The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Most critically, a capitalist society values productivity in its citizens above all else, and those with severe mental illness are much less likely to be productive in ways considered valuable: by adding to the cycle of production and profit.

Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair.

I’m uncomfortably uncomfortable because I know that these are my people in ways that those who have never experienced psychosis can’t understand, and to shun them is to shun a large part of myself.

In my mind, there is a line between me and those like Jane and Laura; to others, that line is thin, or so negligible as not to be a line at all.

If schizophrenia is the domain of the slovenly, I stand outside of its boundaries as a straight-backed ingenue, and there is no telltale smearing beyond the borders of my mouth.

There are shifts according to any bit of information I dole out. Some are slight. Some tilt the ground we stand on.

If the conversation winds its way to my diagnosis, I emphasize my normalcy. See my ordinary, even superlative appearance! Witness the fact that I am articulate. Rewind our interaction and see if you can spot cracks in the facade. See if you can, in sifting through your memory, find hints of insanity to make sense of what I’ve said about who I am. After all, what kind of lunatic has a fashionable pixie cut, wears red lipstick, dresses in pencil skirts and tucked-in silk blouses? What sort of psychotic wears Loeffler Randall heels without tottering?

McQueen said about his clothing, “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.

As I sank back into my folding chair, Patricia asked if there were any comments or questions. A bespectacled woman raised her hand. She said that she was grateful for this reminder that her patients are human too. She starts out with such hope, she said, every time a new patient comes—and then they relapse and return, relapse and return. The clients, or patients, exhibit their illness in ways that prevent them from seeming like people who can dream, or like people who can have others dream for them. When she said this, I was fingering the skirt of my exquisite dress. I’d fooled her, or convinced her. Either way, I knew, was a victory.

With chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition I can attempt.

I am still ambitious, but I must be careful about my ambition; illness has distorted my life such that it’s become hard to recognize it as my own.

Hope is a cast line in search of fish; faith is the belief that you won’t starve to death, or that if you do, God’s plan could account for the tragedy.

Remission appears over and over in the latter: May I be well.

What I have found difficult is not seeking an escape hatch out of pain, whether that be pills, alcohol, or the dogged pursuit of a cure. In suffering, I am always looking for a way out.

Hope, I write in my journal, is a curse and a gift.

The test results all came back negative. People congratulated me on this news, but I sought comfort in those who understood that negative test results meant no answers—meant Dr. J’s diminished interest in my case and thus in my suffering—meant that I had no avenue of treatment to pursue and no kind of cure in my sight line. Ever since then, I have continued to experience monthly fevers and daily fatigue, as well as a constellation of other symptoms that have been brought to, of all people, a cardiologist. In the meantime, I am more well now in 2018 than I was in 2016, and more well in that year than in the four years prior to that one, which seemed to indicate something—but what, I am not sure. All I can do now is wait for spontaneous remission.

either extraneous chemical additives or essential medications that keep me stable.

I am not willing to experiment to see which.

As Viktor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning, we want our suffering, if it must be endured, to mean something. Yet I had no idea what this belief would look like in practice.

One article of faith is This suffering will be of use to you someday.

“If there’s something of use there, then you take it. And so even if it’s a scary vision, if there’s something of use there that you can take and you can apply to your life, I wouldn’t consider that schizophrenic. I would consider that liminal.”

This, Estés says, is a caution against “calling upon too much of the numinosity of the underworld all at once … for though we visit there, we do not want to become enraptured and thereby trapped there.”

I originally went to Bri because psychosis had made me fear my own mind. Since then, the sacred arts have given me some solace not so much through the beliefs they provide as through the actions they recommend. To say this prayer—burn this candle—perform this ritual—create this salt or honey jar—is to have something to do when it seems that nothing can be done.