What is having Schizophrenia like?

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I know this is a random question* - But I am quite interested to hear what having Schizophrenia is like from a person who actually is Schizophrenic. What do you experience, and how does it effect you?

*Recently I've developed an interest in psychology.

I have been diagnosed with schizophrenioa since 2007.
I do not have hallucinations though. My problem is the delusions that i have. I cannot speak for others but for me at least, things made more sense before i was placed on meds. Sure enough, i was fearfull all the time since i thought that i was being spied upon by everyone. In other words, i was in my own version of the truman show.

I also had delusions of grandiure in which I thought the i was the returned jesus christ.

Since then, i have recovered. Most of my delusions have gone away. My psychologist said that it was the first time that she had seen someone recover. The problem is that things have lost their meaning. There is no longer a cause and effect. Random events occur that i cannot explain. At least when i was symptomatic, i could explain away my experiences by saying that they were caused by a group of people pulling my strings.

I have schizoaffective bipolar type which is very close to schizophrenia it is just that it has a mood component as well as the psychosis. I first started having symptoms at 13 and am 28 now. In the last 5 years it has gotten worse. I am on meds but sometimes even on the meds I have problems. I don't respond normally all the time. Like the other person diagnosed here, my problem is about the so called "delusions" but I don't like calling my thoughts that because I believe them so much it is the doctors that labeled is as that. They always call me delusional. I have psychic powers that I can't control and it started on 9/11/01 when the attacks happened. That is when I started believing about my psychic power of influence. I have had other beliefs before that when i was 13 I believed that bullies wanted to kill me and burn my house down and was terrified and saw them chasing me around. Now the beliefs are far more out there as people would say. The voices are rare for me except in the last episode which was last month. That one lasted about a month and a half. I heard voices threatening to kill me. Sometimes I heard whispering and laughing. I also have high functioning autism. I don't have Asperger's Syndrome. They are different. The first warning sign that some episode is coming is the fact I start to lose sleep. I take sleeping pills and tons of meds for my problem and that causes me to get tired but when these stop doing its job is when I start to have problems. Most of the time if someone would meet me they wouldn't see the autism or the schizoaffective because most of the time its controlled for the schizoaffective at least. I don't have meds for autism. When I have a stressor then I have problems with or without meds. The pills don't stop an episode caused by stress. It wouldn't make any difference if I was on them or not in this case. I bet if I was off of them then the problems would be more severe. I can't have a job because of both my schizoaffective and autism. The only thing I do is public speaking at autism conferences and am an artist that makes hardly anything. I know I have a very major stressor coming up so I pray I don't have another episode because I just got out of one. There really wasn't a stressor in last episode its also certain months I have episodes. The certain months are people's birthdays. Its kind of like seasonal affective disorder but instead of having episodes based on seasons and just be depression, it is psychotic episodes and birthdays and stress. I don't have any clue why. There is no logic to it. I do know that 2 of the birthdays are during when the days are shorter. That would just be depression though. Sorry this is so long.

Thanks for the posts so far. One of my friends has recently been diagnosed and all this information is really helpful to me