Truce?

            I’ve been labouring under the impression that life with medication is dull and flat, like a butter knife. I’ve come to see it as grey and unappealing. My separation from schizophrenia (we are divided by small gelatin capsules at this point) has made me perceive it not as dark chaos, but as a swirling land of light and life. In my mind, colours dive and reflect from its surface. On one end, bland tea after cleaning the house and the rigors of stepping into shoes or showers or bus stops – the hopelessly mundane. On the flipside I see a veritable disco ball of busyness, a bright, swirling world of wonder where I own and am the world.

I have a psychiatrist who says I need medication for my broken, hapless brain. He has seen too many wayfarers slip into the bottomless pit of egocentric depression. He has known too many souls who are lost in schizophrenia’s miasmic, quicksand arms. And I have a Jungian psychotherapist who insists that when schizophrenia is seen as a positive attribute that should be celebrated, and not as a negative abnormality that must be “corrected”, the downward spiral of worry and self-destruction following an episode is slowed considerably, and in some cases wiped out. He says societies that allow for such a thing to be accepted and embraced have a much lower rate of suicide as well.

Which to choose? If only there were some kind of truce, some kind of breaking the walls down between these two worlds, someway I could have both.

Every day I wake and choose my mind-numbing medication. I choose reality and now-ness. But I am tired. I am tired of living as a patient, a half-awake cripple. Some part of me wants desperately to cast off the shackles of my gelatin Safety Floats and swim away, go to the deep end where the archetypes are, frolic in the water of living (and not just surviving). I miss the cool, frantic shadows of my naked brain. I miss painting and writing on and on for half a day, thinking only a few minutes have gone by. I miss the output I achieved.

Sadly, my life story goes like this: “One time, when I was 14, I got sick and then stayed in my room for 20 years. The end.”

And in more depressing news, it shall remain this way. I will continue to gobble up Medicare and medication. But I am putting this in my blog anyway. It is a missive from me to the vacuous world of ether that says simply, I wish I were alive. 

Observations From Underneath the Multitudes

One of my sketches, 2006

IF...

I fold up my inability into a circle, my knees will touch my forehead; my toes will curl under; my eyes will close and I will be numb from the inside out. The world is an egg and I struggle inside it. Sometimes I feel like a stowaway on a sinking ship, hoping for the languid bottom to finally cork my lungs, swell my belly, and hide me forever. In a sea of people, I swim toward the whirlpool of Nobody, eddying down until I am dissolved.  People are like horses to me; they thunder over my quiet voice and my lowered eyes.  I am trampled at the start of everyday with these ignoble masses bearing down on me.  What they don’t know is they feed me secrets here at the bottom. The rubbish in the center of their hearts is pushed and repressed to my eye level, where I can see plainly the stones they hide from their glass houses.  The floor of their mental trash bins is slick with refuse and my feet gingerly step like amphibians in the cool of their doubts and questions.  It’s like drool from the seat of the soul.  I waiver in my obstinacy to join these swirling herds, packs, gaggles, murders, and groups of the lifeless.  I’m tired of noses turned down at me, as though my fingers form their sanitation crews, as though the muck in their emotional crypts were mine to bury.  Somehow they believe I’ll cover their ruinous cycles with my very body – as though my existence were mourning veil for the results of a failed polygraph, or the desire for the explicit embarrassments too soon revealed.  I want to enter into the universe, cracking my embryo of stagnation that smoothes over the rough and tumble of others’ imaginations.  I am – so far – putrid within the rotting nucleus of doldrums and decadence.  I live among the cigarette butts of the rich, the stupid, the fake, and the cruel.  Inwardly I would burn up in the regress of human history, and languish like a pulsar that quietly thumps a reminder of impermanence.

Imperfect

One of my own sketches, 2005

            Last night my boyfriend and I had a troubling conversation over Existentialism versus Nihilism. He with his stomach ache, me having forgotten my medicine, we circled each other like fighting dogs and got nowhere. I apologized for my annoyance and irritability. I have a tendency to lean towards Devil’s Advocate when I am unsure of what I really think, and I felt I had broken this bond we’ve been steadily building over the past few months. He replied in his usual kind generosity, “It’s alright. You don’t have to apologize. We both had a bad night.”

            But my heart has caved in.

            This morning I woke to a dysphoria that broke the bones of my jaw and the joints of my knees; today there is no speech or movement that isn’t painful. I keep very silent at times like these, agonizing over the small things that make life a deep suffering, but which are utterly meaningless. I bury my head in pillows and wish I was anywhere else but here: on Mars maybe, or in the deserts of Iraq where silly things like lives are ruined everyday. I would welcome a suicide bomber today. We would both get what we’ve wanted. Heaven, Heaven. 

My boyfriend hangs around like laundry. He is unsure what to do in the shifting wind of my illness. He moves this way and that, either trying to keep up or caught in an eddy – I can’t tell which. And I love him for his steadfast stewardship of my imperfect heart. I want to hold him tight right at this moment, but he is resting from the tightly strung air of left-over conversations, in the middle of the bed as usual.

So not all ground is level and even heaven has cracks in it.

He is still gentleness defined, and I am still broken and edged with sharp angles.

But it is life.

We are still breathing.

Madness

is an uncomfortable syllable on my tongue, as though fighting for its life.  The welling of words that doctors surround it with drowns its simplicity, as though it were more than what it is.  Loud and loutish I spark and sizzle within its grasp.  Crazy can fall into any category as smooth as baby’s skin.  It eats chaos.  It is alive and unlovable.  It seethes under my epidermal layer with the fluid lucidity of a fish in water.  I want to enter into it and drown in its motherly suffocation.  I need great gulp of a fascist lunacy to subsist.  It comes as natural to me as breathing.  In repression I take no food and stop paying attention to mirrors.  I am both partial and unused, a wreck of wasted breath.  I resign from the world, straining toward coherency.  I remember bits and pieces, selective adjectives, and discordant diaries.  The world slides away in shards, sorrowful and lost without its purpose.  I find myself recycling memories, recalling fractures of conversations, and reusing phrases from old poetry.  Nothing seems to fit.  My eyes glaze over with age and still I am unable to process or comprehend the intimate, visceral loss of conscious direction.  But the world tilts on its axis and moves by dispassionately.  I am no longer stable on its revolution.  Its consistency muddles the mess of my mind.  As a wound, my delirium sucks in all it encounters, bleeding out the people who brush it with their distractions.  I walk about like a braggart, stuffed into my oversized clothes, eating nothing, touching nothing, saying nothing, knowing everything.  Images scatter when I touch them, like reflections in water.  What is there to do with this contagion hanging over me?  What indeed is left to say?  It has seen my unbelievable conceit and has taken my vocabulary like a surgeon would take a tumor.  It has left me wholly crippled down the right side of my imagination … a censure of sorts.  Delusion has a conscientious objection to my arrogance and bites my language in two.  Now with a forked tongue I turn my collar up and stride off into a world of massive silence.