If I wasn’t laughing I’d be crying isn’t replicated with torture. And schizophrenia, during its most intense moments, surely is torture.
When I first wrote this story, without the notes and these between-thoughts, there was a glamour in reliving what I’d been through. It was a sense making of a reality, although less than sense: it was mostly facts. It was what I saw, felt, heard, some of what I experienced: necessarily less than what I experienced. It wasn’t new. It was giving a mediated form to events that sprung—at the time—like static from my mind, into my mind, through all that was me. Writing them was controlled. It was tumult with perspective. It was not fierce.
Adding my notes, giving meaning to those who wouldn’t find meaning in the simplicity of walking down a street, having a drink in a bar, or speaking with a friend, has forced me to engage with myself: the difficult parts of myself always waiting.
During my recovery (and most of my adult life has been spent in recovery) doctors, nurses and occupational therapists have advised me to simply acknowledge my thoughts. To question whether they’re based on objective fact or not (they somehow seem to think such a thing exists), then to put them away when I cannot confirm them. The advice has never been to engage with them, as I’m doing now.
My madness has returned.
It’s not back in full force. It’s not with me every moment, but as my edits stretch into the night, then into the morning and onto the night again, as the importance of what I’m doing gives me strength my fears and paranoia have returned.
I fear plots around me as my energy gives way. It is taking energy—energy I am happy to spend—to engage with the meaning of my delusions, my paranoia, my madness. I am left with less once I put this manuscript down. I am primed. I am positioned in the wilds of my mind and exposed for them to attack me.
But it’s not an attack. It is who I am. My fears are not baseless although the threat I fear may not be so final as I imagine.
In engaging these fears I strengthen their hold over me, but there’s also a strength I’ve found in getting at their truth. I have learned writing this; learning in a way physicians may never want a schizophrenic to learn. It is easier to live unknowing. It takes work and determination, it takes failures, it takes risk to engage with thoughts that can strike at you. It may not be the ‘smart move,’ the ‘medically appropriate prescription,’ but that offering of a pseudo-intelligence is coming from people who want a sedated life for you. People who don’t want you to risk because the risks are so troublesome in their challenges and absolute in their ends. Or seemingly absolute to a society that can’t bear their consequences: the me I may become.
I may not have the strength to conquer these challenges. I may ask for the torture to end but it would be ending a part of me. It’s not the most sensible part of me, but it is still me. It’s the me healthcare has forever failed to address.
I’ve asked for therapists in the past, in meetings with doctors who have the power to provide one. I’ve been given social workers, nurses, psychiatric nurses, psychiatrists, general practitioners and occupational therapists. I have never been given someone who will assist me in engaging with my mind. It is for me to do that alone.
I fear medicine has decided engaging with my type of thought is pointless, that there is no sense to be found within it. That it offers no ‘benefit.’
Is it a paranoia, a fear of conspiracies that tells me medicine sees me as without worth? Is that not a silent torture, worse than what I do to myself? A torture that denies me self-understanding.