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| Vol 10 No. 9, Nov
16 - Nov 22 2000 | |||||||||
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| YOU'RE
NOT GOD by Trisha Ready
The Story of a Schizophrenic I CARRY AROUND the joker from a deck of Bumblebee
playing cards to remind me of Nate. He gave me a sketch of the same image
once: a jester in red-and-yellow pajamas and cap marching across the back
of a seemingly genial bee. The image, like Nate, is a contradiction of
innocence and danger, a puzzle I can't stop trying to solve. Even Nate's
appearance is mixed. He looks like a sensitive, distracted art or
philosophy student. He's willowy and shy, with dark hair and olive skin.
Sometimes the weather of Nate's face changes as though it's crossed by a
chaos of clouds. You see the difference mostly in his eyes, which narrow
and intensify.
Nate worries me, both for the world inside his brain and for the
reasons why he keeps falling through the cracks, some as big as canyons,
in Seattle's mental-health services. Nate's been diagnosed with
schizophrenia. Sometimes I imagine him as a walking time bomb. I've
watched him throw a chair, storm out of a room. I know he's attacked
people when he's been scared. But most of the time he is docile, skittish,
circling a sun that alternately burns and goes dark.
Nate has changed my view of the world and my work. Mostly, he's haunted
all my pretensions of trying to help someone using the diminishing
resources of social services. During the last three years, I ran a job
training program for homeless youth. The training was based around writing
zines. Most of the homeless kids who worked for me were in transition from
the streets to the world of housing and regular work. Some kids didn't
want to get off the streets, but wanted money. Some kids were on the edge,
and by that I mean struggling with drug addiction, chronic mental illness,
or intensive trauma from being abused. Sometimes all of these factors
swirled together chaotically in the same kid--and for those kids the work
training program was merely a trench, a temporary respite from the war
they lived inside. That war was the window through which they saw the
world looking back at them.
Nate was one of those kids. I tried to talk him into working for me the
day he first walked into the youth center. He was looking for food, money,
and distractions. I didn't know he'd just been released from jail. Months
later, I found out about his convictions, his diagnosis.
At first all I knew was what Nate told me, what I saw in him. Nate was
almost 20. He was awkward, angular, as angry as lots of other homeless
kids. But he seemed more detached from his body than most, more
unpredictable. He'd say strings of witty things, go catatonic, then recite
lines of associative, nonsensical words. I thought he was on drugs, but
that wasn't unusual or intolerable on the work-site. The job training
program was the edge, a chance for getting stable: a first, and for some,
a last stop.
The first clue I got about the real depth of Nate's complexity was
when, on his second day of work, he showed me two pieces of
identification. One of them, a University of Washington student card,
showed a smiling young man, clean-shaven. He had been 18 then, but looked
older because there were shadows around his eyes. In the second photo,
taken about a year later, Nate resembled an emaciated Jerry Garcia. He had
a wiry beard and long, oily hair. His expression was flat, perplexed, a
little wild. He wore a fisherman's hat pulled low over his eyes. By that
time, Nate was already homeless and had been to jail.
Nate never mentioned an illness. He said he had addictions--alcohol,
pot, heroin. He said he would talk to me if I promised not to tell the
people who were trying to force him to die. Nate didn't even like being
contained within the four walls of a room. He liked doors left open.
At that point, I didn't believe mental illness existed. I thought it
was a scam, a power game played by shrinks. I was adverse to how doctors
arbitrarily diagnosed patients with mental illnesses based on a guidebook
of observed symptoms (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, or DSM-IV). I was also politically adverse to
medications or even anti-depressants that I thought were overused. I
believed people could stop the symptoms of mental illness by making
different choices. That idea worked well in existential theory, and I
could apply it neatly to something like attention deficit disorder, a
diagnosis so frequently given to unruly kids and unfocused adults that it
has become absurd. But Nate's case was different. Being in his proximity
was like entering a distant country with unfamiliar customs and language.
At the work training program, Nate stared into space for the first few
weeks instead of working on his zine. I'd sit and talk to him. He was shy,
funny, self-deprecating. He leafed through one zine obsessively. It was
written by a couple of train-hopping kids. Nate idolized the zine, the
lifestyle it explored. He'd say, "How could I make anything? Nothing else
could be this good."
Then one day, abruptly, he opened his sketchbook. Inside, he was
building an alphabet of sensual letters. He explained to me how W loves A,
how the two letters lean into one another, almost touching. He sketched
cushioned, brittle, and voluptuous letters. He made them spoon, belly to
back. He made cartoon characters out of the alphabet--a man in a lampshade
hood stood for the letter A.
While Nate was showing me his alphabets, he was lamenting that he
couldn't master graffiti. It was odd: This kid had the will and brilliance
to create, but in his own head he was stuck imagining that his arms and
brain were useless. Trying to encourage him was tricky. He saw through
every attempt at a premeditated bolstering of his ego. He'd say, "You're
trying to make me feel good, but I already know what this is, and it's
nothing."
For weeks, Nate offered up beautiful and intensely disturbing drawings.
