I was born and raised in the small town of Kidron, in rural Ohio, about an hour south of Cleveland. I always enjoyed drawing as a child, but I didn’t become serious about it until I was fifteen. That’s when I decided I wanted to go to art school after high school, and specifically, it was my dream to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Unfortunately, my mother, a fundamentalist Christian, didn’t approve of my love of art and did everything she could to prevent my going. We fought what was for me an increasingly cruel and desperate battle of mental and emotional attrition that lasted three years. It ended bitterly when she finally relented, not because she was persuaded by my arguments, but because SAIC made it more affordable for me to go there than the other school I’d applied to. To me, life’s possibilities and my potential seemed limitless. My mother wanted to draw a circle around me and keep me as small and narrow-minded as she was. I may have won, but in the end I felt like I lost because I knew she didn’t believe in me. I’ll always consider my mother my first and worst enemy.

The main reason I wanted so much to go to SAIC was that at that time it was rated one of the three best art schools in the country. I thought it would be the perfect place for me to make my dream come true. Within the first week, however, I was completely disillusioned. I was appalled at the poor quality of most of my classes, the complete inadequacy of technical instruction, and the mind numbing hours I was expected to stay in class. Studio classes lasted from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, with an hour break for lunch, and two short breaks in between. A full time student was expected to take two or three studio classes per semester, and the creative demands, combined with the complete lack of direction or progression towards defined goals made the school’s expectations a joke. I managed to keep up the first year, but by the end of my second year I was completely burned out and blocked creatively. If SAIC had set out to systematically destroy my confidence, my initiative, my inspiration, and my creativity, they could not have done a better job.

I was so shocked and underwhelmed by the disparity between the school’s reputation and my experience that after the first week I dropped out. I couldn’t figure out how I could have been so wrong. When I told my parents, my mother started talking about my coming home. My relationship with her had become so poisoned by that time that going back to Ohio was unthinkable. I was so devastated emotionally and mentally from fighting with her that when things fell apart at SAIC, I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. The only way I could stay in Chicago seemed to be for me to reenroll at SAIC and make the best of it. My mother was so adamantly opposed to my attending art school that I knew that she would never let me choose an alternative. I reluctantly decided to give SAIC a second chance, since it seemed to be the only education I could get. Going back was the most traumatic thing I’d experienced up until that time. I believed myself to be a complete failure for having chosen unwisely, and fiercely blamed myself for having ruined my life. 

During the two years I spent at SAIC, I observed a few students who seemed to be happy with the education they were receiving, but the majority seemed to be as lost and directionless as I was. In the painting and drawing classes I took, almost no one ever finished anything. A lot of the time I was so stuck, I didn’t know how to finish what I had started, and that had never happened to me in high school. 

Eventually I couldn’t take anymore, and I dropped out of SAIC. I had gone there with so much talent and promise, and all of it had just vanished. No one knew how much I wanted to succeed, or how desperate I was to be an artist. It meant too much to me to discuss with anyone, and I learned to keep my pain to myself and focus on other things. By the time I quit school, I was already used to feeling like a loser, and I would feel that way for many years. The guilt I felt was so intense I literally couldn’t bear to examine my choices to figure out where I had gone wrong. For a long time I made no progress. In time I asked my mother to help me apply for financial aid to go to another art school, but she refused to help me. I knew I would have to wait until I was twenty-four, when I could legally apply on my own. 

Years went by and I moved away, and it wasn’t until I was twenty-six that I came back to Chicago and applied to go to the American Academy of Art. By then, I was working full time as a security officer, and it worked out well for me to work at night and go to school part-time in the morning.

Right away I knew I was going to be able to learn what I wanted to know at this school, and I was filled with anticipation. I had been lost for almost ten years, and finally I began to feel a glimmer of hope for my future. I had felt like a failure for so long that when I finally knew what I was doing, I wanted to do everything I could to succeed. I felt I just had to make up for lost time. I was working full time at night and doing over fifty hours of homework a week, mostly for one class. We had strict deadlines we had to meet for our projects, and since I deliberately chose difficult subjects, I always finished at the last minute. The pressure I felt to succeed was immense. I had believed myself to be a failure for so long that when I began to draw again I felt INTENSE anxiety. It felt like there was an iron band around my chest, and it was a constant struggle for me to breathe. I don’t think I took a deep breath the whole time I was in school.   

