Living & Arts

Trigger part IX: songs from the big chair

In print | April 23, 2009

Disclaimer: This column is part nine of a 10 part series dealing with the author’s experiences with mental illness. As it contains explicit subject matter, sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

I left McLean Hospital in November of 2007. Because of arbitrary divisions between academic semesters I soon realized I had earned an unexpected vacation. I was now twice-removed from reality, exiled from the ivory womb that had incubated my madness. Directionless, I played videogames and baked cookies with my mother, finished my night classes, took a job at a local record store in hopes of preserving some scrap of my indie cred. (My little sister, bless her, told me that living in a mental asylum was “pretty indie rock.” Let my audience, infinitely hipster-er than myself, be the final judge. However I acknowledge that several times at McLean I caught myself wondering if the hospital sold t-shirts that I might purchase and wear faux-ironically, perhaps underneath a fitted blazer of some kind.)

Somehow I survived those long insufferable weeks of delicious food and abundant leisure. But I constantly reminded myself that soon enough I would return to the academic dungeon that I called home, and January became like an evil Christmas to me; I had a small plastic case I used to sort out my daily phalanx of pills, and each day I opened it like some unholy advent calendar, swallowing the bitter narcotic chocolate and counting the days until judgment, trial without jury or sanity clause, was delivered.

My eventual return was uneventful and uncommented on. I parroted my grotesque alibi and found it accepted without question. I did a play and took several pass-fail courses. My education continued. Yet my extensive study at a more selective, arguably more rigorous institution (F———r’s Skull Community College) had irreversibly transformed my perspective. Everything seemed smaller here. The laborious academic discourse I had once accepted without question had become pedantic and trivial. My friends would complain about double-credit laboratory seminar take-home theses, and I would stare, mute and blinking, uncomprehending of a language I had once spoken fluently.

Part of this is that I was simply no longer equipped to engage in the ecstatic ritual flagellation pursued by my fellow monastics. My symptoms, after all, are exacerbated by stress. When I am asked to post to a class discussion board, I wince and ruminate; an hour spent studying instead of sleeping is an hour in the company of screaming, tormented ghosts. Sometimes I struggled with my medication, although it is difficult to articulate this sensation, because it is a feeling defined as much by absence as presence. It is not entirely unlike vertigo, a strangely empty sensation. It is the nauseous recognition of empty places in one’s mind. It is like the acute awareness of the absence of a headache, just slightly uncomfortable although not painful, like chewing a too-large piece of bubblegum that has lost its color and flavor. Ghost circles, psychic white noise. The school has made minor concessions to my condition, I have been granted late homework passes ad infinitum, but these do not entirely compensate for the idiosyncrasies of the disorder. I imagine that our institution’s faculty does not regularly patronize this dodgy periodical but a plea, if any of you are reading: restraint, compassion. Every time I am pushed beyond my abilities I fucking suffer a little. And I am not alone in this.

There have also been odd moments of discontinuity since I’ve returned, resonances that others miss, inside jokes that would confound anyone sane. There have been times when I have felt an overwhelming urge to speak up, to scream until hoarse and raw-throated, yet in such moments of ineffective rage it is difficult to find an ear that is wired to a sympathetic brain. Here I encounter weekend bingers who tell me, joint or screwdriver in hand, that they do not believe in psychiatric medication. I am subjected to periodic published diatribes, composed by undergraduate fuckwits manic on Nietzsche and caffeine and sleep-deprivation, that claim that mental illness does not exist; that all I must do is believe, and the Power of my Will shall elevate me to glorious rationality. I am told that medicine is unnecessary because unnecessary suffering is the medicine, and I am told that it is my fault that I am tortured because I simply do not want enough to be healthy. Tell me, my sane brothers and sisters: have you ever described yourself as “depressed” because of a B on an assignment, have you ever refused dessert because you are not only “anorexic” but “totally anorexic?” Have you ever counted something twice and chuckled and claimed to be “oh-cee-dee?” Then congratulations! I am drafting you as an ally, and here is how you may begin your contribution to the magnificent struggle for the enfranchisement of the mentally ill. Shut. The fuck. Up.

