Content Warning:
This piece includes references to mental health challenges such as suicidal thoughts, experiences of discrimination, and emotionally intense language. As this year’s theme explores transitions, some submissions engage deeply with personal and vulnerable experiences. Please take care while reading, and feel free to pause or step away if needed.
I gaze out the large picture windows at the low clouds clinging to building tops like vapours around a showered body. My nurse, a woman with curly auburn hair, nervous eyes and rosacea, comes every morning to collect me from my cell—she scrubs me with chlorhexidine gluconate solution (the hospital-issued all-purpose cleanser), her gloves moving over my body, which trembles lightly under her touch like a leaf near the ocean. She doesn’t know Black hair, doesn’t know how to treat the delicate curls coiled like pen compression springs. So, she squirts the cleanser and massages gently, my coils tangling and roughened under the harsh treatment. When it dries, it crackles to the touch, springing out of my head in an unruly heap.
Some people are afraid of dementia at end-of-life, but I’ve already experienced the half-death of severe psychosis. I’ve already been catatonic, my hands reduced to useless claws, my gaze unfocused, my face unresponsive. Though my body was in peak physical condition: lithe, toned, firm—my mind had broken.
I, 2 months from my 21st birthday, the golden child of my parents, a competitive pianist, national French dictation winner, the teacher’s pet, the scholarship winner, valedictorian daughter of two educators, gifted with an IQ in the 95th percentile… I roamed the three hallways of the acute unit of the Mental Health and Addictions ward for 2 weeks, spending another 3 in the general ward. None of the anti-psychotic medications were working. None of the anti-depressants had worked. Not risperidone, not olanzapine, not quetiapine, not the SSRIs, nor the SNRIs, not the little blue ones that dissolve under the tongue, not the ones that killed my libido, not the ones that made me sleep all day and gain 60 pounds. They. Didn’t. Work!
Despite my privileged, upper middle-class upbringing, despite the piano lessons, the swimming lessons, the gymnastics lessons, the inspiring middle school teacher, my high intelligence, my potential… I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Schizoaffective disorder (SZA) is a serious and chronic mental illness, in the schizophrenia-spectrum of disorders. Like most mental illnesses, there is no cure for SZA, meaning it is a lifelong condition, but it is treatable. It is not unusual for teens and young adults to experience psychotic symptoms, particularly those who go through prolonged periods of stress, lack of sleep, and psychedelic drug use. “Bad trips” are fairly common—seeing or hearing things, feeling paranoid, not being able to tell what is real and what is a product of an overstimulated brain trying to make sense of the world in an altered state. And yet, as a schizophrenic, I feel my illness has some of the most intense stigma attached to it. The biggest misconception about schizophrenia that I’ve encountered is people assuming I’m hallucinating all the time. I don’t hallucinate at all in my regular day-to-day life. I take medication daily to keep psychotic symptoms in check, and my symptoms have always been episodic: they only take place when I am actively unwell. They are not present at my baseline.
Like a knee once dislocated, now weakly held in place, will sometimes pop out of its rightful position, so too can the mind--taxed by stress, lack of sleep, trauma, drugs—dislocate, pop out of this reality and into a dream. With enough pressure, reality can bend and shatter… After the trauma, at times I felt like a limp, paper doll forced to dance to and fro on a string, dangling, a passenger in my own body—numb to the beauty. There were no epiphanies, no untamed joy, only a desire to leave, to give up, to die. But now, I am back from the brink of brain-death and returned to the land of the living.
