have decided to own it and embrace it and use it as a term of endearment because it describes my experience the best way that other people can relate to it. I mean, yeah, I'm crazy, but it's fine, I'm also pretty normal.