Since childhood I have been reassured that we are all human, that everyone is the same on the inside. I wonder, where does that leave people like me, who are demonstrably not the same on the inside? We are misunderstood mutants like the X-Men, only not the cool popular X-Men; like Marrow, whose face was disfigured by bony protrusions, or like Maggot, whose digestive system was replaced by a pair of intelligent armored slugs. I am homo obsessus: “besieged man.” My brain, my mind, my soul — whatever terrestrial or transcendental organ you choose to assign responsibility for the functionality of my person — does not work. It is broken, and it has consequently spent the duration of its existence trying to dismantle itself. My better angel is defective, and the manufacturer has been extremely uncooperative in my attempts to obtain a replacement. Indeed, much of my treatment has involved convincing myself not to prematurely approach the executive for an explanation of his organization’s incompetence.

On a campus cross-sectioned by clashing minority identities, those afflicted by mental illness are infuriatingly the first to be silenced. We are alike but alone. We have no history of oppression or triumph to draw strength from, no artists or advocates to defend us; no academic department dedicated to cataloguing our achievements, although our behavior is carefully and clinically examined, like that of dogs or rats. We are united, not by distinction, but by a burden that any of us would gleefully shed. We chuckle and cringe and self-deprecate in the presence of colossal, indefensible ignorance. We suffer alone, and pointlessly, and in silence. Our power is not that which makes us different, but the strength we muster to overcome these differences and assimilate, to conform, to live unremarkable lives while beset by exquisite personal torture. Every day, survived under such conditions, is an endeavor and an achievement. Every B is a victory.

Forgive my ranting here. Again, because my experiences defy narrative convention I hesitate, here, to try to apply a final moral context to my writing. But if I may instead offer some advice, as a graduating senior.

You are brilliant. You have gifts that may be used to better, not only your own circumstances, but the standard of human life on this planet. And you have been given four years to crystallize your understanding of these gifts, and to achieve the wisdom and maturity needed to use them responsibly. But we waste these years on petty self-flagellation. We lionize personal suffering in service of abstract goals, we willfully endure unbearable trauma to achieve things that do not matter, and we use these circumstances to rationalize our failures. We sequester ourselves at basement desks and play joyless games while we claim to work. We hide behind the salad bar to avoid meeting the eyes of people we have fucked. We choose to overexert ourselves and deliberately neglect our actual problems, and we use the same trite excuses, again and again, to validate our behavior. “Tired.” “Busy.” “Awkward.”

People talk about this school as existing within a bubble, like it was some other planet. It baffles me that on a campus filled with chemists and biologists such rumors persist. Is the atmosphere not oxygen here? Are these plants so exotic as to not produce chlorophyll? Welcome, my friends, to planet Earth. Enjoy the air, the trees. It’s almost summer now. Perhaps now would be a good time to go outside and catch up on some reading. But it is my unhappy duty to remind you that it is impossible to save the world if you cannot bring yourself to live on it. Each of us needs to stop making excuses, to lay down those burdens that we cannot bear, to confront our personal problems instead of orchestrating new ones. We must be kind to ourselves. To do anything else is selfish, socially irresponsible. It is cowardly and childish. The undiagnosed life is not worth living. It’s time to grow up.

So this is it, this is the end of the proverbial session, and I ain’t gonna be taking any more questions. I believe my attorney will second that notion. It’s been over a year since I returned to Swarthmore. I wrote and read; I botched exams. I finally got into the fiction workshop. I completed my thesis while sleeping ten hours a day due to a slightly overgenerous prescription of medication, and I launched into an irrational tirade against The USA Network program “Monk” at a bewildered friend at Pub Night. I’ve done silly, embarrassing, reprehensible things, and I will probably do several more of them between the submission and publication of this column. I have been allowed to be a college student, a little, for a bit. I wish that I’d had more time to enjoy it.

Writing this has been a long, ugly, difficult process, as my past four years have been long, ugly and difficult years. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve contradicted myself and I’ve probably angered people that it was inadvisable to anger. But I do not regret writing or publishing this. The narrative does not stop, things accelerate, a few weeks and I will be swept away from this place for the last time and everything will change again. But for now, at least, a moment of quiet. It is done, almost. The rest is … well, I’m sure you know the rest.

Hamlet is a senior. You can reach him at hamletwrenncroft@gmail.com. The next installment of “Trigger” will be published next week.