The Collected Schizophrenias

by Esmé Weijun Wang

I have been psychically lost in a pitch-dark room. There is the ground, which may be nowhere other than immediately below my own numbed feet. Those foot-shaped anchors are the only trustworthy landmarks. If I make a wrong move, I’ll have to face the gruesome consequence. In this bleak abyss the key is to not be afraid, because fear, though inevitable, only compounds the awful feeling of being lost.

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. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way:

After all, it is easy to forget that psychiatric diagnoses are human constructs, and not handed down from an all-knowing God on stone tablets; to “have schizophrenia” is to fit an assemblage of symptoms, which are listed in a purple book made by humans.

but is not considered responsible for my so-called bad genes. I’ve inherited a love of writing and a talent for the visual arts from my mother, as well as her long and tapered fingers; I’ve also inherited a tendency for madness.

one that warps and mutates as quickly as our culture does. The DSM defines problems so that we can determine whether a person fits into them, or whether a person has lapsed out of the problem entirely—which is not to say that their life changes, even if their label does.

As tempting as this perspective is, I worry that seeing schizophrenia as a gateway to artistic brilliance glamorizes the disorder in unhealthy ways, therefore preventing suffering schizophrenics from seeking help. If creativity is more important than being able to maintain a sense of reality, I could make a plausible argument for remaining psychotic, but the price of doing so is one that neither I nor my loved ones are likely to choose to pay.

Sartre claimed, “We are our choices,” but what has a person become when it’s assumed that said person is innately incapable of choice?

The mind has been taken over. The mind has lost the ability to make rational decisions. There’s someone in there, but it’s not whoever it is we formerly believed it to be. Depression is often compared to diabetes—in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is compared to Alzheimer’s—it’s still not your fault if you get it, but there’s no fixing it, and though you may not intend to be a burden, you’ll still be one until you die.

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.

“Is everyone the same as they were ten years ago?”

and I considered how it takes so much—too much—energy to act as though our addled minds are all right.

Depression bestows sensitivity and empathy;

anxiety creates useful caution.

Place me in a high-stress environment with no ability to control my surroundings or my schedule, and I will rapidly begin to decompen-sate. Being able to work for myself, while still challenging, allows for greater flexibility in my schedule, and exerts less pressure on my mind. Like Saks, I am high-functioning, but I’m a high-functioning person with an un predictable and low-functioning illness. I may not be the “appropriate” type of crazy. Sometimes, my mind does fracture, leaving me frightened of poison in my tea or corpses in the parking lot. But then it reassembles, and I am once again a recognizable self.

as having a job is the most reliable sign that you can pass in the world as normal. 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:

It didn’t matter how pulled-together I seemed when I was dodging specters that no one else could see. I knew that I looked crazy, and that no amount of snappy dressing could conceal the dodging.

If my mind might go so far it couldn’t make its way back.

my entire life had been marked by illness and depression, and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t continue in the same way.

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.

But what if there isn’t? 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.

And if it’s true that I think, therefore I am, perhaps the fact that my thoughts have been so heavily mottled with confusion means that those confused thoughts make up the gestalt of my self;

anxiety as a component of their personalities.

In their minds, there is no tabula rasa overlaid by a transparency of hypochondria, generalized anxiety disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder; such thoughts are hard-wired into their minds, with no self that can be untangled from the pathology they experience.

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.

That year was particularly bad. I became manic; went a week without sleeping more than two or three hours a night, or without sleeping at all; couldn’t hold on to one thought without racing to another;

A cousin to my mother’s remorse and guilt is an invisible, additional question that I have for her, that being: would it have been better if I’d never been born?

the world is full of cages where we can be locked in. My hope is that I’ll stay out of those cages for the rest of my life, although I allow myself the option of checking into a psychiatric ward if suicide feels like the only other option.

Folklorist Trevor J. Blank says in Beware the Slenderman, “Often in the adult world we forget how much it sucks to be a kid.”

I posit that 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. The internet is one way to access a type of freedom.

I remained grounded in the world of my imagination.

for the sake of my version of unreality. Was there already something vulnerable to fragility lurking deep in my mind, or was I simply more stubborn than most? In hindsight, I ask myself how much I truly believed in my own fiction. Where the puzzle gets tricky is in children’s natural proclivity for the line between fake and real.

To do so sounds simple, but I don’t think it was so simple for me to detach from the world we’d created, as though I could simply toss it aside after a period of intense commitment. When I try to remember how I gave up the fiction, my mind blots out the transition; I have no recollection of telling Jessica that there was no Nothing and no Fantasia, as though the trauma of letting it all go had shattered my memories.

One could say of my younger self that she was simply highly imaginative. Spirited. Already prone to storytelling, which would make sense for her future self—the novelist, the writer. Children are prone to believing in the things that they pretend are real;

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.

which feels like breaking through a thin barrier to another world that sways and bucks and won’t throw me back through again,

Still, I know what is supposed to be true, and that includes a reality without shadowy demons or sudden trapdoors.

It is impressive, and horrifying, how many authors choose to employ the trope of discovering a woman’s body in pieces, scattered, or in garbage bags, unrecognizable. I wondered if bookstores, instead of having sections for Mysteries or African American Literature, ought to cordon off a section for Girls in Trouble.

but what are our experiences of disturbance if not subjective?

Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing.

Other questions: if I am psychotic 98 percent of the time, who am I? If I believe that I don’t exist, or that I am dead, does that not impact who I am? Who is this alleged “person” who is a “person living with psychosis,” once the psychosis has set in to the point that there is nothing on the table save acceptance? When the self has been swallowed by illness, isn’t it cruel to insist on a self that is not illness? Is this why so many people insist on believing in a soul?

still saw myself as being a soul in a state of eternal damnation because I couldn’t otherwise explain what had happened to me.

During the “perdition days,” which had no rhythm to them, I could not summon the motivation to do anything. I would not eat. I often would not move. I would not attempt to read or answer an email or have a conversation, because there is no point in doing anything when in perdition.

Pacing, they told me at graduate school, is one of the beginning writer’s biggest challenges, because a beginning writer wants to tell all the wrong things, or everything at once.

Suicide demands a narrative, but rarely, if ever, gives one.