The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense;

Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, but I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable experience.

A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure.

It is disconcerting for anyone to be told that her brain is being damaged by an uncontrollable illness.

Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of their broken brains. We cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.

I’m still trying to figure out what “okay” is, particularly whether there exists a normal version of myself beneath the disorder, in the way a person with cancer is a healthy person first and foremost.

There might be something comforting about the notion that there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder, and that if I try hard enough, I can reach that unblemished self. But there may be no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit.

For over a decade, I have not wanted, or even considered having, biological children, but these days I find myself frequently on the receiving end of unsurprising “news.” Where once the announcement “We have news!” from a couple almost inevitably meant a marriage announcement, the statement is now followed, particularly if the couple is heterosexual, by “We’re pregnant!”

did my job. I said nothing about the horror show that was still sinking its teeth into me.

For those of us living with severe mental illness, the world is full of cages where we can be locked in.

being a kid “sucks” even without the specters of bullying or abuse. You have no control over your life; it is frequently impossible to decode the actions of adults.

Imagination has a power in childhood that it lacks in older years.

I experience an agitated sense of something being wrong. The wrongness isn’t limited to the grotesqueries mutating inside, but is also true of the world at large: how did it get this way, and what am I supposed to do with it?