The Experience of Schizophrenia

This is a hard one for me to write. It tests my command of the settler's tongue, for it forces me to use words that debase my differences. I hope that describing my experience of reality in such terms, ultimately, will demystify schizophrenia as a mental condition. We're not freaks or crazies. We're a blind spot in secular supremacy, and the anguish of our abandonment is used as a form of propaganda to further abandon us. The settler has spent a very long time getting good at genocide, and it has found many ways to realize extermination, many of which we have no good words for.

I'm schizophrenic. My diagnosis is "schizotypal bipolar" which means I have mood swings, and I'm clinically afraid of the dark. "Afraid of the dark" isn't quite right, though it is true that my body reacts with fear to lightless silence. I always expected to grow out of it, but I'm thirty-six now, and still the dark talks back. This phenomenon can be described as a form of vivid pattern recognition, such as when I hear a radio in white noise. I'll be in bed with my wife, falling asleep, when I notice that behind her rain sounds is some kind of talk radio host chattering over a half-tuned station about I-don't-know-what. He's not giving me instructions, or rather, I can't understand what he's saying at all. It's just gibberish that my brain is finding in random stimuli. Sometimes in white noise like a shower, this imaginary radio plays catchy songs that don't exist, and if I could write music, I'd write them down. But I can't, so I don't, so I just groove in the shower to patterns nobody else can hear.

Sometimes I've attended support groups for schizophrenics, because it can be lonely experiencing things nobody else seems to. We all seem to have different experiences, and our rationalizations rarely overlap. I once sat next to a woman who talked about how the Christian God would speak to her directly, mainly about how much He hates her father, and also about how she needs to unplug her refrigerator despite her roommate's insistence otherwise. It seemed so surreal to hear that, given my experiences are also highly "delusional", but we'll get to that. For others, schizophrenia troubled their lives in more physical ways: their heightened paranoia complicated relationships, and the risk of a psychotic break under stress meant living with the possibility that your anxiety could destroy your life at a moment's notice. None of our experiences aligned, and it seemed almost like we didn't trust each other as a result. You're crazy, but I'm just troubled. In America, everyone's an embarrassed millionaire.

I have also struggled with my grip on reality at times of especial stress in my life. While I was grappling with having been date-raped, I had a dream where I could fly, and so when I woke up I rushed to the balcony and prepared to lift off again -- before realizing I was about to plummet five stories. It sobered me, though it didn't heal me. That would take time. Most schizos don't get that time: our alienation feeds disenfranchisement, until we are just another sallow sunburned face peering up from the sidewalk. It was a jarring revelation in my late twenties, trapped in a mental ward, that if I couldn't get my shit together, they'd imprison me for profit (as that is how mental wards operate) or leave me to die of exposure. That's just what happens in this barbaric society, and until we decolonize, it will just be that way. So I got my shit together.

Schizophrenia isn't triggered by external stimuli. Some things can induce psychosis, like drugs or agreeable AI, but inheriting it in your blood is different. It means I have lived with my so-called hallucinations all my life, and had to make peace with them in order to assimilate as our society demands. This repression was traumatic in its own way, and it wasn't like the spirit world cared about how I coped. Ghosts would drift through my walls, and spirits like people-shaped shadows would point and look and sometimes even scream. I try to think of myself as ultimately level-headed, and so I have endeavored to maintain a strict and conscious boundary between the physically-real, and the spiritually-real. I share this physical world with all of you, and the practice of consensus reality is foundational to getting along. But the spirit world is a real place that I experience vividly, and though you may not, that doesn't mean it doesn't make a kind of sense. Sometimes it can even feel a bit like home.

My Scottish ancestors might have called it the two sights, which is a decent way of putting it. In one sight, I see the physical world through my physical eyes. That sight is the body and mind, or what I call the physical substrate. The other sight peers into a simultaneous existence that is mostly ineffable, as though I were feeling it through a literal sixth sense, some uncommon organ whose behavior we simply lack the language to describe. So only in ritual reverie do I see-with-my-eyes all these spooky forces. Mostly they are like some kind of invisible weather. But, you spend enough time looking at the sky, and you can learn a thing or two about meteorology.

I don't know how useful it is to talk about how I have rationalized and systematized my so-called hallucinations. It may just sound crazy, and I don't care to waste words to that effect. Sometimes I just say, I have a rich spiritual life. I think, with proper support, that's what schizophrenia can be at its best: a profound and personal connection to the indescribable, which does not have to be either destabilizing or egomaniacal. In therapy, I sometimes treat my strange experiences like dreams, asking grounded questions like, what in my life could seed a vision like that, or, why would I think of a thing in my life that way? This framing helps because it conceives of my spiritual life as an alternative form of knowing, as though it were some part of my body giving me important information the only way it knew how. Information like, hey, remember that thing that you don't like to think about? That happened, and it was like a hulking slobbering monster, but you beat it. You survived it, and all the scar tissue from healing afterwards is some kind of power, or proof of power, and you can use it for art or to thoughtfully love people, because you know the absence of creativity, the void of anti-love, and how profoundly it can hurt. Other times the information is like, hey, remember spending ten thousand years as a tree under a pink sun on a world beyond the observable universe? Sometimes the strange is just weird. A self-driven skepticism can keep the schizophrenic grounded even as they navigate and document the ineffable.

Cultures around the world have had magical traditions since time immemorial, and many of them have even been compassionate rather than the sort that boils down to human sacrifice. Often this has meant that, in such a culture, a person experiencing strange visions or an alternate mode of reality could be brought into a magical tradition to support them, educate them, and integrate them within this more-or-less loving society. In this way, I contend that the Enlightenment destroyed magic, not by killing the fae but by obliterating magical traditions. In some parts of the world this happened in the last few centuries, with the pinnacle of the settler's brutality. To my Scottish ancestors, it happened over a thousand years ago. The way Christendom colonized them is a different beast than the stuff of modern colonialism, and yet the effects of cultural genocide remain: the only things my ancestors leave me are involuntary connections to spirits whose names Christians purged. My paternal grandmother also had schizophrenia, and without support, it ultimately killed her. Magi are a part of the human experience, but the incurious Christian-turned-secularist is perfectly content to let our sacred mysteries eat us alive, because they'd rather we not exist at all.

I could conclude with some paltry plea to not make jokes about schizos, because we are real people and you don't know shit about us, but the truth is I don't give a shit about your ignorance. The bigger enemy than bad jokes is the goddamn colonizer, and once we decolonize our relations and abolish profiteering as a mode of social organization, then suppression of people like me, like the suppression of billions of people, may finally fade away and be healed over. If you don't have your eyes on the big demon, you'll get crushed thinking the enemy is the muck between its toes.

Decolonization is a political action with a psychic and material nature that can be described in mundane language. If you're stuck at decolonizing your mind, I invite you to do more homework to understand how to militantly decolonize Turtle Island, and how to show up for your community to do that. A land acknowledgement can be a kind of threat, but transformation calls on us to carry it out. The settler can be abolished as an extant category, and all its fonts may be smashed, all its tools melted down. Then, my kind will be free to gather and remember again.

But also, don't ever let me catch you using "schizo" as a punchline. It is a bad idea to mess with wizards.