Fight For Life: Schizo-affective Disorder

Even though you may have thought it, you have not begun to hear anything remotely like the last of it, and there will never be a magical day of ideal balance that once found adheres, and there can be no place of real security, oh no, ideal balances happen all of the time, nightmarish too, and they last 15 seconds or so.  The only ideal balance I have and what brought me out of a 20 battle with psychotic schizophrenia and bipolar depression, a disease called schizoaffective disorder, was my growth in the gospel, which included giving up that which was damaging to my state of mind, and galvanizing to the comfort and strength of my family, which has for the large measure, put my mind in a semi-state of remission of psychosis. 

The celestial room with my youngest sister Emily, who has always been the most valuable creature in my life and always will be; as I walked in and saw my parents I was still in a disheveled state with so much processing but as I turned around and saw Emily, it was the most right moment of my life and it was the happiest moment of truth I will ever experience as I held Emily in my arms and the tears flowed like a tap that will not close, the purest tears of my life, embracing her as I “got it” and all became clear and as each of my beloved siblings with their spouses walked in with my joy compounded each time knowing that this is forever.  This is when the nightmare of psychotic schizophrenia, a state that began with a major psychotic break in March of ’94 to forever alter my brain chemistry so great was this break and so intense was the experience and it was that very night of the break that I heard my first voice… but that is too personal.

Following this came friends, one by one abandoning me and my detachment from the world around me was complete.  I had completely broken from reason as my neurons no longer had the ability to pass freely between each other for reasonable thought, and what was to follow was 20 years of misfiring chemichals and a mind sunk into a psychotic depression never having one moment’s peace.  Yes, the psychosis was tortuous, the delusion loomed large in manners that blended homogenously one delusion fitting the other, the panic attacks were so horrendous that I tried to commit suicide twice and both times I was saved in a state of unconsciousness by my father.  It was a battle of trying this and that medicine and poor mental health treatment for those without hundreds of thousands to spare for the extra niceties.  It was a brutal reality and all of the while I fought and I fought and there was nothing I could do to get back to “the way things were” and after so many years I had to realize that to live and to enjoy life at all is to accept and manage and this progressive action took place after a confinement of a few days for “acute psychosis” being already 29 and still my mind could not grasp the reality that it was indeed mentally ill. 

This episode shook me up dreadfully and I began my 30s with this progressive initiative to learn and to accept.  I had to accept that I was a mentally ill growing man and that there were measures I could take to effectuate better heath and frame of mind as my life began a metamorphosis as I emerged from graduate school in art history to enter the world on my own that took form immediately.  It is a life of beauty and simplicity with wondrous meaningful personal collections in a bright and cheery spot in down town Salt Lake City and as a successful art critic for the two top art publishing magazines/papers, I am happily doing very well.

But this new life, this new reality, truly required that moment holding my sister as I “got it.”  From that point onward, my life became a perpetual showering of blessings to dull the manic depression I was experiencing and do experience heavily and to distract me from the beast, my God blessed me with an inspiration to explore my intense passion for philosophy applied with an LDS point of view, a philosophy so bitter only to find that its antithesis is the pure manifestation of Jesus Christ and the hope and joy he brings to those who will embrace him.

Since my endowments I have embraced him as my constant companion as I know he is ever present.  Having THAT peace and security in my life, something that my philosophical contemplation only further galvanizes my testimony like a magnet to iron, for the first time in my life, something had become really real.  The schizophrenia, as it is now, with the psychosis that is a perpetual management and the bipolar leaving not a moment that is secure for me; the mentally ill must for the sake of loosing comprehension, fill in the missing gaps of reason with that which makes no sense to others and is most often, the worst kind of mental life-reality that is in fact very real to the mentally ill.  Being severely ill I have many novels of psychotic miserably self-destructive patterns of delusion, which I will never write, because that is my past and as I turn 40 in just two months I have never been more excited about anything in my life as my present and my future.

The full story of how, ultimately beneficial, this progress has been should be written.  So much has manifest in me over 20 years that I do not know how to be inauthentic, I can only be true in thought, word and deed as each requires some corporeal reflex to balance out the misfired chemicals which perpetually cause a brain that perpetually malfunctions and thinks it is the worst there is all from a naturally perpetually regenerated gene pool.  Many sink into or embrace their psychotic identities, and these are the majority that will never know any happiness like I know.  It was by obeying without exception, the feeling of truth in my heart in the moment of the bitterest hallucination, panic attack, episodes of many shapes and sizes, at every dark turn when I could not foresee what lie ahead but took a leap of trust, that I followed the hand of the savor whom without, I would never have gotten out of the mental hospital and been able to live a life that is literally “unreal” to the vast majority.  It is very real to me and only now, as the product of countless decisions big and small, do I have a life tailor-made for me as I must still live this reality and binge and purge everyday for my mind to process and release and this it does on the spirituality of life’s progress.

