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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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