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| Bzzzz Image by Genevieve Nolan |
More than 20 years ago I wrote a story in which a family goes on a four-wheel-drive trip. The family consisted of two kids (a boy and a girl), their mother and her new partner. They are inexperienced four-wheel-drivers and, after a long hot sandy drive into the desert, they get bogged. The weather is lethally hot and dry and there’s no shade, only sand, scrubby bushes and pale blue blinding sky. They’re under-prepared. They struggle to dig out the vehicle, without success. They climb a low rise, look at their map, and realise that they are too far from help to walk and too remote to expect that another vehicle will happen along to save them. They all struggle to come to terms with the situation. Someone accidentally spills most of their water. The new “dad” soon tries to rig up some shade and he digs out shallow ditches to put the kids in. Thinking that this might keep them cool he partially buries them in what, to the son, look like mini-graves. For the son, in particular, the idea that his new “dad” is burying them alive reflects the whole family’s situation. This intensifies the anger, fear and hopelessness he already feels.
Overheated and dehydrated, the son begins hallucinating. He believes that the ants crawling on his skin find an access point and start crawling inside him. He thinks he is hollow, like a cheese grater. The surfaces that separate his inner and outer worlds begin to disintegrate and movement of the ants, marching between the two as if they are identical, describes this mental breakdown.
My brother, Dave, who had just finished his psych rounds as part of his training to become a doctor, read the story and said to me, “That bit with the ants… The imagery is typical of someone with schizophrenia.”
I’ve often had experiences where writing - particularly creative writing - has shown me something about myself that I hadn’t been aware of before. Writing hasn’t always been an orderly process of coming up with an idea, or seeing something interesting, and then writing it down. For me, new ideas, feelings, bits of logic, attitudes and ways of seeing have been unlocked and put on display by the act of writing, and often this new piece of me has only become visible after it appeared on the page.
Dave’s comment caused me to wonder if I was schizophrenic. The idea of ants walking through my skin and up and down my veins had seemed an obvious idea, a normal, logical way of thinking about responding to stress in an extreme situation. If it was logical to me then perhaps my logic was disordered.
I wasn’t especially anxious or concerned. I was more curious. In some ways I thought that maybe some things about me (the nights I had been kept awake by the electric colour-shows in my head, for example) could be explained by a diagnosis like schizophrenia. There was also a part of me that was desperate to be special and thought that having a label would at least make me different and give me something interesting to say when people asked me who I was. Like Harry Potter being zapped in the brain by Voldemort and suddenly becoming the most important person in the history of everything, I sort of secretly hoped that I might be touched by something that would justify my fantasies that I was interesting, useful, different and important. Maybe I’m schizophrenic? (Or maybe, I thought, I’m just a little bit schizophrenic, and then I wondered if “a little bit” would be enough.) The word rolled around in my mouth, sounding exotic and interesting. I wondered if it would stick.
(Certainly, having schizophrenia sounded more exciting than just having the occasional migraine, which was the other, much more likely, candidate.)
At that point I didn’t know anything about schizophrenia. I had simple questions, like: “Are you schizophrenic or do you have schizophrenia?” And: “Can you be a little bit schizophrenic?”
Nah, I thought, laughing at the idea. Everyone who reads the DSM finds about twelve different disorders they have. “Turns about I’m an agoraphobic anorexic with ADHD (and I haven’t even made it past ‘A’ yet…)” or “So I’m OCD and on the autistic spectrum. (Please put your cutlery back in the right place...)”
And when I looked into it, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that I really didn’t want to have schizophrenia after all.
I’m fine. I thought. Normal.
*
When I was a kid, if someone “went crazy” or reacted in a way we thought was a bit “mental” - if someone got really upset about being teased, for example, or violently angry after losing a game of Uno - we used to say that he or she was “schizo”.
*
In a book called Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant, writes about how brains work. He describes what he perceives as the similarities between his experience of becoming autistic and what his father, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, went through. He had epileptic seizures as a child and his father also suffered from brain seizures. Tammet borrows Van Gogh’s description of his own seizures as “the storm within” - chaotic and frightening periods of electrical activity where the brain’s synaptic wiring is overloaded with “hallucinations, confusion and floods of early memories.”
His own mind-storms, Tammet suggests, resulted in the kind of unusual super-connectivity that has enabled him (and other famous autistic people, such as Laurence Kim Peek, better known as the inspiration for the character Rain Man) to develop super, or savant, numerical or linguistic abilities. Tammet has recited pi to 22,514 places from memory, knows a dozen languages and can learn a new language to high-conversational level within two weeks.
He argues that his ability to see, speak and feel numbers are because the different parts of his brain are hyper-connected, and that this feature (of hyper-connectivity) is something normal people lose, as opposed to it being some kind of freakish abnormality or divine gift. All children are hyper-connected. At age three almost all kids have twice as many neural connections as they will in adulthood. “Normal” people, however, don’t retain this connectivity. With the simple and effective rule of “use it or lose it” the brain, from age three onwards, prunes away connections that aren’t used, “protecting it from information overload and allowing it to function more efficiently.”
