I cannot imagine a reality more harrowing or isolating than being imprisoned by the relentless grip of schizophrenia. It is a mental and emotional landscape marked by chaos—a place where love feels unreachable, peace is a stranger, and rest is a distant dream. Day and night, the torment is unyielding, a storm without reprieve, a darkness that clings to the soul. In that world, every moment is a battle to hold on to fragments of clarity, to remember that there was once light, once hope. 

Escaping that prison was nothing short of a miracle for me—an intervention that defied all logic and expectation. It is from that place of healing and hard-won freedom that I now share my story. My deepest hope is that these words might echo within the hearts of others who suffer silently, helping them feel seen, understood, and—most of all—not alone. If even one life is touched, if even one person begins to believe that healing is possible, then sharing this journey will have been worth it.

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Chapter One

In 1964, my family shattered into a million little irreparable pieces. I was thirteen at the time and had suffered through as many years as I could remember of yelling and screaming, crying, acting out, and fighting that went on night after night and never seemed to end. There were the nights of drunken stupor, the rides in the car with my drunken mother, who almost killed us when she nearly drove us over the side of a bridge into the bay. I was used to chaos, and it erupted almost nightly throughout my childhood.

We were four — three girls and a boy — in seven years. As the youngest, I was on my own. I had to figure out how to cope and get through the madness that ran rampant in our house.

I had learned to bury my feelings. My father couldn't deal with anything negative, so he told me I didn't feel what I felt, and I learned to repress everything I felt. This turned me into an angry pre-teen and later a teenager who was out of control. By the time I was twelve, I had a chip on my shoulder, a rebellious spirit, and I did whatever I wanted.

My mother finally left when I was thirteen, after years of drinking and a weekend of almost drinking herself to death. Her departure was the end of the family, as I knew it, and it caused us all to splinter off into what we all still call the every man for himself existence.

This every-man thing played out in every aspect of my life. At thirteen, I knew I was on my own, and no one was going to save me from a life that I hated and a family that barely existed. I pictured myself sitting in the branches of a tree, high above a house that had rotted, and everyone had left. And it played out that way as I matured from thirteen to eighteen. My oldest sister had left earlier. My brother went into the Navy. My sister and best friend, Nene, married a guy at eighteen with whom she had had three dates because she wanted to get out. And I, at eighteen, was going to escape to college.

I kept my eyes on that goal all senior year, as it offered relief and escape from the life I knew. I was ecstatic (to put it lightly) about leaving behind a childhood of emotional abuse and a shattered family.

I watched my siblings and their ways of coping through those years, and the mistakes they made. There were a few that I had determined not to make. I would not get pregnant. I would not get married early. And I wasn't staying in my small hometown. I thought that the older ones were the lucky ones because they'd escaped earlier, but I learned later they had issues I didn't, because they'd been around it for longer than I.

It embodied the alcoholism that saturated our home, the elephant in the room, that destroyed my mother, made my alcoholic father a neglectful parent and spouse, and ruined the rest of us. To one degree or another, we all suffered, and the suffering went on for years as we attempted to sort out what had happened to us.

We weren't a Christian family, but we attended the Methodist church, where I was told by my Sunday school teacher that the story of Daniel in the lion's den was not a true story. At five years old, I was smart enough to know that something was mistaken about that. I didn't think that God would make up stories like that. After all, He was God.

I was interested in this God who saved a man from getting eaten by lions, so I set myself on a path to find Him. If He could save Daniel from the lions, maybe He could save me from my terrible life. So, my search for God began at age five and continued until I was nineteen, when I found Him. I didn't find Him in a Methodist church.

When I was a child, I thought that maybe the angels knew where He was, so I would go to my front yard, get down on my knees, and pray to them. Unfortunately, the angels either didn't hear my prayer or they didn't care because they didn't show up.

Undaunted, I tried some of my friends from different denominations and inquired if they knew how you could find God. By then, I was about nine, and no one so far had given me an answer. None of my friends had ever had any experience with God, not even the Catholics, who were the most serious of the bunch. They had rituals, Mass, and Holy Days, and that was heads above anything we had at my church. We had potlucks and nice candlelight services at Christmas, and even a pretty Easter pageant, but beyond that, we had little to offer.

So, this God I sought eluded me. And honestly, I have to admit that I was rather sporadic in my search for Him. I called to him now and then, and maybe I should have been more serious because maybe He would have answered. I guess I just wasn't desperate enough.

When I was seventeen, I moved in with my Great Aunt and her family. The backstory to that is that my mother never returned after she left, and my father remarried and moved away. I lived with this new family for less than a year and then moved in with my mother. Turned out that was a disaster because my mother was deeper into her addiction, and in five days, I was back home. When I got there, I was told that I would live with my aunt and finish high school in my hometown. That was a good plan, as far as I was concerned. After I moved in with her, I cranked up my search for God and started reading the Bible, hoping it would give me a clue how I might find Him.

Up to this point, I was an awful teenager and probably not one that most parents would want. There are many things I did from the age of twelve to eighteen that I don't admit. Let's just say that I'm glad that when I had children that none of them were like me.

But I will tell you that I was rebellious, angry, often depressed, out of control, broke the law, abused myself in many ways, attempted suicide twice, and pretty much hated my family.