I dedicate this post to my new best ally in things deeply and richly spiritual as he and I share, not a common experience, but common phenomena, as I have related a charmed youth and then the horror of those twenty years only to find peace through the Gospel of Jesus Christ… this is how his situation has developed as we were raised together, he served an honorable mission to come back stalwart and strong and ready for anything life could throw his way and it did… and life was hard on him and satan knew of his sensitivity and manipulated my friend as I have experienced the like.  He and I having both gone far away from the light of Christ, to come back makes the trial of our experience and the blessings of our dedication so very profound as neither he nor I will ever stray from the rock we stand on as we know to budge is to open oneself to tests that have already been established and our fortitude proven.

My friend and I hold the Gospel above all other things as we know with out it our lives, his life would have amounted to little and mine would have long ago ended.  But, we are the first to embrace our suffering as a journey of strength to build the kind of testimonies a house can stand firmly upon as a great precipice can withstand any tempest and those within will be nurtured and comforted.  Even though our trials both he and I will last all of our days, so will our conviction as we overcome them with testimonies uncommon and a passion for the Gospel unusual for men of our age.  But we have seen and know too much not to be excited and rejoice in this glorious Gospel as Christ has proven our Savior in absolute reality to both of us and we will not think twice to let him down but will be the men he sees us to be.

Conquering Same Sex Attraction

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a powerful thing and can be the motivator for those things that the world does not think can be done.  But with a firm testimony of the Savior and the Atonement and what exactly it means to be our Savior and a profound understanding of the atonement, every personal agony of this world can be overcome with effort and faith and perseverance. 

My life’s personal trial was for me a trial of effort and faith and perseverance that was realized initially 27 years ago and I can say today that my battle, my personal struggle with compulsive same-sex-attraction that has never brought me a moment of happiness but only utter and very real misery including a completely deflated sense of self and a detachment from the family I love so much and the Gospel of Christ whom I love so much, is one that I have quite literally conquered. 

The real change in my experience only happened as I accepted the reality of the Atonement as the path to transcendence and for the first time, regardless of what I heard from innumerable sources, I knew that this would not be an ongoing labor that must be pacified and maintained with constant attention and treatment, but something I would be utterly free from and there would be no trace of any aspect of this attraction as a part of my lifestyle, as it would be utterly conquered.  

I knew I could conquer it as the Spirit bore a strong witness within me, a feeling of great strength that this could be done, and today I experience just this, a life of a single man who thinks nothing or pays no attention to the same sex and is far more concerned not only in finding a spouse for the sake of it, but is excited in the newness that has come for the first time in my life being attracted to certain women.


The significance of the quality of my personal experience was detectable early in a very sensitive, introverted, contemplative, intelligent young boy.  Although sexually neutral, I had a profound fascination for the singular qualities of my male friends that was not sexual but ones that involved characteristics I lacked such as their agility at sports, their confidence, their ability to play the kind of physical games I was never good at, strength, boldness and fearlessness, and masculinity in general. 

As I had none of these, these qualities occupied my sensibilities; my emotional intellect, my contemplative nature, and my sensitive nature yearned to be like them and it stung that I was different.  My fascination was fixated on my male friends and these qualities.

Puberty is a time of life that we do not know understand the fullness of, but it is an incredibly powerful period and for one such as I, intensely emotional.  As my friends, who were comfortably masculine, became fixated on the opposite sex, by the time puberty hit, I, with my heart aching to be like my friends, my inner self so insecure, and my mind so fascinated by the qualities I lacked, I remained fixated on my friends during puberty and in this duration of puberty my sexual future was sealed.  Had I not this intellectual sensitivity and keen interest in my male friends without my sensibilities, I would not have been so focused and my mind would have been alerted to the girls in my life and my sexuality would be fixed in a like manner.

But what manifest did.  I became acutely aware of my developed feelings at 13.  One of life’s most heavily dire moments, especially for a young boy of 13, happened while on a vacation with my immediate family to Disneyworld in a van. I was alone at the back.  I have always been a comfortably alone person, I have never fit into any groups although my friends are many I have always been a detached person, but staring upwards at nothing but lost in thought, I have never felt so alone.  In fact I became petrified.  I realized that on one hand I knew my religion was true and I loved it and honored it and was faithful to it and was proud of the good Mormon that I was.  But, being intelligent and honest, I recognized the demon that was ready to plunge at me at any moment- very real feelings I was experiencing that I could not hide from that were becoming increasingly intense and scared me as nothing in my life had scared my yet.  

