“Prolonged and chronic illness stitches itself into life in a different way than acute illness does. She refutes a line in Rebecca Solnit’s book “The Faraway Nearby,” about how illness “takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough.” This “has not been my experience,” Wang writes. Wang is married-another signifier, she says, that she is high-functioning-but she does not plan to have children.ĭoes someone with depression remain a depressive if her symptoms are kept fully in check with medication and treatment? What about someone diagnosed with the schizophrenias? (Wang refers to schizophrenia in the plural to encompass schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder.) For Wang, the experience of schizophrenia is defined as much by the spectre of her symptoms returning as by periods of actual psychosis. She no longer holds a full-time office job-as she described in an essay for BuzzFeed, leaving it felt like “I surrendered my last benchmark of sanity”-and instead carefully balances her writing and other freelance work with her physical and mental needs. What should she wear in order to continue to appear capable, confident, and mentally sound, even if she’s locked in hallucinations and delusions or hasn’t had the energy to bathe in days? What movies or TV shows are safe to watch-that won’t trigger psychosis or dissolve the borders of her sanity? Today, Wang manages her condition with medication, therapy, journaling, and a spiritual practice of what she calls “the sacred arts”: Tarot, divination, candle magic. Many of Wang’s essays explore how navigating a chronic illness that brings so much stigma can complicate even the most basic life choices. It was helpful to be reassured that it wasn’t strange to find it so hard to write, that it was quite common to be retraumatised by writing about things that had happened. I’d have to go through thousands of pages of journal entries and remember and relive awful things. I talked to friends who’ve written memoirs, including Blair Braverman, who wrote Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, because I was having such a hard time.
It was as traumatising as writing a memoir in many ways. One book that was really important while I was writing The Collected Schizophrenias was Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon. You mention other books exploring mental illness – what for you was the most powerful? The collected schizophrenias: essays esmé weijun wang reviews
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