I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder when I was 19 or 20. It’s a mood disorder and thought disorder, like having bipolar disorder with paranoid schizophrenia. I started taking medication to treat my illness at this time, and never having very high self-esteem before then, I felt even worse after my counselor at the age of 21 told me that my childhood trauma had nothing to do with how I felt, rather there was something wrong with my brain. Coming to terms with having a defective brain has been years in the making. When he said this to me, however, my heart sunk and I felt like the biggest piece of shit. Now I realize he was just trying to get me to take my medication which I really do need.

Soon after my second suicide attempt, I started praying to God to send me a female companion. When Jenny whom I knew from school called me out of the blue after months of praying with no prospects up until that time, I was sure God had answered my prayers. Now, she was voted “most likely to have a hit list” in high school, but my self-esteem was as low as the Mariana Trench. I didn’t care about her reputation. I was grateful to be of interest to anyone.

We started hanging out, and we were soon spending every day together. We were having sex and she got pregnant after dating for two months. We didn’t want to get an abortion, and she had just had one a month earlier which I found out after the fact. It was her ex-boyfriend’s fetus.

I tried to do the “honorable” thing and asked her to marry me. We got married when she was three months pregnant. She didn’t work in the five years we were married, and I worked and quit four jobs. The last job I had during our marriage was at Pacur in Oshkosh. It was owned by Ron Johnson at the time, and he is now my US senator. Pacur was a plastic extrusion factory with no windows, a constant loud, droning noise which we had to wear earplugs for, and my co-workers harassed me constantly for missing work, being consistently late, and being lazy. Mind you, I was on Seroquel and Risperidone while working there, so I would often fall asleep at work. These medications also made me gain tons of weight, so it was difficult to be really energetic at work much to the chagrin of my co-workers. Working there for twelve-hour swing shifts when you have a thought disorder and a mood disorder was extremely difficult to say the least. With nothing to look at (no windows), a constant loud, droning noise for which we wore ear plugs there was nothing to listen to. We were discouraged from talking too much. We couldn’t listen to music, and we couldn’t look at magazines when the machine was running. We were discouraged from taking breaks longer than ten minutes every few hours.

I must have been losing my shit from four years of what was effectively sense deprivation. The management hired someone to spy on me and hired a private detective to look into my past. This was all probably due to not being able to take my medication regularly because of the swing shifts, being consistently late, and missing work. Also, someone in the factory had on several occasions called OSHA to report management for some code violations which the factory was fined heavily for. I suspect that someone told management that it was me that was calling OSHA because my co-workers wanted to get rid of me. I suspect this because I was pretty much interrogated and harassed by several co-workers. I NEVER called OSHA.

Not only was I losing my shit from the sense deprivation, harassment, spying, and not taking my meds regularly; I also had to deal with a wife who has borderline personality disorder. We fought all the time. She was cheating, and I went to the strip club twice. We ended up separating and I quit the job.

During separation, we had to go to family court because Jenny was requesting child support. For some reason, even though neither Jenny nor I had lawyers, the assistant corporation counsel for Fond du Lac County, Meggin McNamara, was there to request that I pay child support based on the job at Pacur instead of the job I then had. Jenny was granted the higher child support, and I had to break my lease for my apartment which I had and move back with my parents. I had some major issues with my father which I don’t want to get into, but needless to say I moved from one bad situation to another. I was extremely stressed out and agitated.

I was laid off from my then job because they went out of business. I got unemployment insurance based on the pay I got from Pacur because I only had my job at the next place for a couple months. I’m sure this really stuck in the craw of Ron Johnson, a self-described Ayn Randian libertarian (no better than a fascist in my opinion).

After being on unemployment insurance for a few months I took a job I thought I could handle. It was in the stock room at Target. Jenny and I were going through a divorce and would argue over the phone. I found out later that she was recording me, and a police officer who I think had a crush on her played one of the recordings over the radio. I didn’t know this at the time, but it explains why I was being harassed and gaslighted all over the community and at work.

It was at this time that the CIA planted a remote controlled microwave transmitter into my car, which zapped my brain when I was driving, causing me to hallucinate and have what felt like electric shocks in my right ear. I know absolutely nothing about cars or car parts, so I couldn’t remove the device because I didn’t know what to look for. This psychological torture went on for several months, but when they realized that I wasn’t going to act on their commands, they eventually stopped doing this to me.

After being fed up with being continuously harassed by the community (which goes on to this day), I asked my childhood best friend to help me get a job at his factory. I was making more money again and paying Jenny an extra $75/week on top of the child support. I got this job, however, not so much from my best friends good word, but from the fact that I inflated my IQ twenty points on my resume.

I ended up quitting this job because of an abusive boss and I was afraid to go to work because of him and the harassment I faced from co-workers for falling asleep at work due to my medication.

I finally did something for myself. I decided I would go back to college. I majored in philosophy, and I was pretty good at it. I was getting straight A’s in all of my classes, and was married to my second wife, the love of my life. My self-esteem was getting better, but the spying and harassment continued in the community. I ended up graduating summa cum laude albeit from a second-rate university. My higher self-esteem turned out to be mania (my mood disorder) as I had taken out a small fortune in student loans.

How was I going to pay back these student loans? I doubled down. I went to law school taking out even more student loans, but I couldn’t handle the stress. I got extremely depressed and flunked out at the end of the second semester.

Now I am on disability for schizoaffective disorder bipolar type. I am trying to relax and not get too high or too low, but the harassment, spying, and stalking continues to this day. I don’t know how to handle people anymore (if I ever did), and I thought I’d give this synopsis of my adulthood troubles in order to perhaps get some insight from the intelligent folk here at TPF.

Advice is welcome, but I ask that you please be kind. Thanks.