My therapist Jill, at the Bristol Regional Counseling Center, in Bristol is a genius practitioner specifically in understanding my illness, and what exactly it means. I have many times asked doctors, nurses, and therapists what it means that I am schizoaffective, but they never seemed to have the kind of insight on the illness as she.

When people look at me, neither party really knows what is going on in the mind of the other. People can know me well and be good guessers. I sometimes can make super psychic seeming remarks. But other people never know what the other is thinking. This truth manifests in paradox in the schizoaffective mentally ill person. I never knew before that this was anything that made us unique, or that it even was really true that others never can read my thoughts or I know for sure what someone else is thinking. I often have believed I knew what someone thought and felt as if we were sharing the same experience and air. With this truth that I just learned, comes much awareness. With it also has always caused and solicited in me and in others a terrible degree of hurt, to the point that I believed I would never be forgiven. In my purist way, I conceived that my not being understood, meant I might be wrong in some way. I am judgmental to a fault and self critical and randomly and harshly critical of others and it always has been something that caused me to have hurt emotions and to lose friends like flies, and to exhaust and deplete my reserve of people who love me no matter what I do, think, say, or feel.

The thing that I learned today is that no one will ever really understand me, including quite possibly me, and in learning that, I learned more about myself than I could ever express. One thing that comforts me about that and that might sooth others with schizoaffective disorder experience a similar reality in terms of our abilities to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. In fact, I learned today that is one main element to what makes us have this diagnosis.

I am going to abbreviate my thoughts here because I have a concern that others might be reading every word I write with concern to watch for bad dangerous thoughts. I don't want others to have to watch my thoughts like that. And I don't have bad and dangerous thoughts anymore. And I am pretty sure I have gotten out of the bad part of this and am now just flying up in my cognitive understandings of things, merrily clarifying and improving myself.

Thank you for this blog, bro.

PS Sometimes, I need peace, so I plug my own ears.