A Beginning

Oddly enough I found that writing this first post induced more writer's block than starting an actual novel. At least if you're beginning a book you have an idea, a baseline, a vague conception of where all this is headed. Essentially I am writing this blog because my publisher said, "Whitney, you should start a blog so people will have some idea of who you are".  And I was like, "But I'm a really random person, I don't have an agenda or ideology worthy of a cohesive blog, nor do I draw amusing webcomics". And they said, "Random is fine as long as you're mildly entertaining. We have confidence in you."

And I agreed I could probably do that, but the idea of a blog in which I express myself outside the safe and finite structure of a book forced me to think about what exactly I want to stand for. I don't want to be one of those people who talks despite having nothing to say. I don't want to be so postmodern that I refuse to take any ideological stance on issues that matter to me. The most personally relevant, of course, is the idea of mental illness. Do I want to identify with my diagnosis or not? Do I want to challenge the entire system in which I am soon to receive my graduate training? And then I have to confront the issue I've been carefully trying to repress for the three months prior to the release of my memoir, namely the possibility that publishing it could harm—actually 'destroy' was the word I initially conjured, and then 'decimate' until I remembered that it means destroy 10% of something, not all of it (thank you, Barron's GRE prep!) my career prospects in the field of psychology.

And then I decided I was being melodramatic, but I can't be sure. There are a number of prominent psychologists, lawyers, and doctors who've written about their experiences with mental illness, but on the other hand I really, really lost it for a while, with 'it' being my entire subjective sense of self. Furthermore I'm not even established in my field, I'm a sparkling new graduate student. I don't know if the 'get out of the locker room, freak…' mentality will transfer from high school into a professional, academic setting. I wouldn't be applying to these programs if I doubted my ability to be both professional and academic, but I can't say with certainty that I will never experience another psychotic episode—although really, who can?—and I don't know if I'm ready to be a voice in a new generation of people who've had serious breakdowns at a young age (there are a lot of us, more than you might think) and are now trying to become professional adults acting in the elusive and perhaps illusive Real World.

I don't know to what degree I want to challenge the system in which I've seen, firsthand, so many flaws, but mostly people with good intentions trying to do their best within a cumbersome bureaucracy. I've always had a vague suspicion of people who criticize what they don't intend to change. This is why I don't care if people call me schizophrenic—the category may be poorly conceived but I don't think challenging the semantics is going to do much to change the reality. I'll return to this topic soon, but for now I'll end this post with an excerpt from Demons in the Age of Light:

Chapter Nine

 

                I first become aware of my breathing—it is deep and regular, under the competent care of my autonomic nervous system. When I try to take over it becomes erratic, desperate, thinking I need more oxygen when really I don't. My eyes open and see too much white. My head is too heavy to lift, but moving my eyes I can see a corner of the room at a time. Monitors in one corner, silent and unlit. My parents in two chairs along the wall, heads bowed and hands limply resting in their laps. My eyes drift closed again.

Someone comes in and jabs me with a needle. I swear reflexively and my parents jump up and hover near the bed. "Whitney?" says my mother cautiously, as if she is afraid I will not know my own name.

I shift in the bed and a jolt of pain radiates across the back of my hand. I look down and see my arm covered in a pillowy bandage.

"You tried to kill yourself," says the needle-jabber, a nurse in a flowery scrub shirt, in a disapproving tone. How insular to assume it was suicide and not murder. My body feels heavy and adrift, my vision creating blurry haloes around everything. For a moment I wonder if I somehow exorcised the Other, bled him out like snake venom. But with a crushing awareness I feel his consciousness superimposed on mine again, a neutral crimson plane that reveals nothing.

                What did you do to me. What…

His presence is serene and melodic again, like the reading of a haiku.

                Nothing at all…

                                 it seems even shy soma thinks you're better off dead,

                                                 though she could not say it to your face.

"What happened, Whitney?" asks my mother. "Why did you do this?"

"I didn't. It was…"  But the truth is impossible, and I am too weary to come up with a plausible decoy. "A mistake," I say finally. "Just a mistake."

