The Novelist's Hubris

Finding My Way In: More Thoughts on Blogging Post-LiveJournal & Grappling With Fiction Writing

Susannah Conway posted an intriguing piece about being tired of the Shiny Happy Factor of many blogs -- to which I'll add that I'm tired of not only the Shiny Happy Factor, but also the marketing, the Lessons Learned approach, and the blogging-as-science shenanigans that have been rolling around in my universe lately. (I touched upon this in my Remembering Livejournal post, to which I received many a comment from LJ veterans who felt similarly, as in, Where do we go from here?) What her post, which I partially related to -- but only partially, as we come from very different Internet backgrounds, and she has a much larger, and one could even say, "cult" following, than I do -- reminded me of is that this is my space. And you (yes, you) are a part of my audience, but I want to sound like myself and not like a performing monkey.

& it saddens me that I even have to remind myself to "Be Myself" and "Be Authentic" and all of that tripe, but it's true: the Internet has changed and is changing all of the time.

 

On the mental health front, things have been a mixed bag around here lately. The last two months have been a bit of a struggle and a slog, with a few high points here and there -- right now my body's old patterns of stress reactivity have been arising, to my dismay, and I keep thinking about my old therapist's maxim: "Accept it and do the work anyway." He was an ACT therapist; he believed in Acceptance and Commitment. I liked him, and I think that radical acceptance is an interesting idea, but ACT can be a brutal method of responding to traumatic forms of mental illness (i.e. psychosis). At present, I still don't regret quitting therapy, and not having that appointment weekly or semi-weekly is a weight off my shoulders. I'm stepping gently into working with a life coach at the moment, and though at least one friend has expressed nervousness about life coaches potentially being charlatans, I've had largely positive experiences so far with the coaches that I've worked with -- you can see the ones I love most in my Resources page -- and so I'd like to work with someone around the issues of decreasing phase blindness, actively working on healing from old trauma, and reducing escapism/increasing distress tolerance -- which are all things that I've tried with therapists, but never made much headway in.

 

It pleases me to see the development of The Long Work as I've been chronicling it here, so here's an update: it's 400 pages (double-spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman; much longer in Courier, of course) and 126,000 words. Structurally, I'm in the last leg of Part Two, which leaves Part Three as the final section of the book -- then I'll have a full, sprawling, disarmingly tidy draft, at which point I'll have to dismantle and rework for at least a year, maybe two.

The end of Part Two is giving me a headache, though -- TLW has been leading me around by the nose, and I've tossed in salient elements that are a bitch to research, including Liberation Theology, piano-making in the 1940s, Greenpoint in the first half of the 20th century, and charismatic Christianity in rural Northern California. I suspect that the hard part about writing the final chapter of Part Two is that so much of it is based outside of my so-called realm; the book is very un-autobiographical, but extrapolation helps, and living in a ministry-slash-commune is. Um. Way out of my depth. I decided to break the ice by "planting a bomb" in the chapter, i.e., deliberately inserting heated autobiographical content in a foreign scenario. I did a major Find/Replace and used Real Names for characters. We'll see if it works.

I'm also paring down an excerpt into a short story, which instinct tells me will have to go through many more drafts before I let it near this particular solicitation. I have a tendency to, in a jolt and flurry of anxiety, shove my babies out the door to school before they've got their pants on.

So, the Rapture, huh?

 

xo,

Bells

These are the new rules. I’m not allowed to leave the house without Ma, William, or preferably, both. I am not allowed to go into town. Therefore, William is not allowed to go into town, because I am not allowed to stay at home alone. Now we are having family meetings every day. In these family meetings, we talk about things that are unifying us and things that are dividing us. We are striving for things that unify us. (Naturally.) Things that divide us must be eliminated. At this family meeting is where the rules are defined. We sit at the kitchen table. William has arranged his face in a semblance of nonchalance, picking at the table with his thumbnail. There exists a somewhat mythical story about my father buying this table and having to enlarge the doors to get it in. It’s one of my favorite stories about him because it seems so outlandish, and makes my father seem grand in a manner that has nothing to do with madness. One of Ma’s ideas is to string bells along the top of the front and back doors, and the windows, too.

 

P.S. Jezebel quoted from my post about "phase blindness" in an article this week titled "Vague Memory May Be Linked to Depression." Check it out -- it's an interesting look into memory and mental illness.

TNH Chats With: Paolo Sambrano, Creator of Bi-Poseur

Image taken by Beth Allen

Paolo Sambrano is my kind of dude. He also performs and writes about bipolar disorder -- and after seeing a chunk of his performance a few months ago, I'll voice for his sassy smarts, wonderful wit, and amazing ability to move around on a stage while conveying the deepest, darkest aspects of mental illness.

