Excerpt from a short story by Stephanie Milem

It’s almost impossible to rid yourself of something after you’ve named it. It remains a part of you because the name has some kind of emotional significance. You begin to think of things differently when they’re no longer “it‘s“. You give away a small part of yourself in a name, and to have something you’ve grown attached to be torn from you is like losing that part of yourself. It sounds sweet, like parents naming their newborn child, or that child in turn naming their pet hamster, but for me it’s the very opposite. I didn’t chose this thing, or to name what it brought me. It found me, as if I’d won it in some biological screw-up lottery, and with it came my mental nightmare. This thing is my disease, nesting in my rotted mind. Schizophrenia. The mental nightmare it forced on me would be called Hiroki. Before the disease itself was given a name I suffered under it without knowing. My perception was warped, I saw things that weren’t real or weren’t there. I witnessed horrible scenes that I had no power to stop because they weren’t even real. I heard any voice imaginable, all of them meshing together and swirling around in my head constantly, pulling me in a thousand different directions. My dreams made as much sense as my reality did and I could never tell the difference between the two.