I knew if I failed again I would never be able to face myself, and so even though I didn’t know what I was doing a lot of the time, I didn’t allow myself to make mistakes. I willed my work into being, and the results were immediately impressive. It was thrilling but exhausting, and in the end I couldn’t handle the pressure. Toward the end of my second semester, I often only got four hours of sleep a day during the week. After that, I decided to take a break. I had completed four classes of my freshman year for the second time, but now I knew several techniques, including a version of the one I use in my work today, and I finally knew where I was going. Riding the high of my rediscovered talent, I still kept working as hard as I could, and in the end the exhaustion and anxiety it caused proved to be too much.

In February, 2003, right after my twenty-eighth birthday, I lost my mind in a very public and humiliating way – I had a breakdown at work. It was awful. The cops were laughing and making fun of me when they came to take me away.

I was in the hospital for about ten days or so (I couldn’t keep track of the time) and when I got out I still didn’t know what had happened to me. I had been fired from my job, which I absolutely loved, and all my coworkers knew I was crazy. I was so ashamed. I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. I hurt all over. 

I wandered around in a daze for a few weeks trying to make sense of things. The hospital had given me some medication, but they were huge capsules that made me feel like I was going to pass out when I took them, so after trying a couple, I just threw them away. (Big mistake.)

Eventually I got a job working for another security company, but I was having a hard time managing my symptoms, so I worked part-time on the weekends, and tried to take it easy during the week. The form of therapy I chose for myself was drawing. I would get up in the morning, take a shower, eat a snack and just draw all day long. I don’t remember feeling anxious at all during this time, at least not when I drew. My life was a shambles and it was the only thing I had left. It was my one solace. 

I could write a book about all the terrible things that happened to me when I lost my mind. I was suicidal for months, years. I was desperate to find a way out of my situation, but too scared to actually hurt myself. I moved to an apartment on the sixth floor and I had a big window with a wide sill, and every day I sat on it and thought of just letting myself fall. There was a wrought iron fence at the bottom though, and I was afraid I would be impaled or crippled. 

I finally realized I couldn’t work anymore when I was fired again in 2004, and that September I came home to my parents, from whom I’d been estranged for seven years. I showed up with the clothes I was wearing, and a few more in a little satchel, the main contents of which were my drawing supplies. It was all I had left in the world. I’d lost my mind, my job, my apartment and its contents, my reputation and my self-esteem, all in eighteen months. I tried my best to get by without taking medication, but it was impossible. I kept having breakdowns. I was paranoid, delusional, and hallucinating all the time.

The road to recovery was acutely painful. I tried taking several different medications, but they all caused horrific side effects. I was only on one medication that didn’t cause me to gain weight, and that was Haldol. Haldol crippled me. Initially it gave me convulsions, and after that I lost the use of my hands. I couldn’t brush my teeth, butter my toast, wash my hair or sign my name. It was harrowing. So when my doctor finally prescribed Abilify, I just gave up. I didn’t think there was anything better out there, and I resigned myself to suffering.

I took Ablilfy off and on for about a year, but in the end I stopped because I was gaining so much weight and because I couldn’t do anything. I tried to hold down a job, but again I was having trouble managing my symptoms, so in April of 2006, I finally gave up, walked off my job in the middle of a shift and went home. The next day I bought a one-way ticket back to Chicago. I decided I was going to live on the streets and hopefully just die. 

There was one women’s shelter that offered beds in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, and you could become a member if you followed certain steps, which turned out to be too difficult for me since I was in a constant state of mild to moderate psychosis by this time. Or you could arrange to spend one night at the shelter if you called from a specific pay phone at a specific time. This arrangement worked well for me the first two times I tried it, but when I went to the pay phone the third time, I found it had been vandalized. The phone had been uprooted (probably by another frustrated homeless person). So, I went to another phone and explained the situation and was told that I really needed to call from the designated pay phone. I kept repeating that the designated phone had been vandalized, that it was completely detached and lying on its side, and the woman on the other end of the phone kept insisting that I use that phone! I finally talked her into putting me on the list, but in the end it was too much for her, because the last thing she did was remind me again to use that phone! It was a conversation straight out of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch 22. After that, I was through with shelters, and took my chances and spent my nights on the street. (To my knowledge, that pay phone was never fixed the entire summer I was homeless. It was in a central location, and I often walked by that corner and noticed it was still broken. As it turned out, if I had spent my nights in a shelter, I would have missed the spectacular lunar eclipse later that summer, an experience I’ll never forget.)