In this interview, Paolo and I chatted about performance, creativity, and why Playstation controllers are funny in that "ha ha but oh no" way that I love so much. And at the end of this post, two lucky winners will get a chance to win a pair of tickets to a performance of Bi-Poseur this weekend!

 

Q: So I saw your performance awhile back, and was quite struck by all of it — the narrative technique, the use of physical space, etc. How did you fall into performance, and what sort of training do you have, if any?

Paolo: Ah, first off, thank you very much! I really appreciate you coming through, and double thanks for the note a couple of weeks back. Let's see, I did some acting in high school, nothing too much though, some community theater and drama as an elective. And I mean, I always was interested in solo performance - my first exposure to it was as a kid watching John Leguizamo one-man shows on HBO, Freak and Sexaholix. I've personally been doing solo performance since July 2008, and I fell into it by accident, really.

Q: I truly hope this is going to turn into a story where you are walking into your bathroom and there's an audience in the shower.

Paolo: Almost! I checked out W. Kamau Bell's own solo show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve in SF that summer, and saw that in the program he teaches a workshop on solo performing, Doing a one-person show was always something that I wanted to do, but one of those things that I didn't know how to get started on (much like how to wrestle bears and fly in a hot air balloon around the world).

Q: Right! So it sounds like a workshop was perfect for you. Did you have a sense of what you would want to perform, back then?

Paolo: Absolutely! I always knew that I wanted to talk my suicide attempts in high school, 'cause I've been telling people those stories for years now, and I always thought what happened to me was always absurd (even while it was happening to me!). And as a medium, I really clicked with solo performing, I bummed around from filmmaking to slam poetry in high school, and doing solo was the first thing I didn't bail on after a sustained amount of time doing it.

Q: That really strikes me — that you wanted to use performance as a vehicle for talking about suicide. I especially noticed that your show — the part of it I saw — had a lot of humor in it. What's one particularly absurd thing or moment you're fond of performing?

Paolo: Oh man, I think for me, I really like doing this scene where I try to hang myself with a Playstation controller. My dad walked in on me and ended up wrestling me to the ground, but neither of us knew how to wrestle, so it turned into this awkward, shirtless sweaty mess with him just exhausted on top of me, so I couldn't move... then my brother and grandma walks in (my grandma asked if I wanted a cup of Sprite) and my dad tells my brother to call the cops. The cop comes, and I basically yell at him that LIFE SUCKS. He ends up putting me in cuffs and puts in me the back of the squad car while the EMTs come.

Q: I can just imagine the reaction you get when you tell this story one-on-one versus in performance. Or maybe they're the same!

Paolo: Ha! Totally! I mean now that you mention it, when I [narrate it in my head], it sounds way darker than how I play it on stage. That was definitely a low point in my life, but I was always able to realize how absurd this all was. Even the EMT was like, why would I waste a perfectly good Playstation controller.

Q: How old were you?

Paolo: I was fourteen years old when it went down. It happened Fall 2000. But it's always fun to play on stage. And the Playstation as noose kind of became the unofficial symbol of the show.

...

Q: That's brilliant. I want to ask you about your creative process... how did Bi-Poseur get put together?

Paolo: Bi-Poseur was formed with W. Kamau Bell and the Solo Performance Workshop (the workshop he co-founded with Bruce Pachtman in 2005). The way the classes work is that you put together a 20 minute self-contained scene over an eight week period with other people. So you'd get up on stage each week and present what you got in front of the others in the class. At the end of the eight weeks there'd be a class show where you'd perform your scene in front of friends and family, [and] I did most of the heavy lifting with Bi-Poseur in these classes, I'd sign up for sessions and write these 20 minute scenes (although I didn't have an immediate end game of forming them into a full length show at the time). It wasn't until about Fall 2009 that Kamau (and others) pushed me in the direction of having a full length show cause I had enough material. So I stitched together the existing scenes I had, wrote some connective tissue around it, and there was the show. Although I like to admit I have such an inefficient creative process.

Q: I'm curious about the actual Moments of Creation, though, having never written for performance. How did those 20 minute scenes get written? I'm picturing you sitting at some desk, pulling at your hair with a flask next to you. And then getting up and saying dialogue to yourself.