One sketch was a self-portrait, showing a man's face as a tangle of horns
and bones. There was one swirling eye. Antennae sprung from its head. It
was the demonic geometry of how Nate saw himself.
Nate's other self-portrait was of a joker marching down a bumblebee's
back. In Nate's sketch, the joker is a smiling, carefree trickster with a
bulging belly. Nate portraying himself as the fool--an emblem of naiveté
on the back of an insect layered with complex symbolism--was haunting.
Bumblebees stand for mathematical order, unpredictability, anger, fear,
and creative abundance. They are the lovers of flowers, alchemists of
sweet potions. And they sting. Bees are encoded to sleep underground all
winter and fly in straight beelines back to their hives. The bee is also
associated with the human mind: A bee under one's bonnet has traditionally
signified eccentricity. The deeper I looked, the more I realized that Nate
had found the perfect symbol, the bee with the fool, to illustrate his
internal shift. At the deepest root of "bee," according to The Oxford
English Dictionary, the word means "fear," stemming from the insect's
relentless, frenetic humming.
Nate also kept a journal he showed me sometimes, in which he wrote
tender, reflective paragraphs like the following: "Sometimes I go down
among the stars and planets (Gods) and just sing the most beautiful music
I can think of which turns out to be a Pearl Jam song. The first few notes
are spectacular, but it sort of goes downhill from there. So much damned
love in such an empty promise. What a diminutive attempt at the meaning of
life."
Nate's displays of vulnerability, in his writing and artwork, made me
feel protective of him. So did watching him struggle with intense social
awkwardness. He couldn't figure out how to interact with other kids. His
small talk lost its way. He'd miss cues. He'd stare too long at someone.
Other sections of Nate's journal were more troubled: "God let me write
one coherent page that I may be able to decipher and publish it into my
already questionable ethics please in the form of a prayer. Charles Manson
and the Bundy's and at other times amen." I had seen and read more
disturbing things than that from other kids who wrote to purge demons or
release coiled-up anger. I didn't start really worrying until Nate began
throwing himself into walls and desks. He'd smile, talk to himself, crash
into things. His movements were puppet-like, compelled from voices or
nerve impulses. I couldn't tell.
I pulled him aside and said, "Nate, you can't act like that at work. It
makes people nervous." He just stared back, smiling, like he'd said the
punch line to a joke that I was several hours too slow to catch. I
suggested that he take a smoke break on the back porch. Someone told me
later that coffee and cigarettes are like water and light to
schizophrenics.
I started to ask people whom I trusted for advice about what was going
on with Nate. I wasn't surprised that he refused to acknowledge his
diagnosis. What person in the prime of life would choose to accept a label
like "schizophrenic?" The word has the same sort of cultural stigma and
historical darkness as "leprosy." We innately think of mental illness as
an indication of impurity or sin. We make jokes, cross the street. It
scares us. And since the schizophrenic is part of this culture, it follows
that he is naturally repulsed by and scared of himself. Thus,
schizophrenics are trapped twice: inside an illness and inside a cultural
prejudice against that illness.
Even the word schizophrenia is a little deceptive. It literally means a
split (schism) in the mind (phren). But the disease isn't about
someone splitting into two neat selves. Having schizophrenia may be like
having your brain physically change, so that whatever wall separates
dreams from reality--and one's self from other selves--dissolves. Or maybe
schizophrenia is a kind of awakening. Scientists claim that we use only 70
percent of our brains. What if that unused portion suddenly kicked into
gear? Who would we become? What would that transition feel like?
There was another kid who participated briefly in my work training
project who had schizophrenia. He'd had it for 10 years. He described how
cans of Comet on store shelves talked to him. Dogs made speeches.
Buildings yelled at him. He had no control over the super-animated world
around him; his perception was much like living inside a cartoon, I guess.
He cut himself a lot. Voices told him to do it. He tried to modulate
voices and delusions with drugs and alcohol, which only complicated his
symptoms and made him more vulnerable to being criminalized.
I was compelled, day after day, by Nate's embattled tenderness and his
spiky trust. He gave me a sketch of Spiderman, swinging through an ad for
whiskey and on through another photo of Native American warriors. Some
days he saw me as an enemy, some days as an anchor.
I started to read everything I could get my hands on about
schizophrenia. I collected stories from people who work with
schizophrenics. I looked up the different varieties of schizophrenia in
the DSM-IV but couldn't decide what variety best fit Nate. He had
the characteristic symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, and derailed
speech. Sometimes he was catatonic. Often, his demeanor--the way he talked
and his expressions--was flat. And he had intense paranoia about being
asked questions or being stared at. But he had also started drinking a
lot, and I couldn't tell exactly what was causing what.
I bought more books: guidebooks for families, memoirs by
schizophrenics, memoirs by people close to schizophrenics. I collected
anecdotes. Lori Schiller, author of The Quiet Room,
describes how her senses were heightened, how the visual world became
crisper, more vibrant, when her schizophrenia hit. A therapist friend told
me about sitting in a room full of schizophrenics once, early in his
career. One of them claimed, "I'm God." Another answered, "Oh, that's
good. I thought I was God, and now I don't have to worry about holding all
that responsibility alone."
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