This is some serious conflict for a boy of 13 and at 13 I had an immense awareness of this conflict that lay before me and I had a witness of the life that I was to face and it was a crippling feeling of overwhelming impossible devastation to my utter ruin.  To me I had no future.  This would be the dialectic of my life.




My mental illness has what is called “early onset” at about 14 and this hit me like a brick and I changed drastically in appearance and mentality in just a few weeks with my mind expanding exponentially.  I did not serve a mission. I did not believe it was possible for me as I had compulsively acted on my feelings from this young age following my early onset and had little or no self-esteem.

Soon after, my activity with the Church wavered and then I became totally inactive. Then, to compound the tumult of my life, I had a complete psychotic break which would continue for 20 years and was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder; full blown schizophrenia and bipolar and one of the most serious mental illnesses if not the most traumatic. 

Although I consider this to be the most arduous and demanding challenge of my life with the most ubiquitous effect, my sexuality has always hurt more and damaged me more as a human being causing an intensity and depth of emotion far more penetrative and far more real than any of those of schizoaffective disorder which are quickly mended, while the insecurity that comes when I compulsively acted on my same-sex behaviors caused a lasting insecurity that was deep and penetrative and truly debilitating unlike any disability.

During my early years of schizoaffective psychosis, I sought spirituality as a remedy for psychosis and I tried to curtail my compulsive desires.  I was not sexually active for long periods of time, years, but the feelings were stronger than ever. Such feelings are only more active with bipolarism as compulsive sexual drive and the emotional devastation this compulsion causes is a primary symptom of bipolarism.  


The dialectic presented me when I was 13 had been ever-present throughout my life and in my mind was a scale that I attempted to resolve for 13 years.  This scale would vacillate with one side weighing more heavily than the other, ever shifting, but I always knew in all truth, that they were irreconcilable.

After graduate school, moving out on my own, completely independent and having my own life for the first time, I made my resolve and was acutely aware of where I would ultimately find my peace, as innately I had always known. 

The world I stepped into without a safety net and little established security was unsound and unsure. This was brutally evident and manifest from all directions.  The world I found was a different one than the padded and cushioned one I was accustomed to and there was no body that had any real interest in me and I mattered very little in the vastness of what I experienced around me and I was faced with a world that is nothing of comfort but an arena for a fight and without a support group, I had no one, no fans cheering me on and it was brutal and bloody in its cold harshness.    

The scales immediatey dropped from my eyes and in 2005, the year I moved out, I was made acutely sure of what I wanted and what mattered to me and quickly and decisively made my decision and although it was still a progress involving strengths I did not know I had and faith I lacked the faith in myself to believe, I made the unequivocal decision to choose God and family and for the first time since I was a petrified boy of 13, 17 years prior, I knew then unequivocally the course my life would take and it was a feeling of great comfort and the beast was at bay.  

I knew for a certainty there was no future for same sex attraction in my life and I became active in the Church again. The progression from 2005 till December 27th of last year, 2011, and my worthy unity with all of my family in the Oakland temple was not a smooth or an easy one by any means, it was rough and rocky, but I was determined. Yes I would falter in several instances in minor ways but everyone who knew me and my spirituality knew what my desires were for my self and I never questioned my resolve and put a tremendous amount of work into overcoming what puberty had caused; this was no passive thing and I am today a worthy Melchizedek priesthood holder and hold a temple recommend honorably.




Since attending the temple and perpetual in depth study and growth I am a happy and successful man unlike I could never have hoped to be with more security that I could wish for.  Had I lingered in the mires of my compulsive debauchery that claimed my spirit for so much of my time here on earth I would never have experienced real peace in this life.  But God loves me very much and The Gospel of Jesus Christ manifest in his atonement allowed me to be free, to loosen the bonds that bound me to sin, to free me from compulsion to emerge whole and cleansed.  

The blessings since have been abundant and joyous. Most significantly the two desires that I chose, God and family, these relationships have been restored with beauty, renewed and made whole in the infinitesimal love that is God’s ultimate plan for each of his children that we may all share in as we are all enlisted in this magnanimous and glorious work and to feel His mighty power in our lives to make anything possible that we ask of Him.