For example, there was the time that my group of friends got drunk and broke into a summer home on the water and stole a gun. There was the married guy I dated for a while. Well, two of them. And there was the time I went to Philadelphia for the weekend with my boyfriend, before my fourteenth birthday. You don't need to know much more than that because I think it rounds out the picture.

So, the years from the time my mom left until I was seventeen were riddled with wild escapades like binge drinking, promiscuity, and staying out all night (or all weekend). Trust me, it would chill your heart to know the details, and my father, being emotionally and physically absent much of the time, didn't seem to notice. He did not attempt to pull me back or stop me, even when I started smoking at thirteen. I could do whatever I wanted, and none of it was good.

It was those years I suffered under the hands of my alcoholic parents that left me with little sense of self and a weak identity. Life had broken me, really—up one side and down the other. I was heartbroken, depressed, angry, resentful, and sad. I'd had years of being told that what I felt wasn't what I felt, so I had repressed all my negative emotions, and it was that mess that made me act out. And those buried, wounded emotions would later play a big part in what happened to me when I was in college, and it would take me a lifetime to overcome all of it.

But at seventeen, while at my aunt's house, I kind of settled down for a while. Living with my aunt was a good thing. It anchored me in reality. So, I was pretty good except for the binge drinking and the fact that I was dating a married man who had ties to organized crime. God had still eluded me.

Tha winter, when it came time to apply to college, I thought I might want to be a teacher, so I applied to a state college and a private college on Staten Island. I was accepted at both, but my father had gone bankrupt the year before, so there was no money for college.

This put a huge hole in my plan because I needed to get to college more than anything else in the world. There was no way I was staying in a small tourist town and working in the local grocery store. I wanted to escape that town and my life so much that I felt a desperation deep in my soul, and I think I ached when I thought about it. On top of that, I was fearful that I would be stuck in that town and never get out. I'd be like some of the girls I went to school with who got married and had a few kids, and did nothing with their lives. I had plans. I wanted to do something with my life. Teach maybe. Become a cop or a social worker. Be a writer. Something. Anything, but I had to get out of that town.

I had a friend named Mike who had been my best friend since I was five. He was the guy I always thought I'd marry because I'd been in love with him since I first met him. I told him about my desperate situation. He was one of the Catholic kids in our town, and he shocked me when he suggested I pray and ask God to send me the money for college.

First off, I didn't know that Mike prayed. Second, I didn't know that God gave people money. I'd heard nothing like that. Peace, maybe, but money? Nah. But I had nothing else going for me except college loans, and I didn't think that I could get enough loans to pay for college. I was planning to go over 250 miles away from home, and I was going to need money to get back and forth and for all the stuff I needed.

So I prayed. Every night for several months, I prayed and asked God for money for college because I didn't know what else to do. I kept reading the Bible and praying at night and telling God how desperate I was and how much I needed His help. I wasn't sure that He heard me or even cared, but I prayed because He was my only hope. And I did not know if He would even answer me. Why? Who was I?

In the early spring, just as the weather was changing and the cold weather slipped away, the school counselor called me into his office to talk. I did not know why he wanted to see me, but I figured I'd probably gotten in trouble because I was always getting in trouble. I had recently run off something personal on the mimeograph machine in the school office and handed it out around school, and the content made many people mad.

So here I was in the counselor's office, waiting for my punishment. I don't remember my counselor's name, but he lived one house down from the house I grew up in and knew all about my crazy family, just like everyone in town knew all about my parents' alcoholism. So, I sat waiting for my punishment.

When I entered his office, he smiled at me and asked me to sit down. Then he started talking to me about college and where I wanted to go and how I was going to get there. I showed him on the map where I wanted to go, and we talked about loans and grants, and scholarships, and my chances of getting those. Then he got serious and looked at me right in the eyes and said, "I have some news for you."

I was just relieved that I wasn't in trouble. I couldn't imagine what could be better than that.

"There is a new state thing called the EOP Program, and they give grants to kids who don't have the money to go to school. I applied, and you've been accepted into the program. They will pay for everything for your four years of college—room and board, expenses, books, everything!"

I was stunned—completely blown away because I never expected to hear anything like that. But there it was! All the money I needed, with the only caveat being that my father had to fill out a financial statement for the state to prove he didn't have the money to send me to college.

There it was.

Before I went home that day, and before I told anyone else, I ran down Main Street to the old Presbyterian Church, one of those white steeple churches with a white picket fence from the 1700s. I ran up the walk, turned the doorknob, and walked in. Then I tiptoed up to the front of the church and sat down in the first pew.

The place was completely silent, cool, and empty. It was just me and the rays of sunlight shining through the old stained glass. I watched the little specks of dust dance in the rays of light and took a deep breath.

And then all hell broke loose. I could not contain my emotions, and they blew out of me like a vomit of emotion. I bawled my eyes out and cried in between deep gasps of relief, joy, and excitement. I cried and cried, and I said thank you about a hundred times, threw my hands into the air, and praised God as I let out all the pent-up emotion of the last year escape into those beams of light. I cried until there were no tears left.

I sat in stunned awe of this God I didn't know who had heard my cry when I called out to Him. He had found me, and now I knew He was real.

I didn't believe that anyone could explain this miracle to me, so I tucked it into the back of my heart and swore to never forget this God who had answered my pleas for help.

God was alive. I knew that for sure, and I had to tell someone at least that much.

When I got home, I called Mike.