Further Meditations on a Theme

(A note before I begin: look, I really am essentially okay, in case anyone's worried. I know I keep talking about this; it probably won't be forever. Minds interest me, and mine's the one closest at hand for study. That's most of what's going on here.)

1. Here's another thing mental illness has helped to do to me or for me: it's made me an essential skeptic. I've had to clear my inner closets of things like religion, political ardor, mysticism, and even to some extent self-confidence so that madness can't find them there and turn them toward ill use.

2. I know that setting all the clocks in my house a few minutes ahead would help me get places on time and thus improve my life in measurable ways. But this seems less valuable to me than actually knowing what time it is.

3. I'd forgotten about this other mode of depressive psychosis: decoupled from anxiety, there's a flattening of affect toward the excessive meanings that the world continues to produce regardless. Then this thing turns self-mocking and mean, but it has an okay sense of black humor. As the butt of an insult comic's jokes in the audience might still laugh.

4. Part of how it works is: there's a quasi-physical sense that my "I" is too small for my purposes. I feel it clamping down over me like a clamshell or the underside of a set of knuckles. (It's come to me in milder form on the edge of sleep for some weeks, too, as was often the case in childhood. It is of course ontologically intolerable that our selves should disappear for so long every night. The mystery is that we can think of anything but death.) With this constriction arrives the certainty that a thing so small could easily be guided by some other force that I almost have access to. (In some corner of this hall of mirrors flashes the fact that in one obvious sense this hidden force is the illness itself, not that there's much to be done with that notion. Look it in the eye and move on.) A feeling of insufficient personal reality descends, although it's not clear whether I'm more or less real than the things around me. The cogito gets you just a couple steps from nowhere; after that, you're on your own.

Sensory input doesn't arrive with its usual force. It's coming in from a long way off. I find myself gripping iron railings, running the back of my hand along brick walls, trying to tie tighter knots between me and the world.

5. Historically, voices haven't been the main hallucinations I've experienced, but I can so easily see how they're produced. In such a state, thoughts become words -- even become couplets of medium-poor poetry -- instantaneously, and don't seem to stem from my own powers. The world's speaking to me in sentences rather than in sense data. I don't have to go to the trouble of translating and assembling them myself. It's like the subconscious has just disappeared. Context, subtext: they're all just text scrolling across the wall at once.

6. Hate, like heat, collects in things. Every object wears its most ghoulish mask. There's a dead possum on the sidewalk. But actually a plastic bag. But, upon closer inspection, perhaps a bloated pigeon? (A plastic bag, of course.) Church architecture an assemblage of mausoleums. Everyone on the street is lurching in the throes of some contagious illness. But it affects me almost abstractly. My body goes through the motions of disgust: the shudder, the crossing of streets. Something else is in charge of that, though; I can hear it happening somewhere in the neighborhood, but not where I live. So the mind laughs flatly at itself, for allowing the body to be moved along such senseless routes.

Psychiatry calls this patient insight and it's indisputably better than the alternative. But it makes it hard to maintain much, ah, self-esteem.

7. In depression is the counterargument to one of the values I'd most like to transform into belief. Ipsa scientia non potestas est. Instead of acting on the cold knowledge, the iterative disillusionment, that it's constantly synthesizing, depressed consciousness loops and loops through a bureaucracy of inner courts. They are endlessly in session and endlessly handing down convictions.

I've sometimes harbored a little abstract envy toward other, more florid species of psychotics -- the ones with delusions of grandeur, the ones being called upon to save the world. You could maybe get a few things done in such a state.

8. It's good and terrible that mental illness is incommunicable. Cannot be communicated. Lately it seems more interesting to write anyway than not to.

More on creativity and mental illness: Parallel Motions

"The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you." - (the admirably and authoritatively sane) Mark Vonnegut

Now that I've climbed up on this horse, why not ride a little farther, since I haven't yet talked myself out of this as a potentially fruitful area of inquiry? After having talked about the ways in which mental illness interferes with creative efforts, and made clear that I don't support the classic romantic connection between madness and creativity, I want to draw out some of the other, more tentative and fragile connections I find there. 

For as long as anyone can remember, I was a pretty weird but also smart- and creative-seeming kid, and this might have mitigated some of the surprise when it turned out I was also crazy. My mother began saying things like, "I guess that's the thing, when you're really creative . . . ," as if my illness were only further proof of my exceptionality. I squirmed under this proud pity, but when I was being lax with myself I could let it seem like a slightly less dark corner of that darkness.

Though all this was, of course, a major burden on my family, it might have also been something of a relief. Until 7th grade I'd been a star student, but once I got to middle school a combination of rebellious awakening (what, precisely, was the point of all this bureaucratic ritual around me?) and incipient depression sunk my grades to the point that I was at risk of being kicked out of my competitive-admission magnet school. (I am incredulous at and a little proud of my 12-year-old self to recall that during a parent-teacher conference it was revealed that I'd submitted zero of the five geography assignments given so far that quarter; the teacher, who seemed to hate me for other reasons than my lack of initiative, was later fired under circumstances surrounding his penchant for the blonder and bubblier of my cohort.) Mental illness might have provided something of an explanation, an excuse for the past few years of decline -- and a promise that, if treated, I'd return to my unproblematically exceptional previous performance.