"We'd like you to stay in the hospital until we feel that you're no longer a danger to yourself," says the nurse. "Someone will be here soon shortly to bring you upstairs."

"Upstairs?"

"To our psychiatric facility."

"A psych ward? No thanks."

"Ah, well…" she says delicately, and I realize the insinuation that I have a choice was only politeness. The nurse slides a consent form into my hand. From his comfortable perch in my mind the Other says nothing, but the silence is suffused with bright, sinister interest as he waits to see what I will make of the situation. I click the pen a few times, indecisively. The nurse's eyes take on a strange apprehension, and I realize that it's a ballpoint pen and she was probably supposed to give me a felt-tipped pen and she's worried I'm going to stab myself in the jugular and bleed out and die or sue the hospital or both. If it weren't for my parents I might have given her a little scare, but they're watching with that rabbit-in-the-headlights look so I just sign the paper and give her the pen.

Soon two ER techs come in and wheel me down a hall full of people resting doll-like in white beds, then into an elevator that seems to go up for a long time. I have heard that psych wards are always on the top floor to minimize the possibility of escape. My parents have gone up by another way and are waiting in front of the ward door, a steel contraption with a reinforced window that looks like it could survive a bomb. It makes a buzzing noise and opens admit me. Someone tells my parents that they will have to leave now, but visiting hours are six to eight on weekdays and two to six on weekends. My parents look glazed. They tell me they love me. But I can't say it back…he is listening, and anything I value he will turn into collateral. So I just nod and hope they see it in my eyes.

***

                The psych ward looks like you'd expect from movies and books, except a little more airport lobby and not quite so Kafka; droning TV overlooked by a plexiglass-fronted nurse's station, faded people sitting unnaturally still on faded couches. But when I look closer they are not still at all. Limbs twitch, feet tap, fingers shred tissues into a fine confetti. The impression of stillness comes only from the faces, which have a curious blank, oily sheen. Only a black girl with a red scarf over her hair returns my gaze with interest. There is something like a challenge in her face, although I don't know why. We stare at each other from across the room like unfamiliar cats angling for dominance. After a minute she smiles mysteriously and presses a finger to her lips in a silent shhhh before turning back to the television.

The ER techs help me into a chair in front of the nurse's station and wheel the empty bed back out of the ward. A few patients shuffle over with a strange zombielike gait. "Who're you?" says an old man in a peculiar snuffling voice. He is wearing a hospital gown like an overcoat, the strings knotted over his bare emaciated chest. His teeth are very bad. I do not particularly want to tell him my name, so I stare vaguely over his shoulder and feign deafness.

"Who're you?" he repeats, stepping closer. "I said who're you?" He breathes a sour chemical smell on me. The other patient, a fat woman with a tangle of dark unbrushed hair, reaches out and touches my shirtsleeve, rolling the fabric between thumb and forefinger as if testing the quality. The man holds out a sticky plastic cup full of yellow chunks.

"HAVE SOME PINEAPPLE," he says in a terrible, thundering, godlike voice.

I shrink back in my chair. If I keep still maybe he will leave me alone, or maybe he will be angry if I don't take it…

What's the matter? Don't you like your new friends? I flinch as the Other erupts into consciousness like an unexpected surge of static from a dead radio station.

A nurse comes out from behind the glass barrier. "Patricia…Anton…stop bothering her." She flicks her hands as if shooing away a couple of stray cats. They retreat a few reluctant paces and watch as the nurse takes my blood pressure, breathing deeply and rhythmically through their mouths like someone sleeping with a head cold.

"This is intramuscular haloperidol," says the nurse beside me. "I'm going to inject it into your arm, okay?" A sting near my shoulder, and within minutes a foggy paralytic haze has crept over my mind, sealing out every thought regardless of origin.

Someone propels me to a room and I stretch out on a hard white bed. To have a drug encamped in one's brain is not so wrong as having another ego there. It acts with no malice, no free will. I close my eyes and am not so sad to have lost my mind. If I can't have it, no one should.