Tammet hypothesises that his father’s schizophrenia was a result of being unable to effectively process his mind storms. (Where Rain Man is the poster-child for autism, it is David Nash - the man with the Beautiful Mind - played by Russell Crow - who is the poster-boy for schizophrenia. A paranoid schizophrenic, Nash eventually won a Field’s medal for his contribution to the development of an area of mathematics known as Game Theory.) The struggle for schizophrenics, according to Tammet, is information overload. Being hyper-connected, his father’s brain received deluges of input, which was one part of the problem. But just like the creation of a traffic jam, there needs to be both too much traffic and not enough road. His father had no way of making sense of all the information being received. Tammet, on the other hand, has been “lucky enough to be able to control the creative ‘storms’ within my head and, better still, to use them to produce a range of original and creative contributions.”
His father, like Van Gogh (who was also without Tammet’s “luck”) had mind-storms which left his brain flooded like a drain overflowing with rainwater after a heavy storm: sensory information and ideas coming too fast and from all directions, lightning flashing, confusion, grid-lock, horns blaring, more and more, the risk of drowning, fear, thought, creativity, tension, anxiety... and ultimately no way of controlling the flow or making sense of it.
*
I used to lie in bed and watch lights and images flash inside my head. The show would begin without me asking for it, and persist for hours. It wouldn’t happen every night, but it was regular enough to be, for that stage of my life, very familiar.
The lights were not aimed at me. It was more like being the only person in an empty theatre , sitting in the front row, and watching a lighting designer run through all the possible lighting states he (or she) could possibly produce on the empty stage. The lighting states would change relatively smoothly. It wasn’t a techno bam-bam-bam experience, but this was even more dizzying because there were no clear edges between states. The lights wouldn’t always all change; sometimes lights on the left would shift while those on the right would stay on, so I would have a feeling of falling towards the left of stage, or vice versa, or upwards. Sometimes the lights would jump forward (yellows and oranges) or leap backwards (blues and greens) or be more or less solid. Red was a colour I felt I would fall through. So watching the lights was a very physical experience; it involved a lot of movement through space.
The lights would reconfigure, I guess (having never timed them), roughly ten times per second. This might sound fast, and it is - exhausting after a while - but it was actually slow enough for my brain (and yours) to comprehend each individual lighting pattern. Each step was properly seen, then the next, then the next, and the next, and the next, and the next…
Inside this relentless pattern were other images. Sharper. Images of actual things and images that had sounds inside them, in the same way that the painting of The Scream by Edvard Munsch is very loud. I don’t remember any actual sounds, but the images were often very loud. Within this theatre of light shapes, flashing images and storms of silent sounds, I was fully-awake but asleep to what was going on in the world around me. I was trapped, claustrophobically, inside my head, but I was unable to withdraw from the mind-storm until it ended of its own accord. And afterwards I was exhausted but wired, buzzing with anxious energy, sweaty and disoriented. This is how I remember the mind-storms I experienced as a child.
Even then, I saw them as something alien. They were, I felt, a weird electrical storm similar in many ways to the storms I had seen outside my head. Even thought they were obviously inside me, they (these storms) were battering at the structures in my brain (my brain… my brain) with the same scary, uncontrollable violence from outside as the hail that, with lightning flashing in the background, hammered against my bedroom window. They were storms that had that frenzied almost human passion about them, as if some god or other must be angry with me and want to get at me, take me by the lapels of my mind, shake me and thunder DO YOU UNDERSTAND!?!?!
Of course, I was just a kid, so I didn’t understand. I just stared up (out? in?) at these storms with the same kind of obedient fear that any kid would if he or she was being yelled at by god.
The night storms happened most often between about ten and fifteen. I also suffered from occasional bouts of wild and uncontrollable rage, which may have come from the same source, but were very uncool and caused my parents more than a little concern. As I grew, these experiences gradually receded. However, one lingering problem remained: I still couldn’t read properly.
*
I was good at reading individual words, okay at reading sentences, bad at reading paragraphs and really struggled to comprehend anything longer than a page.
In Embracing the Wide Sky, Tammet talks about the differences between chess and Go that make Go a game which even the most sophisticated super-computer cannot hope to play well. In chess, there are roughly 35 possible moves to consider each turn.
In Go the figure is nearer 200. After four moves, the number of possible board positions in chess is 35 x 35 x 35 x 35 = 1,500,625, whereas in Go the number is 200 x 200 x 200 x 200 = 1,600,000,000 - more than a thousand times greater.
For me, reading was like playing Go. I would start by reading the first word in a sentence. That word, just on its own, would present a huge range of possibilities, which blossomed outwards in a rush of images, sounds, ideas and, of course, other words. I might follow some of these words down the paths they suggested. I’d use processes of association, guesswork, intuition or something more random. Homophones and puns are great ways to leap tracks and get lost in a maze of association. So, guided by history, knowledge, biology, psychology or who knows what, this one word I had read would unravel in front of me. Then I would read the second word and try to match it, as it unravelled, with the first word.