It was probably a few years before I had enough distance to consider at length what my family was going through at this time. Lately I've wondered about another possible factor in their conceptualization of my illness. I have a girlfriend now, which my family did not know was within the realm of possibility for me until a couple of years ago. They've welcomed her with an effusiveness that suggests a little more may be at work than delight in Heather's highly family-pleasing character. The other week on the phone with my grandmother, after some polite chat about what Heather was up to, she broke out with: "I'm just so glad you're happy now."

Now? Now that I had come out and into my true self, I suppose she meant. I had never actually framed the matter as a "coming out," never indicated that this had been a matter of much inner struggle for me (it was and wasn't, but not due to any kind of self-repression). But this is one of the narratives at work around us, and it might well present itself as a comforting explanation for why one's granddaughter was so miserable for all those years.

Sadly for narrative convenience, my mental illness surely did not stem from my being creative or being queer (though the latter factor might well have added to the general feeling of pressure under which my first break occurred). But it has informed my art, not so much as cause or content but as process. The two things can move in similar ways.

Metaphor is itself a kind of paranoia; poetry, like psychosis, depends on seeing things as they are not. A piece of praise that sticks with me is a comment that I seemed to "see more than anyone else." (The capacity for paying attention makes up about 90% of my talent in any area, I suppose; it's not much, but it can do a little more than one might think.) In a paranoid state the mind runs its fingers more and more rapidly along threads of connection between all things (perhaps half-realizing that it is weaving these very threads with the other hand, and perhaps not at all), enwrapping the world in an ever wider and more elaborate net. Similarly, when things are going well as I write or compose in my head or plot out an essay it is among life's highest pleasures to feel the successive sparks of connection between ideas; I feel maximally powerful drawing so many things within my grasp, alive with the sense that I am doing the thing that I was designed to do – as a cheetah must feel when it runs, a hawk as it enters its swift controlled fall toward its prey.

Accordingly, the first stages of agitation can feel almost virtuous themselves in their similarity to this blessedly productive state. The hyperawareness of anxiety sometimes brings along a sense that the world is burgeoning with barely-contained meaning, and every so often it does produce some useful flash: an apt image, a slightly bitter bit of aphorism. Usually, however, this branching of thought turns in on itself before reaching the desired destination. Consciousness begins instead devouring data on the body and its accelerating heart rate, the twitch developing in one eyelid, the nausea puddling in the gut, and the fraught border where the self meets a judgmental world. Past this point, the best that can be hoped for is to eventually collapse into an exhausted calm; the promised breakthrough is lost for good.

Depression does something else, which it can do in tandem with these other forces or alone. It saps the will to such an extent that it can, in some middle state between normalcy and incapacitation, actually provide a sense of focus on those few things that seem marginally non-useless. When things are going easily in a superficial way, the sense of urgency needed to undertake creative projects fades. If one is happy cooking delicious meals, watching movies, having drinks with friends, why not bask in complacency for a while? In a steady mood I can go days or weeks without the question of what I am here to do posing more than a minor itch at the back of my skull.

In a depressed state, however, art becomes one of the few things of worth in the world and one of the only ladders up toward the light. When making art is a way to feel better (and not because it helps "work through" my feelings, but rather because it dissolves the self and feelings in its own process), one is compelled more strongly toward it.

If my work ethic were stronger to begin with, these prompts of illness would lose their authority, I think. As it is, I try to wring what I can from them without losing sight of the inevitable point where they stop being of assistance, without forgetting that they are not the only spurs that can induce me to work seriously, but only the most painful. Which is not the same thing at all, as it turns out. 

On Not Writing about Madness

I have been thinking for a long time -- years and years, really, as I had considered myself a writer before I had any experience with mental illness -- about whether and how to write about mental illness. It presents a problem for fiction, I have long been told by writing mentors who know what they are talking about, since it seems to erase the comprehensible motives for action on which most fiction plots run. "She was crazy" is a dead end as explanations go.

So although mental illness is an actual and in fact a fairly sensational-sounding aspect of our world, our forms of narrative art have rather a dearth of ways to work with it. There are memoirs and biographies, of course, but typically the mental illness is presented as the thrillingly seamy flipside to a life (as an artist, a writer, a mathematician) whose on-record interest lies elsewhere. When it is used in literary fiction it is often afflicting a secondary character as a complication in the life of the non-mentally-ill protagonist (the first examples that, for some reason, come to mind, resting a little way apart on the spectrum of good taste: Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True, Eugenides's The Marriage Plot).

