I’ve been living with schizophrenia for 11 years now and I have done my best to cope with it. I feel like I'm in the best groove that I can be for myself right now. I take my meds, I go to therapy, I handle my stress and my work accordingly. And it's taken 11 years to get to this point. It's been a lot of personal work and a lot of analysis and stuff like that on my part to figure out the best way for myself to live. I had to learn about what reality is and how boring it actually is, so that took some time.

There are some things that can knock me off my groove. It can be stress, it can be the seasons, it can be a bad couple of days, just normal stuff that makes people sort of question themselves, and just I have bad days like anybody else. When I get knocked out of my groove, I try to relax and try to take care of myself and try to be good to myself and just try to get back to a feeling of maybe homeostasis. Being good means taking it easy on myself because I am very self-critical and it can be really easy to tell myself things that I don't need to tell myself.

I think a routine is important for maintaining stability. Having set things to do each day can, sort of, give you that structure that is important for getting well. It helps me to not think about the chaos of what can happen and just sort of gets me focused on the things that need to be done.