Paolo: Yeah my actual creative process is terribly inefficient. What usually occurs is that I just freewrite, or try to construct scenes, or at the very least scene concepts that I would like to do at my computer, on the word processor. And then I'd print out that document, and then I'd carry that around with me wherever I go, and then use whatever inspiration that pops into my head at the time, and immediately write it down on the script somewhere. Eventually, I just reconcile the notes I made on the script into the document, print out the new version of the document and repeat the process. I'm not much for just sitting at my desk and making myself write, I find that it's easier for me to let the mind wander. Makes the stakes in my head easier, I reckon

Q: Ah, that's really interesting. So when people ask you what Bi-Poseur is about, what do you tell them?

Paolo: Ahhhhhhhh, yes. I half joke that I need a new tagline or 30 second pitch about Bi-Poseur, but it usually sounds like this: "Okay, whatever I'm about to tell you, I want you to know that this is a comedy, okay? Okay. Bi-Poseur is about suicide, mental illness, and the death of my mother. Remember! It's a comedy! It's hilarious!" And then I spend a minute or two talking about how the way I approach the topic isn't exploitative, and how the gravity of the situation isn't there, and the stuff with my mother is treated a bit heavier.

Q: Do people laugh nervously at that point and give you a dollar?

Paolo: I've been getting the the nod and smile lately. Wish there was dollars involved though. Maybe a THAT'S INTERESTING here and there.

Q: That's interesting. Why do you emphasize that the death of your mother is treated with more gravity than suicide and mental illness?

Paolo: Ah, good question .I think in my head, when I say that the mental illness/suicide stuff isn't exploitative, I'm afraid they think that It'll be like a Me, Myself, and Irene situation, where it's I'm using these topics just to be 'edgy' or what the fuck ever, and that the jokes that I'll be constructing just use the edginess as the punchline without any real craft attached to it. One of the things that I'm proud about Bi-Poseur is that the comedy is completely straight, I'm not being ironic at all, but it's juxtaposed with the stakes of me actually trying to kill myselff/deal with mental illness. And then I say the stuff about my mom, because, the stuff about my mom is more somber, I don't want them to think that I'm using my mom's death for laughs.

Q: I wonder sometimes if I'm always going to use mental illness as a characteristic of my work — it's in my fiction, it's in my nonfiction, blog, etc. — and just now, it occurred to me to ask the same of you.

Paolo: Oooh. When you say characteristic, forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but do you mean it as like an adjective when you describe your own work? Or do you mean like, this is the stuff that I write about (mental illness).

Q: I meant, I suppose, the way that Flannery O'Connor is associated with the South, or Dave Chapelle is associated with racial issues.

Paolo: I mean, here's the thing that always astounds me about Bi-Poseur - the fact that people can relate to it. When I was writing the show, I remember panicking to my director saying how nobody is going to like the show, how they'll say it's all self-absorbed and narcissistic and not about BIG ISSUES (like the Middle East or racism). I learned that most solo shows are all narcissistic to a degree anyway, but when I started doing the show and people would come up after and be like THAT REALLY HAPPENED TO ME or I HAVE A SON WHO IS BI-POLAR AND ITS LIKE THAT. That's really flattering to me. So I mean, I feel like the show can be used as advocacy for mental health/suicide issues, and I'm more than happy to take on that mantle in that regard, if it is asked of me... not to get all big headed there, or whatever, heh. And I mean, I think the mental illness stuff will always be a flavor or be an influence on my future work, I don't think I wanna be like... the one thing I'm known for. I'm writing a show right now about losing weight, and I have this idea in my head for a show about manliness

Q: So let's talk about future work. What's cooking for you, presently? We'll wrap up with that.

Paolo: Yeah, I'm currently deep in the throes of writing my second show, currently titled I Get Wet. That show is about my ups and downs with weight loss (I used to be a lot fatter in the past). I'll performing the first twenty minutes of that May 20 in Baltimore as apart of Fitbloggin', which is a conference for weight loss and fitness bloggers (perfect fit for the show). I'll be performing Bi-Poseur one more time this Saturday, May 7 in San Francisco at Stage Werx Theatre (533 Sutter @ Powell) at 2pm. It'll be the last time I perform it for a while. [And] I recently just quit my job, so I'm really just trying to open myself up to possibility, as new agey/hippie as that sounds. I've been [training in] Boxing and Muay Thai for a spell... bly good fodder for future work. I just wanna do all sorts of things, really. Competitive BBQer, solo performer, amateur fighter? Able to perform marriage ceremonies? Anything, everything.

Final performance of Bi-Poseur this Saturday, May 7 at Stage Werx Theatre (533 Sutter) at 2 PM.

 

So you totally want to see this amazing dude perform, right?

Brown Paper Tickets link for ticket purchases - https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/171589. Get five bucks off tickets with discount code FRUAD (not a typo).  