Being homeless presented me with dilemmas I’d never thought of before. The closest thing to a toilet was a port-a-john along the marina in the park, and that was mostly what I used. However, the park was closed at night, and as a consequence I spent that time dozing, sitting on a low wall in front of a parking lot on Broadway. Often, usually between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m., I’d wake up and feel nature’s call. I’d have to decide whether to walk the mile-and-a-half back to the marina or find an obligingly dark corner in an alley. At that hour, with dawn on the horizon, I always chose the park. Even though I knew the park was dangerous (there were always men wandering around), the thought of getting caught with my pants down in an alley seemed even more risky. The thing was, after I got to the park and used the toilet, I never felt like walking back to my concrete bed on the street. Instead I found a dimly lit bench nearby and waited for morning. I tried to stay awake and vigilant, but that got to be boring and inevitably I would decide to doze lightly. Sometimes a man would wander by and I’d wake up and give him a look that let him know I knew exactly what he was up to, and when he moved on, I’d go back to sleep. 

At that time in my life I had nothing more to lose, and as a result I had great courage. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel fear, but that I didn’t let it stop me from doing what necessity demanded, and what I felt was best under the circumstances. That being said, I took tremendous risks when I was homeless. Part of me was cautious, and another part of me enjoyed the danger. I would lay my arms along the back of the bench, cross my ankle over my knee like it was noon instead of night, and wait for something to happen. Luckily nothing ever did. I wasn’t nearly as confident as my body language indicated, but I wasn’t about to make myself a bigger target by letting my fear show. I always wore military fatigues, which I hoped suggested I knew how to fight. If someone bigger and stronger than I was had wanted to hurt me, it would not have been hard. I tried my best to look tough, but I knew I was vulnerable, whatever my other delusions.

My biggest concern when I was homeless was getting enough to eat. It took a while for me to find places that fed the homeless, and my first week I didn’t eat anything for about four days. The pain was so intense it was all I could think about. I finally went looking in dumpsters and found some rotting bananas and a couple outdated but unopened jars of salsa. (Not very good, but it was something.) Eventually I was directed to several charities that offered meals throughout the week, but it turned out they were all closed on Sundays. So from Saturday evening until Monday morning I went hungry. Sunday afternoons I wandered around the park smelling all the picnic food, and in the evenings I walked the streets and smelled all the restaurant food. I managed to cope with this at first because I needed to lose weight, but eventually it became too painful, and I decided to apply for food stamps. I filled out a form, but when I turned it in, the woman I gave it to promptly lost it and plead ignorance. What with my symptoms, I didn’t have the energy to argue with her or fill out another form, so I just gave up and left. I was losing so much weight that my pants were falling off my hips and I had to hold them up when I walked. One Monday, I ate breakfast, and it didn’t even make a dent in the hunger I’d been feeling the previous weekend. I tried to get extra help from one of the organizations that fed me, but they gave me a snack and told me not to expect more. It was horrible. You don’t often think of people starving in America, but unfortunately it happens. 

When I think of being homeless now, I would do everything I could to avoid it, but at the time I was somehow just ready for it. It was the next step for me. Life had beaten me down, and I was able to cope with the reality of not having a home. And the thing about schizophrenia is, when you’re delusional, everything is an adventure. And because I was paranoid all the time I didn’t talk to anybody, so I managed to stay relatively safe. I didn’t let anybody get near me. Sometimes men would come and just beg me to go home with them or follow me around until I actually had to step out in traffic to get rid of them. I did my best to manage and mask my symptoms, but on October first, I lost the battle and had a huge breakdown. The cops came and took me away, laughing at me and making fun of me, as usual. 

