- Hi, everyone.
My name is Lauren
and I make videos about what it's like living
with schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia.
And I just wanted to make a quick video today
to kind of be more transparent
about when I'm struggling more with symptoms.
And last night I was struggling quite a bit with symptoms.
And so, you know,
please pay no mind to my presentation right now
because we were supposed to film
a couple other videos this morning.
And so I went through kind of the excruciating process
of getting ready and getting presentable.
So this is not typically how I would look
after going through a night of struggle
and still kind of struggling this morning.
But last night,
it was my turn to feed Teddy or baby.
And I was really, really struggling
when I got up to feed him the first time.
I just felt like I couldn't really ground myself
within reality.
And I felt like I was experiencing everything differently.
I'm not sure if I was hallucinating or not.
I think I probably was
because I kept seeing the same person walk by
the sidewalk outside or front window several times.
And I just,
I couldn't put myself
in what was currently happening, you know?
I was like,
it felt like I was in an alternate universe
experiencing everything just kind of differently.
And this felt kind of distressing.
It had no impact on my ability
to take care of my baby in that moment.
And I got him back to bed and whatnot.
But I crawled back into bed and just kind of let Rob know
that I was having a really hard time
grounding myself within reality.
And so then he took over the rest of the night with Teddy
and he got up with him in the morning.
And I took Ativan to try to calm myself down
and try to get to sleep again.
But it was a really difficult
kind of hallucinatory delusional experience
that I had last night
and it's still kind of lingering today.
And so I just wanted to make a video
that was a little bit more real
about some of the things that I experience
when I'm not presenting on camera
and making it look like I'm symptom-free
and presenting really well.
So when things like this happen,
I tend to kind of just want to recede within myself
and just kind of withdraw.
And I think I do get a little bit more flat too.
Sometimes mood issues come into play
where I feel a bit more depressed or that kind of thing.
And so I think knowing all this,
it's probably really important
to focus on self-care today for myself.
And so whether that's getting more rest if I need to,
whether that's making myself get outside for a run,
some kind of physical activity,
just being gentle with myself today, I guess.
And, you know, I think it's really important to highlight
that this situation,
this small bit of psychosis that happened last night
and it's kind of continuing to dig into today,
was made manageable and a lot less, you know,
I don't want to say catastrophic,
a lot less debilitating than it otherwise could have been,
or that it otherwise used to be for me,
was just getting better at communicating with Rob
about what was going on.
And I think understanding and being able to communicate
with myself what was going on
and understanding that it was okay
that I was experiencing reality a little bit differently
and it wasn't going to be forever.
And just kind of talking myself through that
I think really helped in having a better understanding
of what my experiences of this are like
and how to get through it.
And that kind of thing really helped me to get through it.
All right, so that's the end of the video
where I just wanted to share a little bit
about what went on for me personally last night
and kind of a bit today.
You know, if you've experienced something like this,
we would love to hear about it in the comments below too.
If you wanna see more videos from us,
make sure to subscribe and, yeah, that's it.
So thank you so much for watching
and as always wishing you and your loved ones good health.
See you in the next video. Bye.