Well, you can (if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area). The first two people to reply to this post with a comment will win a pair of tickets to Bi-Poseur for this Saturday, each.

In an email after our conversation, Paolo would like to append:

...I thought a little bit more about [your mental illness question], and I think what I was trying to say (however not obvious and long-winded it was) is that 'mental-illness' is something that I will most def claim in my creative work and writing, but I think I am a little unease with being the 'mental-illness' solo performer, or to be looked at as some advocate prime, kind of like how you mentioned Dave Chappelle is to-go for racial issues.

Thank you so much to Paolo for doing this interview, and I hope you SF'ers rush out and see the show; I'll be there!

xo,

Tomorrow is Today

 

A silly lil video from Half Moon Bay.

All exuberant on the Western Front. Be aware of the following:

I wrote an article for Jezebel about celebrities and bipolar disorder. As of this second, it's gotten over 19,000 pageviews and 72 Facebook Likes. Thank you to everyone who's been supportive in this endeavor; thank you to Jezebel; thank you to Anna, who asked if I would be interested in writing about such a topic.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to be on the CBC radio show "Q,", which airs in the United States on Public Radio International, on Sirius, on CBC Radio One, etc. (see aforementioned link for details), but fortunately, for those of us who don't have either an old-fashioned AM/FM radio or Sirius, "Q" also has a podcast, available on iTunes. I am hoping against hope that I do not sound like a complete blithering idiot.

 

I've had a bad cold for the past couple of days, which stirs up in me a number of thoughts, including that which states that my mental malaise and psychiatric dervish-ing tend to calm down when I'm physically ill, as well as the fact that I need to boost my immune system (more oranges? zinc?). I do have much to say. I'm reading The Tiger's Wife. I consulted my dreams last night after seeking creative direction from my fickle Muse, and came up with fire and brimstone. But my bad cold is wearing me out, dear Readers, and I'm going to rest up and read before going to bed very early, as good girls do.

xo,

Am I Human: An Interview with Jessalyn Wakefield

Image of JW taken from Am I Human.

Spring is all I can think about. Weather. The light. How it feels in the nasal passages. Many books. Many thousands of words. Others. My own. Mostly quiet. Maybe too quiet. Humming to open my throat. -- journal, tumblr

NOTE: This post contains images which may be NSFW, depending on what kind of work you do.

 

Jessalyn Wakefield is magical -- fierce -- stunning -- a storm of a woman. I met her at an aquarium. All around us: otters, silver fish, black-eyed sharks. I find it perfectly fitting that we met amidst water (my element), because Jessalyn has wound her way into my life in a profound way; she inspires me regularly, and I'm thrilled to have her work here, as well as a Q&A. Thank you, Jessalyn, for being here.

As you will discover on her web space, Am I Human, Jessalyn is a writer, photographer, performer, bookmaker, printer, and great thinker. 

Q. Do you see links between mental illness and religion? How does this influence your prose, your style of writing and performing, what you choose to write about?

A. The position that the mentally ill are prophets, or conduits for divinity, or are inherently more spiritually attuned than other people is disturbing to me. Just because someone is speaking in ways you do not understand, it does not follow that what they are saying is profound.

The psychotic aspect of mental illness, of seeing the unreal, is the aspect that is often skewed as being “prophetic.” But to use the prophets of Judaism and Christianity as an example, these were functional people. Most of them lead very ordinary lives. These were not people in the throes of madness. These were people who received transmissions and instructions, followed through with them with clarity and power, and continued on with their ordinariness. The schizophrenias, in contrast, are more often than not debilitating. And what people unfamiliar with the disease fail to realize is that psychosis, while perhaps the most fantastic aspect of this sort of mental illness, is not necessarily the most striking to the person with schizophrenia. The majority of those suffering from schizophrenia don’t even perceive their psychosis as unreal. There are a host of other symptoms that severely compromise one’s ability to live one’s life in the manner in which one should like one’s life to be lived. Agency is crippled and concept of will becomes impotent.

One does not follow the other, but neither does one negate the other. A mental illness is not an extraordinary spiritual experience in of itself. But a person can have a mental illness and also have extraordinary spiritual experiences.

I am a woman with a mental illness (schizoaffective disorder) and I am a woman who claims to have divine visions. These are markedly different states. The psychotic experiences I associate with schizoaffective disorder are simultaneously terrorizing and route. During a psychotic episode I have a repertoire of audio, visual and olfactory hallucinations that, at this point, five years after diagnosis, do not deviate much from a predictable pattern of images and sensations. But to me, terror is the hallmark of psychosis: the feeling of my mind and body assaulting themselves, and my utter impotence to stop what is happening.

