The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death—all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but.

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.

Observing patterns and giving them names is helpful mostly if those patterns can speak to a common cause or, better yet, a common treatment or cure.

I am accustomed to the world of the DSM, which remains the heavy purple bible-o’-madness that sits on a clinician’s shelf. It is, like the Judeo-Christian bible, one that warps and mutates as quickly as our culture does.

I worry that seeing schizophrenia as a gateway to artistic brilliance glamorizes the disorder in unhealthy ways, therefore preventing suffering schizophrenics from seeking help.

“I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” which is another truth about fashioning normalcy: the way I clothe myself is not merely camouflage. It is an intimidation tactic, as with the porcupine who shows its quills, or the owl that puffs its body in a defensive offensive: dress like everyone should be terrified of you.

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. In the language of cancer, people describe a thing that “invades” them so that they can then “battle” the cancer. No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold.

What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am? It has, in fact, shaped the way I experience life.

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.