I was rediagnosed several times with various serious mental illnesses until the most dreaded diagnosis came: schizophrenia. As soon as the words came out of the doctor’s mouth, my line of thinking was: I am not "normal," and my life is not normal, and it will never be normal again. In fact, my life is over. I saw myself as separate from other people, like observing the world and everyone in it from behind a pane of glass, especially since I didn’t know anyone else with my diagnosis. Not only did I consider myself the perpetual "crazy person in the room," or that "friend with all the problems'; I saw myself as the abnormal one. When I have gotten really frustrated with my life, I exclaim, “Why can’t I have a normal life like other people?”

Because my life was interrupted by mental illness in my early 20s, my life was on hold. I watched everyone else develop careers, get married, and have kids. I perceived them as having this predictable, linear life that I was supposed to have, too, if I had ended up "normal" like everyone else. In fact, I had this grandly oversimplified view of people’s lives around me: Everyone has a regular life where normal things happen at typical times in life, except for me.

I think I honestly focused on the lives of people whose lives I wished my life were like, and not everyone’s lives. And there’s no way to compare two lives, as every life is so unique. The........

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