Transmissions I associate as being of the divine are intense but the aspect of terror is absent. I am less comfortable talking about these experiences than I am talking about living with a mental illness. Language falls short. I don’t even know if they are about language. But to say: these experiences do not disrupt my life. I have them and I examine them and I continue on.

My writing often includes images and references to the Christian mythology because Christianity is a significant part of my history. I do not address my direct interactions with divinity in my work. But my illness is my life. By this I mean my life must be lived to accommodate my illness. My writing is not especially creative; I write about my life and my experiences. In this sense, my work is perhaps a continuous catalogue of what it is like to perceive the world with a schizophrenia. Because of my illness, terror is a familiar feeling to me and one I am able to access and transmit readily in both writing and performance. There is a brutality to my work but it is a compassionate brutality. It is the brutality of direct experience. Over and over I am trying to convey: I have experienced and I understand. I know how terribly frightened people are of each other. I know how terribly frightened people are of themselves. I want to tell people that it is okay to be frightened, but they mustn’t let their fear stop them. That they must listen to their fear and yet learn how to honestly live the lives they desire despite it. Because of it.

Q. What are the tactile appeals to you with bookmaking and letterpress? What comes closest to it, for you, outside of the press?

A. Books have always held a blatant erotic appeal for me. I get aroused standing in libraries and bookstores, being enveloped by the presence of language made corporal. The scent of books, the turning of pages, the engagement that reading demands: this all speeds quickly beyond the tactile and into the sexual.

My first letterpress class was revelatory. Handling type, using my body to operate the press to create words was the piece I did not know I was missing from writing. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Taking the creation of language away from the domain and privacy of the mind and making it a totality of the body and the public. I love the direct incorporation of my body into the reproduction of words (and even this language? The integration of the entire corpus. The biological act of reproduction.).

A single piece of lead type has many different parts. Many of these parts are named after the body. The feet. The face. The belly. The beard. The shoulder. You can literally cup the body of a letter in your palm. And the parts of books themselves: head spine joint tail. Words and the shape of words. I know language is deeply flawed and not especially suited for the task we've assigned it. But I love it so much, and it's like people in that way. Of all the things humans have created, language is closest to our selves. And to be able to give it a body, to experience the body of language directly with my body? It’s a mystical act. It’s exciting and it’s sexual.

The closest thing outside of the press is probably intimacy. Knowing a skin, knowing someone and learning how to get along with them. I think of writing and typography and printing as a relationship. As my primary relationship. Loving people and loving my work are inextricable tasks. One informs the other. Continually.

Q. What project are you working on presently that you're the most excited about?

A. I have two major projects in the works. CVLT CVNT is a one off literary magazine featuring the work of Elizabeth Hall and Marie Fury. I am a piss poor binder and wanted to give myself an assignment to practice binding. I am very excited about this object; the writing is excellent and I have not released a handmade book in two years. This is the most complicated construction for a book I have yet undertaken for an edition. Which is not saying much. But it’s saying something. It ought to be finished up in late spring.  

The second project is a new book of my own work, THE HONEYS TRINITY. I don’t know what to say about this piece. It’s an experiment in forms, primarily in typographic forms. It’s relatively lucid but the forms are weird but maybe not weird enough to be interesting. I don’t know. I only write books that please me, that’s all I’m ever trying to do. Pleasure myself. I have no qualms with calling my work masturbation. Masturbation is very pleasant and sometimes you find people who enjoy watching. I think this is currently a popular position to take about one’s writing but so it goes. Anyway. I expect to release it in late summer.

There are always more projects. Every experience presents the opportunity for a new book. One of the frustrating and beautiful things about book making is how much time and energy it requires to produce such an object. Every book is a commitment and a serious investment of hours and resources. There will never be enough time to create all the books that I envision. So many of them will persist for only as long as I am able to remember them. 

 

Thank you, again, to Jessalyn. Please visit her at her website, Am I Human, where you can find, among other things, a free recording and e-book of her work, The Void of Course Moon.

 

xo,

On Both Sides of the Episode, You Are Okay

I bought these Cosabella bras recently, and I can't imagine wearing anything else. They look like soft animals to me when they're all crumpled up. Animals curled up onto themselves.

I am fortunate in that I have always been, generally, all right on either side of an episode. (I'm not counting breakthrough symptoms, here, such as peripheral hallucinations -- which are annoying, but have no bearing on my ability to function.) When I'm doing well, it's easy to forget the bad stuff, and vice versa. I spoke about this in my post about phase blindness, and it's true of me right now.

