Kit Wallis

Kit Wallis: Overcoming Schizoaffective Disorder and Thriving in Recovery

I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1995. I had one younger brother, and we lived with my parents. As a child, I took piano lessons and appreciated art.

I was 14 years old when I heard voices for the first time. In the beginning, there was a voice in my mind called Twilight. He became my best friend, and we did everything together. Soon, he was joined by another, and then a third and a fourth, and so on. These Voices became my regular experience, and I became used to having friends in my head, which I didn’t see as a problem. They assisted me with school and exams, and even helped me with any anxiety attacks. But the real challenge was my depression. It resulted in me learning to keep the voices a secret and drowning myself in books to hide from reality.

The thing that kept bringing me back was my unshakable dream to become a plastic surgeon.  It was my dream since I was 7 years old, when I was introduced to the charity Operation Smile. Everything in my life revolved around saving people who had been born with cleft palate and other birth defects. This dream pushed me to do better in school. I kept a high GPA, and I labored to shadow as many doctors as possible, even in high school, keeping up with extracurriculars to appear well-rounded.

But at age 17, I became profoundly suicidal, and struggled tremendously with self-harm as a way to cope. At home, things were tense between my mother and me. My parents had recently divorced, and neither of them listened to me when it came to my mental health. I suffered through it unmedicated. My life was miserable, and I struggled every single day to choose to keep living.  But when everything seemed bleak, I would remind myself that I would be a resident one day, wearing a white coat adorned with my name in the embroidered black script: Kit Wallis, MD. That had such a nice ring to it.

But as one might have guessed by now, life had other plans for me.

My dream school was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I declared a biology major (pre-med) with an art history minor. While in college full-time, I would also work as a lab technician.

Fortunately, when I turned 18, I was able to go to a psychiatrist, and he diagnosed me with cyclothymia, a mild form of bipolar disorder. I didn’t realize the “voices” were voices. I thought that I was thinking in conversation and didn’t mention them. My doctor put me on Lamictal, a drug that would treat the depression that plagued me, saving my life.

However, the cognitive symptoms of my illness were starting to take a toll. Even on medication, I still had regular mood episodes. I would have around four defined bipolar episodes a year, and they would involve cycling between the hypomanic highs and depressive lows. They made completing coursework difficult. While I could enjoy the hypomania and get a lot done, I was burning through the neurons in my brain every time it happened.

Over these years, I went from having a near-photographic memory to barely being able to keep up with lectures. My depression–which returned and got worse throughout college– made it hard to  work on homework and go to class, and life was becoming more complex. I still thought I could be a doctor, so I trudged forward. This goal is what kept me breathing. But I would graduate with a 3.05, and my dream of becoming a doctor was beginning to look unrealistic.

About this time, I started reading the Bible and attending church, and when I prayed to God, He often talked back. Unfortunately, the hallucination I called God told me the people I loved were going to die. My role was to watch it happen and not be able to do anything to stop it. Over time, I started feeling things weren’t quite right. God wasn’t lining up with what I knew from religion, so maybe it wasn’t real. And the voices? Maybe they were hallucinations. Perhaps I was psychotic.

In the winter after I graduated from college, I got help from a call with my psychiatrist. He put me on an antipsychotic and would later diagnose me with the bipolar form of schizoaffective disorder. It was a scary moment to say the least, but it was also a new beginning.

Following college, I moved to New York, where I attended EMT school from 2018-2019, and finished with a 95% on my certification exam. However, during this year, I struggled with my mental health every day. I tried to study for the MCAT to revive my dream of going to medical school, but was unsuccessful. Finally, I moved back to North Carolina to look for a job, and found lab technician jobs paid much more than I would earn as an EMT. I was hired by Wake Forest University School of Medicine, a day before the lab was closed due to COVID, and I began working full-time from home. At this time, I also took a class in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy which was key in my journey to recovery.

I was promoted at my job to lab manager in 2022.

Today, my hobby is “cosplay” (making costumes) and I travel widely to attend cosplay   conventions around the country. My life is filled with friends from cosplay and from college, and I am very close to both of my parents. In December, I will travel with my dad to Scotland.

I have not become the plastic surgeon I dreamed of becoming throughout most of my life. However, in 2021, I began my own YouTube channel to encourage and educate others struggling with schizoaffective disorder/schizophrenia, called “SchizoKitzo.” My channel now has over 30,000 subscribers. It is not the life I had dreamed of, but I do find myself helping and even saving others, just in a different way because sometimes, that’s how life works.