My New Highly Recommended Book & Mental Illness
A review of sorts of The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang.
“For those of us living with severe mental illness, the world is full of cages where we can be locked in.” [Page 110, The Collected Schizophrenias].
I was embarrassingly afraid.
There’s a cut on my right pointer finger that just won’t go away, it stings like a paper cut but I can’t remember what caused the little slice. In this horrific spot, I reopen it as I apply lotion after the shower, unscrew my serums while doing skin care, and even while grabbing my keys to unlock my front door. The bitch won’t heal. It’s a reminder of an injury I can’t even remember.
I relate this feeling, this annoyance and repetitiveness to my fear of insanity. Insanity is the word I would use when thinking about schizophrenia. I’m being serious and disgusting I know, my mind is terrified that this insanity diagnosis lives under my skin, materializing when I least expect it.
A little backstory, my aunt has Bipolar Type Schizophrenia, and I’ve been subject to a few of her hallucinations. As a kid, I never felt scared of her, even after she shattered my grandma's glass coffee table over my five-year-old body. I could see her struggling with herself behind angered eyes.
Then again, I was so young and maybe I wanted to see that my aunt was not trying to kill me on my birthday.
My family often scrutinized and punished my aunt from a distance, and apprehended my grandmother for ‘giving up’ the rest of her life to take care of a daughter she feels responsible for. My family never offered a solution except to take my grandmother away from my aunt, and to let my aunt sit in a nursing home with no family for the rest of her life.
The last time I saw her, she was bald and chain-smoking Marlboro Lights at the kitchen table in my grandmother's apartment. My grandmother felt the need to warn me of her baldness, saying it's easier to care for her this way, but if I am honest it suited her magnificently. While they both smoked in the one-bedroom apartment, a storm raged outside and I felt like I was choking. Abruptly, almost shouting, I said, I love you with my whole heart Connie, I have always thought about you and wished for your health and happiness. You're a strong woman.
We cried together at the table, my eyes red stinging from smoke and my wish to tell her I loved her since my fifth birthday. This was three years ago. I have no idea how she has been since or if she is still bald.
I put off reading The Collected Schizophrenias because I was scared I would see myself in these pages, possibly even self-diagnose myself with schizophrenia. I say this because I know what it does, I’ve seen this in my aunt, my cousin, my sister, my mother. I’m afraid the cut of the illness will show up in me one day and will not go away, and I will be like my aunt (her diagnosis came later in life). It is my worst fear, but I knew reading this book from a person with schizophrenia was very important for me and I learned more than I could try to explain here. They are deep lessons that weave into my past and my future.
“Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing. Both flare up and die down…” [Page 143, The Collected Schizophrenias].
EMDR and cemeteries
Esme Weijun Wang mentioned something that clicked for me in a very strange way. Recently I had gone to a spiritual reading and there the wonderful Courtney told me that I need to be in the woods as much as I can. She sensed I found a place that gave me comfort and pressured me in so many words to keep going back. I told her I found a cemetery near my house that is often empty, with beautiful acres of trees and moss-covered gravestones; there is so much to look at. I always leave feeling lighter and not fully understanding why a little mental health walk could change my mind about killing myself.
A week after being told to travel the woods more and take my time to heal, Wang tells me in this book that walking through the woods is a form of self-taught EMDR.
“Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a form of psychotherapy that is controversial within the psychological community. It was devised by Francine Shapiro in 1987 and originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” [Definition of EMDR from Wikipedia].
To preface why this was important to me, I have CPTSD, I have been doing Internal Family Systems therapy with my therapist for almost four years and we work exclusively virtually. Hence, EMDR was not in the cards for me, though I have always wanted to try.
“According to the therapy’s [Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, Dr. Shapiro] origin story, Shaprio noticed while on a walk in the woods that her negative emotions decreased in severity when her eyes darted from side to side.”[Page 138, The Collected Schizophrenias].
I will gladly be walking in the woods any chance I get, I hope you do too.
I wish I had more to offer in regards to this text but sometimes you need to let the text speak for itself. I will never stop recommending this book. Read it instead of this substack, please.