By the time I was at the end of a sentence I had usually lost track of what it was about, so I would go back and reread it. I would attempt to pack gardens of association and understanding into this condensed re-read version of the sentence. Sometimes the sentence was swamped; at other times it held on and stayed on the surface.
Then I would move onto the next sentence, and at the end of that sentence I would try to connect the two sentences, and make sense of all the gardens that had been conjured up while reading and cross-referencing all the words in each of those sentences. Then I would move onto the third sentence… Quickly, I reached a point at which I was overloaded: information would dribble out the back of my comprehension and I would just be left with a kind of string of stray images, some of which were in the text and some of which were some outgrowth of my interpretation of it.
By the end of a book I couldn’t tell you what it was about, but I was happy reading. For me it was like jumping from one island to the next in a long archipelago of gorgeous tropical islands - each one amazing in itself but disconnected from the others. And as far as being “normal” goes, it wasn’t as if I was sitting in the corner of the classroom mumbling word-flowers to myself. In terms of results, I wasn’t even struggling.
At the end of Year 8, when I was about 14, I changed schools. I remember meeting the principle of my new school: a tall, stern-looking, middle-aged Catholic Christian Brother. Mum and Dad and I were there and he asked us questions about what we were looking for and how I was going at my old school. Intimidated by the office and the whole experience, I was keen to stay quiet. I did stay quiet on most things, but mum nudged me and made me tell him I’d got 99% for English. (To me it seemed like a ridiculous mark.) I went on to be dux of English at that school and go on to study English at university.
This stop-start, flowers-growing-in-the-cracks way of reading persisted all the way through university, although I did gradually get better. However, there was a moment of noticeable change when I had a breakdown (down? through? up?) when I was 25.
I’d had a tricky period of emotional shutdown brought on by a range of things - both external and internal (remember, it takes both a lot of traffic and a lack of roads to create a traffic jam) - but specifically by the fact that I’d had an abortion when I was 18 but hadn’t told my family about it until after I’d had this breakdown (through? up?) at 25.
So the breakdown involved seeing one thing in particular more clearly - the fact that I wanted very much to have my family back in my life. This meant telling them what had happened and by implication this meant being more present in my own life somehow. Somehow, in terms of narrative, this was about coming out of the clouds of possible meanings and ideas and associations and intuitive leaps and back down to earth - to living with the most direct and simple meaning and perhaps a few hazy guesses on the side. It was a process of pruning language back to what it probably means.
This clearing of the mad associative foliage I had spent most of my life wandering in definitely helped me go and talk to my mum - which I did the next morning - but it also helped me read better. I’m still slow, but I find it MUCH easier now to read a book from beginning to end and emerge with some sense of what the story is about. My sense of character is much more logical, although I still have a lot of empathy for characters who are inconsistent, because it makes sense to me that they would be one thing, on one island, in one part of the story, and then another, on another island, in another part of the story, and the links between the two don’t really need to be that tight. As long as they are suggestively linked in some way I’m okay.
For me this journey down from an over-abundant or over-reactive way of listening and reading to a more normal and productive level was almost deflating. The sensation was, in part, like realising that there isn’t as much to it as I’d imagined. “Oh.” I felt, “Is that all you’re trying to say?”
*
Until recently I thought I was weird. (Okay, I’m still weird, but until recently I thought I was weird in this particular way…) Then I upgraded the operating system on my computer and, as part of the bargain, got a new dictionary. When I saw it I felt a lovely sense of recognition. I felt that I recognised the thinking that created that kind of dictionary and that, after a long time, an object in the world reflected back to me an understanding of my way of thinking.
Every word in every definition is hyperlinked. You can stat with a word, look up it’s meaning or its synonyms, and by clicking on one of those words be at a new starting point. It is possible, in fact it feels as I am even encouraged, to go traipsing through the gardens of words, leaping from island to island, and if you don’t find your way back, well, it’s not a big deal. You probably learned something cool along the way and, as most computer programs seemed designed to facilitate, you also wasted a bit of time. And just like the old days, once I’ve done floating through the hyper-connected word-world, I still have to go back and re-read the sentence I started with to remind me where I was to start with.
*
So words have been a source of confusion for me. I’m interested in writing and communication in general not because I think it’s easy, but precisely because I think it’s hard, because when it happens it is, in my view, a hard-earned miracle that deserves to be applauded and celebrated. Getting just the right meaning across is an incredibly fine balance. Not enough meaning is generally what people complain about. “I don’t understand” is often, in my experience, a veiled complaint, a way of saying, “You didn’t tell me that, so how could I have understood what you were asking me to do…” etc.
But my experience has very often been the exact opposite: the fact that language always has the potential of giving us way too much meaning. Every word is connected to every other word if you follow the path of associations far enough. And every word is connected to every image, every sound, every touch, taste or smell… and all of these are the stuff our memories are made up of… so the rabbit hole is deep. And communication, then, is a perfect balance of not-too-little and not-too-much meaning. A wonder.
*
ps. I’m have never been diagnosed with schizophrenia, nor with Aspergers.
But who knows? Maybe I'm on the spectrum.
Aren't we all?
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