The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [124]
If you fail to benefit from psychotherapy, you stand a better than even chance of being accused of “resisting therapy.” As if things weren’t bad enough already, you are now accused of subconsciously or even consciously wanting them that way.
If on the other hand you do recover while under psychotherapy you may come away feeling that honesty and other forms of virtue were at the root of your problem and that if you and those around you are not always wise and pure, you’ll go nuts again. Truth and beauty are wonderful things, but I want to assure you that, once recovered, a schizophrenic can lie, cheat, and be dense with consequences no more dire than those faced by anyone else.
Doctors, family, and friends will inevitably get into figuring out which parts of what you do and say are “crazy” and which are sane. It would be a harmless enough diversion if it weren’t such an irritating distraction from the real problems. It’s impossible to sort out the sanity of any given thought or action. Every fantasy and hallucination has at least a germ of truth and often more. Everything I did, even at my craziest, was “appropriate” with a little imagination. The dead-end route I kept traveling was working hard on figuring out exactly how my thoughts and actions made sense and then trying to get others to see it. Since I was acting “appropriately,” there was nothing wrong.
What I finally caught on to was that there was something very wrong and that whether or not my thoughts and actions were “appropriate” had very little to do with it. What was wrong was that I had lost control of my life, and not just because I had been locked up. The simplest way to describe it is that my stress tolerance had been whittled down to nothing in a process that went back far beyond the time when everyone got so interested in the appropriateness of my actions. Appropriate shmappropriate, the problem is that schizophrenia makes you so goddamed fragile. I was reacting appropriately but to so many different things, so strongly, and in such a personal way that it didn’t look that way to anyone else. More important, my being that fragile and reactive meant I couldn’t do many things I wanted to do. I was so distractible that even very simple tasks were impossible to complete, so sensitive that the slightest hint of negativity was utterly crushing, so wired that no one could relax around me.
Like you, Anita, I cracked in very hip surroundings. While it has advantages in terms of people being willing to go the extra mile, having more respect and sympathy for the terrors you’re going through, it can also add some new problems. I was often afraid to tell my friends what was going on, not so much because they’d think I was nuts, but more because it might sound like bragging. Many of the things that were happening to me were things I was supposed to like: ego death, communicating with the supernatural, hypersensitivity of all sorts. If there’s anything worse than bragging about such things, it’s not liking them.
It’s been suggested by many that a schizophrenics is a failed mystic. The same thing happens to both, but in the face of God, infinity, or whatever, mystics keep their cool but schizophrenics end up in such rotten shape because they cling to their egos, refuse to accept their own insignificance, or some such sin. Let me say this: It seems more than likely that there’s a relationship between the two, but what sets them apart is far more a matter of degree and circumstance than wisdom and virtue.
Most descriptions of mystic states, while they include feelings of timelessness, actually cover very little clock time. For the schizophrenic it’s a twenty-four-hour day, seven days a week. Realizing