Resisting Internalized Sanism when Writing About Psychosis
On the pressure to make experience conform to linearity and translatability
CN: brief mention of police violence, involuntary hospitalization
I very much dislike the language of psychosis and what it implies—the medicalizing, pathologizing, and disciplining of experiences that don’t align with consensus reality. The way the word is weaponized in casual, everyday sanism: “That’s so psychotic!” The way in which to be seen as “psychotic” in America is to be stigmatized is to be discriminated against is to be mocked is to be disbelieved is to be caged is to be killed by cops—especially if you are trans, Black or Brown.
I haven’t written much publicly about my altered states. But now I am at the part of the memoir where I kind of have to. It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s that I all of a sudden decided that I don’t know how. This kind of second guessing can be such a trap. We are never done with improving our craft. But the constant self-doubt can be a creativity-killer, a silencer.
There are so few memoirs about what it’s like to go through an altered state of consciousness, not induced by acid or shrooms. Looking at some of the few that do exist, like Clare Bien’s Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in my Head, or Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, I see that I am overthinking it.
It feels silly that I am looking for some kind of secret sauce or craft points for writing about psychosis. I’m setting these experiences apart from other human experiences. It’s like saying you don’t know how to write about watching waves, or traveling to a new place. Why am I making this so complicated?
I realize that I am putting a fuck ton of pressure on myself to translate this experience for those who have never found themselves in a reality they didn’t consciously choose. There is this tendency to want to write what gets called psychosis in the “right” way. This desire to be seen and understood, to be digestible. If I write about this topic in a manner that you can easily comprehend, then maybe you won’t be afraid of me, of others like me. If I write this correctly, then maybe you’ll see that voices and visions and other realities are nothing more than a part of human experience. Maybe you’ll empathize.
And then there is the real sanism out in the world. I keep coming back to the conclusion of this NYT review of Wang’s book (which was mostly positive):
“At times, the pervasive disorientation Wang employs in these essays — the zigzagging narrative, the tangled sense of time, the repetitions, the abrupt announcements of ever more diagnoses (PTSD, bipolar disorder, fibromyalgia, Lyme) — can be distracting. One alternately wishes Wang had been subjected to more disciplined editing and to more questioning of her vantage point.”
Ugh. This plea for more disciplined editing, essentially saying Wang should have worked harder to corral her life and essays into a form that is more digestible and linear and neurotypical. She should “question” her “vantage point”—that is, interrogate her reality. How dare Wang zigzag and fuck with our precious straight line of time.
I can see it and be disgusted that others do this kind of shit, yet here I am doing it to my own self. I swear, writing keeps exposing the layers of internalized sanism I still carry under this skin. It is such a gift when another layer comes up to be seen and unlearned. It also hurts, but in a good way, like cleaning a wound for it to heal.
For now, I am going to try to stop worrying about how these stories will be received by those who have not lived their own version of them, and just tell the fucking truth of what happened, as I see it. I can do that.