The last few weeks have been tough, and I won't deny it. I'm taking the day off of work -- so far, I've severely depleted my winter holiday store of time off due to The Many Illnesses of 2011 -- but I'm trying to be kind to myself, and not feel guilty or beat myself up for the downturns of my body and brain. Because, for the most part, I am honestly not able to help these things until they happen.

These are the things I am doing today: drinking water, reading The Pale King, journaling, talking to my psychiatrist, taking all of my medications, stretching, making sure to eat, making Wellness Tea.

And that's all I have to say for today, beloved readers. I might also mention that in March, The Novelist's Hubris experienced its first birthday -- which I didn't celebrate, but which I am looking forward to celebrating belatedly with you.

xo,

Sorrowful and Joyous: The Pale King and Capgras

I'm reading The Pale King, and with the arrival (which happened controversially early, due to Amazon/Hachette/Little, Brown gaffes, and the fact that I was one of those jerks who pre-ordered the book months ago) of this posthumous publication of DFW's ambitious, unfinished book about boredom and how to live have also come a slew of new articles about DFW. I don't want to read all of them, and probably I won't be able to, but so far I've read the generally positive Michiko Kakutani review, the interesting 7,000-word GQ article, a few middling blog posts in various places. There's also the Pietsch introduction at the beginning of The Pale King, which ends with the lines, "But an unfinished novel is what we have, and how can we not look? David, alas, isn't here to stop us from reading, or to forgive us for wanting to."

So yesterday I was feeling sorrowful. There were all kinds of stressors on my plate -- trailing physical problems, the slew of old and highly successful friends arriving from everywhere around the world for V's wedding, an everpresent concern for R, etc. But Hanna said, "I think a lot of what you're feeling today has to do with DFW and The Pale King." Strange how she hit that straight on, deadpan. She didn't say, Why are you feeling so much over the debut of a book, and is this the kind of behavior that would indicate you are part of the Cult of Wallace that sprang up, or was only noticed, after his death? She just said that I was feeling sorrowful over this book that had come out, which is not something that I've experienced before.

Completely related to this issue is the fact that yesterday at work I started to think about writing something about Capgras delusion. Capgras has been written about before, in plenty of places -- there's that Ramachadran pop neuroscience book (Phantoms in the Brain, which I read when I was much younger), and the National Book Award winner of 2006, The Echo Maker. But I haven't written about Capgras in any depth -- not here, and not in my novel.

So then -- what is Capgras delusion. Forgive me, haters-of-Wikipedia, but here: "The Capgras delusion theory (or Capgras syndrome) is a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor." It's no wonder that Richard Powers chose to write an entire novel about the subject -- it reads like the juicy stuff of fiction, doesn't it? It's also the most prominent delusion that I experience when I'm moderately psychotic. Coming up in this blog is a fascinating interview and visual art series with a good friend of mine, Jessalyn Wakefield, a writer/artist/performer/bookmaker/etc. who has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder; she describes, in the interview, psychosis as having the distinct marker of terror. Which I would agree with. The few times that I've had the Capgras delusion, I was always, always terrified beyond imagination.

And I want to write about it. So I've been thinking about that -- how I'm going to do it, and how I'm going to convey the feeling that everyone you look at has been replaced by a robot, or is in some other way a shell of him- or herself, having been replaced by something awful, something sickening, and something that leaves you utterly alone in the world.

xo,

4 Life Things I Learned During (Surgical) Recovery

My first real outing after being laid up on the couch for a month was to go to a flower arranging class with Francesca, which is where these pictures are from -- at Prairie Collective's Studio Choo, a gorgeous little co-operative shop full of beautiful things.

The following are four things that I learned during the recovery process, post-surgery, and I share them here because I think that they're helpful in more general ways as well.

1. Drink water. Really. It's not only hydrating and good for the body, as your loved ones, health magazines, and doctors will tell you, but drinking water is also truly excellent for the spirit. Dyana Valentine, instigator extraordinaire, is the one who tipped me off to this one. I started drinking big glasses of cold water as "restart" mechanisms: after long and difficult conversations, after writing a painful or challenging passage in my novel, or if I was feeling stressed out and worn out. I took to drinking large glasses of cold water, and it served me well. Try it. 

2. Be gentle with yourself. Sometimes, that looks like giving yourself time. I gained weight because abdominal/pelvic surgery does not allow for much post-surgical movement. I wanted to go for walks and do yoga. After a week or two, I started hankering for the gym. I still can't go to the gym yet, and I'm writing this from home because I went back to work today for the first time in over a month; halfway through the day I started having terrible pain. 