One genre that poses a major exception is the young adult or coming of age novel, in which I encountered mentally ill adolescents by the dozens as an adolescent myself. Most preteens are morbid and melodramatic by nature, easily cast under the spell of any subject with an element of gothic romance -- consider Lurlene McDaniel's absurdly prolific career of novels about terminally ill teenagers (some of her more than 70 titles: If I Should Die Before I Wake, Too Young to Die, Sixteen And Dying, A Time to Die, Please Don’t Die), consider the scores of '60s girl group songs about misunderstood boys committing suicide by motorbike, consider young Werther. And so it is with mental illness -- now, perhaps even more than when I was a kid rubbernecking at the misfortunes of my fictional peers, we have the anorexia novels, the self-injury novels, the addiction novels.

So this is another reason why I've hesitated to make any prolonged effort to write about mental illness: the taint of the adolescent, the overconfessional. And beyond even the feeling that it is unsuitable subject matter for adults is my discomfort with the element of romance at the heart of these books. I do not think their authors consciously intend to enhance the sexiness of this subject matter; they simply think they are representing the challenges faced by today's teens. But the romance is there; it is likely the main draw.

As the reader sinks into an ever deeper identification with the beautifully damaged or self-damaging protagonist, the affliction being chronicled appears as a painful but also fundamentally interesting way to live. Given a certain amount of inward affliction, the struggle of simply being oneself imposes a clear plot structure upon one's life. (This elemental plot also drives the coming-out novel, another rich young-adult subgenre I devoured even before suspecting that I myself was queer.) And although the reader, like the author, would not consciously frame it this way, such a readymade plot -- what Susan Sontag calls "the metaphor of the psychic voyage . . . an extension of the romantic idea of travel" -- can hold existential appeal to a reader aswim in the mundane formlessness of adolescence.

For most readers, of course, the romance ends there, and they return to their more or less healthy lives. The passionate pathology of the narrative casts its seeds onto the firm, dry soil of the soundly pragmatic mind, where they shrivel and blow away a little while after the last pages are read.

So I am certainly not saying that fiction made me mentally ill as a teenager; some combination of neurochemistry and life circumstances did that. But it was, I think, a force for rather than against my pathology once it began. It laid the groundwork for madness to flourish with the idea "that illness exacerbates consciousness" (Sontag), and for me to see it as a subject for study rather than an invasive species to uproot. My illness seized me unbidden, but after not much struggle I walked with it a while, prepared by fiction for it to take me somewhere interesting. It seemed to me at first that it might not only impose a new narrative on my life, but also benefit my writing. At the time I considered myself before anything a poet. In hallucinations and delusions were fresh images for my craft, inaccessible to anyone else around me.

The trouble was that they stayed inaccessible when I put them down in words. They were true nonsense. I wrote only a few poems using the content of my delusions (not mid-attack, but afterward; my psychosis was, on the spectrum of psychosis, mild, being episodic rather than all-pervasive, and I think I never wrote a word while within the grip of such an episode) before realizing that for any reader they would be nothing but little sealed rooms with a formless arrangement of inscrutable objects inside. No one saw them. I made a different attempt at at it a year or two later, deploying an elaborate chain of metaphors to depict the state of being mad (It's more like a jungle in the dark, intricate and awful . . .). I brought it to my writing mentors; they did not see much reality in it and asked questions trying to understand.

"Well, it's a metaphor," I said uselessly. A metaphor for a state with which no one could really identify. A sequence of images whose logic no one could follow, mapping to a state of mind signposted only by its own idiosyncratic pathology. It did not interest them; it was of no literary interest.

My salvation came partly when I became able to see madness as boring, when it became apparent that it was not only ruining my life but failing to add richness to my writing or the great narrative of my existence. (By salvation I only mean the power and will to work against my illness; there was no moment of conversion or cure, only the passing of time and the cultivation of a preventive vigilance within me.) I was already well into the demythologizing of my illness by the time I came across Illness as Metaphor, but I instantly grabbed onto Sontag's tough anti-romanticism. "The most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking," she writes.

Such has been one of the key tenets of the rabidly pro-sanity system of values I've built for myself. That system has saved me, but it's also meant that I don't know quite what to do with madness. I'd like to see nearly everything within the scope of my experience as a potential entry to creativity or exploration, but when I arrive at mental illness I usually turn back pretty quickly. Because it is disreputable, because it is in a certain literary sense uninteresting, because I find it irresponsible to participate in the tradition of romanticization but don't entirely trust myself not to do so. And, to a non-negligible extent, because it makes people uncomfortable. It remains a loose thread for me. I keep taking it out and winding it between my fingers because even now I feel that there must be something I can do with it. I just haven't figured out what yet.

(A brief note on terminology here: I've used "mental illness" and "madness" more or less synonymously, aware that this may be an outdated and problematic choice. But because I'm dealing here with the tension between clinical and romantic modes of viewing pathology and because I have laid claim to both characterizations at various points in the time period discussed, I've retained the somewhat sloppy intermingling of terms.)