Speak Up

Is your dad schizophrenic? I have been asked this so many times by doctors, police officers, friends, even family. No, he’s high on meth. My dad is two completely different people, the sober jolly man who helps homeless people (because he’s been there) and the scary cranked out one who thinks my mother (also a meth user) is trying to kill him. When my dad has been using he starts freaking out thinking that he has been poisoned. He has me rush him to the hospital only to believe that the doctors want to harvest his organs. He ran half a mile barefoot through blackberry bushes because he believed someone was chasing him only to come out the other side looking like the little girl from The Exorcist. He jumped off the second story of a house and ripped his spleen all because he thought someone was behind him with a gun. He is constantly calling the phone company to report a "lost" phone after he chucks his out the window convinced that he's being tracked by it. He runs red lights because the old couple in the car next to him look suspicious, and the entire world is in on my mother’s quest to kill him. Surrounded by police officers trying to arrest him, his kidneys fail from being severely dehydrated and he almost dies. What if he had been in the woods by himself? He kidnapped my sister and I from the hospital when we were toddlers after we were taken away from him when he brought us in because he thought there were bugs under our skin. He has been visited by aliens, the devil, and endured all manner of horror because of drug induced psychosis. When clean, my dad reflects on his experiences which he remembers clear as day and he cries wondering why he keeps relapsing when he knows what will happen to him. He knows that there is nothing more terrifying than believing that you are actually going to die, that the temporary high is not worth the panic and paranoia, but he keeps using. People ask me, is your dad schizophrenic? No, he's not.