The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Before the psychosis properly begins, as I experienced during Lucy, 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? I mean this not only of dailiness, which is full of restless hours that must somehow be spent, but also the sky, the walls, the trees, my dog, the windows, the curtains, the floor—all of which are but a small portion of everything that needs my attention, including everything abstract and concrete, even as my ability to deal with them is at first dwindling and then absent. The more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists, or that it is swiftly losing—either because it is pulling itself apart, because it has never been cohesive, because my mind is no longer able to hold the pieces together, or, most likely, some jumbled combination of the above. I can understand only one piece or the other, even though the sky is supposed to belong to the same world as the curtains, and the dog that enters the room draws my attention as an entirely new object to contend with. People write about the so-called comfort of being insane in the same way they cavalierly refer to the happy ease of being developmentally disabled, but in this liminal space I am aware enough to know that something’s wrong. Something’s wrong; then it is completely wrong....