I wound up back with my parents and back on Abilify. The side effects of this medication were much, much worse the second time I took it. Basically it turned me into a vegetable. It increased my appetite, so that I began rapidly gaining weight. It made me lethargic and destroyed my ability to concentrate. I couldn’t read, and I couldn’t draw. I could barely function. Maintaining personal hygiene was the most difficult part of my day. I’d lean over the tub and wash my hair, wait half an hour, and then wash my body. When I shaved my legs, I had to shave one, wait awhile, and shave the other. Taking a complete shower or shaving both my legs together was too overwhelming and difficult. I’d been suffering pretty much nonstop for four years, and when this happened, I just gave up. My stupid doctor didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with my being miserable, fat, and beyond suicidal. I was too far gone to care whether I lived or died. I gained over a hundred pounds in a little over a year. Eventually I filled out a survey at the doctor’s office and someone informed my doctor that I wasn’t doing too well, so in 2008 he finally put me on Geodon. 

It took a few weeks for me to realize I could control my appetite and in general function much better. When I did, I started walking and later exercising, and eventually lost about a hundred pounds in ten months. I started drawing again, but I could only do it part-time for a few months before I would get burned out and have to stop. I would draw, then stop, draw, then stop, and it was hard to make any progress because I still didn’t have any clear direction. Because my drawing technique is so complex, I kept having to relearn it, because I would forget it during the times I wasn’t working. I finally made notes, and after that was able to pick up where I left off each time I took a break.

In 2012, I finally bought a little camera so I could take my own pictures to use as references in my work. I’ve never heard anybody say anything good about low self-esteem, but I have something to say: when you feel like a failure, and you don’t believe in yourself, and you finally work up the courage to try something new, it feels absolutely incredible when you actually succeed. You think, “Wow! I actually did it!” That’s how I felt when I started taking pictures. My pictures are really nothing to brag about, but they work as references, and for me that’s good enough. I would describe my photography skills as unsophisticated but effective. I manage to get the job done, and what I lack in skill I make up for in imagination.

In 2014 something important happened. First, I learned how to capture light in my drawings, and my work acquired its characteristic look. For me this was a dream come true. I had longed to make beautiful drawings for so many years and in October, I finally began to do so.

Some of the best movies (like From Here to Eternity, or The English Patient) show individuals suffering against a backdrop of epic tragedy, but you can take it from me, the most painful suffering is the kind that happens when the rest of the world goes on as usual. If everybody is feeling similar pain, there’s more sympathy and understanding. When you’re the only one hurting, people tend to look the other way. When I lost my mind every single person I cared about walked away. The few who stuck around initially, lost interest when I didn’t make an immediate recovery. Even my family ignored my suffering. When someone gets cancer, people rally around and offer time, money and emotional support to the victim. Mental illness is far less attractive, and every bit as painful. When I see someone who suffers from mental illness, I feel compassion for that person, because I know how hard it is to have that kind of disability.

My story would not be complete without mentioning my other great love, which is reading. I learned to read when I was four years old and read a thousand books by the time I was thirteen. Since then, I estimate that I’ve read another thousand books, though it may be slightly less since I’ve begun rereading some of my favorites, and also because I like reading big, thick, books. Reading, for me, is a way to regenerate after I’ve worked for a long time, and I do it with the passion and drive I experience when I create. My favorite genres are history, art history, literature, biography, and, to a lesser degree, popular fiction. I also enjoy reading poetry, but that is a new pastime for me, and I read with the appreciation of an amateur. You can learn a lot from books, more, in some cases, than you can from actually living. 

I find wisdom in many places, and it doesn’t seem nearly as hard to find as it did when I didn’t know where to look or listen. Life is a great teacher, I admit. But sometimes life tells only one story. That’s when I like to look back at history, for the lessons in contrast and similarity to my own experiences. If I had to choose between drawing and reading, I’d choose reading. Sometimes it seems like drawing has a limited number of lessons to teach, but then I know I still have more to learn. Reading, however, is a never-ending journey, and I am humbled by the knowledge that far more talented writers and artists have cast a light on life than I ever will.

Marcia Thornton

04/12/16