I'd almost gone back to work one or two weeks after the surgery. I felt guilty about staying at home -- really, really guilty. I kept saying I would come back "soon" or "hopefully on _____" -- until Dr. K wrote me a letter saying that I needed three more weeks to recover (which turned into four, due to an internal infection resulting from the surgery). Dr. K's letter gave me permission to take time to heal. I learned to be okay with not pouring my own milk out of a gallon jug or letting the laundry sit for weeks. I started ordering grocery delivery online, which actually turned out to be significantly cheaper than schlepping to the expensive specialty market nearby. People came and cleaned the house. 

I'm not saying that you need to do any of those things, but what I am saying is that sometimes your brain and body need tenderness, and you need to be the one to give it. Which is connected to 3.) --

3. Let your loved ones help you when you need help. In the final week of my recovery, Chris had to leave for a business trip. A dear friend flew out and stayed with me, and I'm ever so grateful for her help and love during that time. 

While I was recovering, people made me meals, took out the garbage for me, brought me my packages from work, helped me navigate the California Short-Term Disability system, and so much more. And I'm really, really grateful for that.

4. Productivity doesn't always look like "productivity." Sometimes taking a nap is productivity when you're tired.

 

My MacBook is at the shop right now; I feel like I sent it away to summer camp for the first time, and I'm a nervous mom. Because all of my photo editing software is on that laptop, I can't guarantee that I'll post everyday -- but we'll see. I'd like to.

And, finally, thank you to everyone who wished me well. It was truly kind of y'all, and I'm sure that it helped me. 

Rest and Quitting Therapy

I ventured out of the apartment today (in the car - post-surgery, I'm still not too good with the whole Walking Places thing) to go to the bank with Chris, where we had a few things to take care of. And then we decided to stop at the grocery store, because we've been eating a lot of cereal and bananas lately, and there's only one browning banana left in the blue-green fruit bowl.

By the time we got home, I was absolutely exhausted. I'm recovering. An hour-long jaunt takes the wind out of my sails, and if I try to carry a bag of groceries, I'm really going to pay for it later. So now I'm back on the sofa underneath my heated throw, gathering myself, and reminding myself that recovery takes a whole lot of self-care.

 

Speaking of self-care, I quit therapy. (Pause for dramatic effect.) Why? Dr. X was, and is, a good guy. I might even so so far as to say that he was the best therapist that I'd ever had. But, after 12 years of therapy, I was tired of the charade. I was tired of hashing out the same pseudo-traumas and psycho-babble. I was acting like a sullen teenager every time I stepped through the threshold of that office because I didn't want to be there. I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere with it, in the end, and I wanted to strike out on my own.

This is what I do have, instead of therapy.

1. My network of family and friends. I know I can call up my dad if times get really tough. That's good stuff.
2. A psychiatrist that I've known since I was 15 years old, who's tiny, bad-ass, and funny. And who remembers everything about me. I know she cares, and I see her regularly.
3. I know that I can go back if I want to. He said so, and I know so.
4. I'm doing well, mentally speaking. Really well.
5. And the most important thing: I know that I'm capable of reaching out for help if I need it. Never underestimate the importance of your own capability for asking for assistance. 

It's been so long since I've been out of therapy (almost 13 years!) that I'm not quite sure how this is going to work. But, hey -- in the meantime, my Monday nights are now free.

(I'd like to add, here, that it's really important to not quit therapy if you're in need of healing, and if you're just starting out with therapy, or haven't started but have just been diagnosed with something, or have Major Life Issues that need to be addressed, I think that therapy can be a useful tool. It's just not what I need right now.)

 

xo,

Why I Left Yale: Mental Illness & Higher Education

One of the most spectacular failures of my life came out of being ill.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the summer before I was to begin at Yale as a member of the Class of 2005. My psychiatrist determined that I would begin treatment once I arrived there -- across the country. Alone. 18 years old.

I saw it as a chance for a fresh start. It was a time in my life when I was reckless and didn't care much about what happened to me. When I was still reeling from the abusive boyfriend, the sexual assault, the boundary-crossing relationships with both men and women. When I didn't know how to say no to people, or how to ask for what I wanted. You know, 18-year-old problems.

I received poor care from the psychiatrist that I was assigned to at Mental Hygiene. That was what it was called: Mental Hygiene. Like my brain needed to be scrubbed clean, which it did. Some of my new friends knew that I was going to Mental Hygiene. One of them, a girl from an Asian American performance group I was a member of, told me in an elevator, "Don't ever, ever tell them if you want to kill yourself."

