Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [14]
There were Vietnam vets on communes in British Columbia. They were more than welcome. If there was any spitting on troops done, it was by hired provocateurs desperate to make sure that pacifism didn’t gain a foothold and cripple our ability to defend ourselves.
Celebrating the beauty and fullness of life, we had a house and food and a winter’s worth of firewood cut. Maybe all the things we had been told had to be the way they were didn’t really have to be that way. We, who had been the best and the brightest, the National Merit scholars, and the students of the week and captains of the teams … were setting up a way of being that could survive without poisoning everything. We believed that we had been given the chance to be heroic. It was like Mission: Impossible, where the tape self-destructs and the powers that be deny all knowledge of our mission and say we were just a bunch of silly hippies.
There was a wonderful feeling of having enough and being enough. Right before I stopped being able to eat or sleep and the voices started, I knew that I was enough. Where I was, what I did, who I was with, and what they did was all enough. It was true and simple, and I was about to get the living crap kicked out of me for figuring it out.
I could feel my thick Old Testament hair lift in a good wind. Life had its bumps, like my parents splitting up and an unfaithful girlfriend and most of the firewood I had cut and split getting rained on instead of drying out, but it didn’t seem like anything I couldn’t handle. I was like a Russian peasant who’s been beaten and left for dead in a ditch by the tsar’s henchmen after they burn the family hovel. I pulled myself to my knees and saw the beautiful green of the first leaves of spring, and then …
zap—snap—crackle—pop
Like 5 to 10 percent of humans, I go crazy. I’m twenty-three years old.
There are overwhelmingly rich, beautiful feelings of universal brotherhood. All of a sudden I can’t eat or sleep.… I’m hearing voices.…I’m not sure who I am or where I am.… Maybe I caused an earthquake.… Maybe my father killed himself.… Life is over.
Then it turns out that I’m in a psychiatric hospital, which is not good but is better than what I thought was happening.
When I was asked if I was hearing voices—“Is the radio or TV talking directly to you? Can others read your mind?”—it was a relief to finally be talking to someone who knew what was going on.
It was probably because my mind was just feeding me back material I had put into it, but it felt like I was able to survive psychosis and maybe save the world because I had read the novels I had read and knew what I knew.
“I’ll try Russian Literature for four hundred.”
“Early Christianity for the whole ball of wax.”
There were times when I was crazy when I was perfectly all right. I’d be locked in a windowless room with an observation hole in the door wrapped in a sheet and think, “Why can’t someone come talk to me now?” Whenever I was okay, I wanted to make the most of it, since I now knew what being not okay was.
It’s explained to me and my friends and family that I have schizophrenia, but I’m young and healthy and did well prior to getting sick, so there’s a chance I’ll get better. I’m treated with major drugs; electroconvulsive therapy, affectionately known as shock treatment; and massive doses of vitamins that don’t do much beyond underline the idea that what I have is a medical problem.
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The commune we started in British Columbia was not a failure because I went crazy, and it didn’t last forever. Nature turned out to be more merciful and bountiful than it might have been. We were independent, we were mostly well, we were mostly happy. We did at least as well as most people in their early twenties.
Among the things I grew up thinking about mental illness was