"Yeah," someone else chimed in. "Never. Unless you want to end up in the hospital."

I said I wouldn't. (Think about this piece of advice: never tell anyone that YOU WANT TO KILL YOURSELF.)

"They have a bad rap," the girl said. "I know two people who've ended up in the hospital because of that."

In the spring I became manic, and then I became depressed. Despite the sage words of my fellow Asian American performance artists, I went to Urgent Care. I ended up in the psychiatric hospital, and as we began to discuss my discharge, Yale administration told me that I would have to leave unless one or more of my parents, who were living and working in California at the time, moved out to Connecticut. Said parent(s) and I would have to live in an apartment off-campus.

I couldn't bear the thought of leaving. I define myself through overachievement. There was no way that bipolar disorder was going to keep me from going to my Evolutionary Biology class, so my mother -- whom I didn't have a good relationship with, at the time -- and I moved into a small apartment near campus.

I was still very ill. I specifically recall lying on the floor of the kitchen, sobbing and screaming, while my mother frantically called my (new) psychiatrist. But leave? Never.

I became terribly ill again my sophomore year, was hospitalized, and then the gauntlet came down: I had to leave. While I sat, stone-faced, in the dining area of the WS2 unit, the Yale administrator told me that someone would have to confiscate my student ID, someone would have to pack up my things for me. In a year, after proving that I could survive through classes taken elsewhere, they would consider allowing me to return.

Grief doesn't begin to describe it. They wanted me on a plane back to California the next day. They wanted me out of the hospital, out of New Haven. My dad -- bless his heart, he'd come from China to be with me and to deal with the bureaucracy -- booked a hotel room for Chris and me to be together for one last night; he didn't tell the school. (In the hotel room, the school called. Were we in New York? They were checking on us. Yes, my dad lied.)

That was the beginning of the end of my time at Yale University.

 

My husband, whom I met when I was a freshman, graduated from Yale in 2003. I feel a mix of shame, jealousy, and bitterness every time I look at his diploma, which hangs in his work office (the diploma is good decor for the parents he works with; Chris is blessed with boyish good looks). I went with him to his five-year reunion in 2008 because after leaving Yale in 2003, I had never returned to New Haven, nor seen most of our mutual friends.

So much of it hadn't changed. The air was the same -- that stifling, heavy air that reminded me of trudging across Cross-Campus with my backpack. The Educated Burgher served the same unnaturally chocolatey milkshakes. The bells still rang. Those bells in Harkness Tower. My heart broke every time I heard the bells.

I attended the reunion as Chris' guest. I wrote beneath my name, "Jonathan Edwards, '05," because I didn't want to be thought of as an unknown guest, a silent partner. I used to belong here, I wanted to tell everyone.

I was still obviously grieving.

By the time I went to the reunion in 2008, my mental health had improved tremendously. I'd finally found a mixture of medications that needed to be adjusted up and down occasionally, but that fundamentally worked to keep me stable. And as I drank wine at the events, and looked around at all of the people who had graduated five years before, and possessed that diploma that I wanted so badly, I wondered if it was true that I didn't belong there, at the reunion of the school where I'd placed all of my dreams of escape and intellect and hope when I was 18 and stuck in my small, suffocating hometown.

Our mutual friend J. was there. He'd snuck into the reunion because he didn't want to pay. The whole thing, he told me, made him sick. He hated that people recognized him and wanted to talk to him. He hated having to make small talk with those people. He smoked furiously and looked miserable.

"I was so depressed here," he said. "This place. It's just such an awful place."

And he had a diploma.

 

Learning is one of my favorite things in the world. It's my jam. But institutionalized learning happened at a time in my life when I wasn't okay enough to do it -- by which I mean, the learning. Middle school? Ha. High school? Hell in a handbasket. College? 'Nuff said. Graduate school? Better, but no dice.

Sometimes I ask myself if any of my time at Yale was worth it, and I think about bells and Chris and the exhiliration of the first day of my linguistics class, when I asked more questions than anyone else, and answered more questions than anyone else, too. It wasn't the right time for me, or my ailing brain; the school wasn't equipped to deal with the problems that I was having, and I don't know if, with liability and suicides on campus, schools will ever have the right solution in hand to help their walking wounded.

But I don't hate myself for that so-called failure anymore. I wasn't the only one who failed, then.

 

Resources:

How to Assess a College's Mental Health Offerings (NYTimes)
More Mental Illness Among College Students (PsychCentral)

 

NOTE: The last few weeks' comments have disappeared, due to some conflicts between Disqus and TypePad. I've now switched to TypePad Connect for my commenting system, which should work. My apologies for the mishap.