autobiography of a schizophrenic girl.

What a strange read, delving into the mind of a person with schizophrenia. Reality for her was inside herself, and she kept reaching for her analyst to save her. Her analyst was the only person with whom she had any connection, and this connection waxed and waned depending upon the analyst’s response to the girl.

I learned a few things from the book, that has helped me gain some perspective on what may happen to E-Niner when he’s having a psychotic break.

First, I’m going to talk with him either in the third person or as the characters he would like me to be. I will do this especially around events that seem to upset him — bedtime, going to the bathroom, eating. Renee, the writer of the autobiography, always felt much more at ease when she was addressed in the third person and when others addressed themselves in the third person. It was as if being “she” or “her” or “I” was just too much responsibility.

There was a time when E-Niner was younger that I thought his body was too much responsibility for him, that he shouldn’t have been allowed to be in charge of his own body yet. He was three, an age where most kids get where their body stops and starts, what is relatively dangerous or not, where they might need some assistance from a parent or other caring and familiar adult. This was the age that he nearly sliced open his finger, that he banged his head on the school’s front step so hard he had a goose egg that did not diminish for three days.

And while now — for the most part — he seems to be less dangerous with his body when he is regulated (not psychotic), now it seems like that analogy might fit with his mind. Maybe right now his mind is just too much responsibility for him. If someone could “hold his mind,” somehow, and could assist him in that warm, third person way — maybe it would help.

By the end of the book, Renee enters reality. Her analyst indicates that she is cured, though there is nothing in the book to indicate how things turn out for Renee in the future. The book seems to be written when Renee is in her twenties — during the mid-1900s. So it is possible for Renee to have lived and died by now. I wonder what ever happened to her. Was she truly cured or was schizophrenia in remission for that time?

The other interesting thing that Renee mentions is that while she says she hears voices or sees things, she knows they don’t exist as hard objects. She is at able at once to discern reality but weave onto it the voices, people and objects of her mind. I see that a lot with E-Niner, too. I often wonder how it is possible for him to be so grounded and here with me, but simultaneously not present. I have often thought it is as if he lives in dual worlds, and after having read this book, I now understand that it’s possible I’m not that far off.

Now that I’ve accepted E-Niner’s psychotic condition — now that I’ve grieved for him, for our family and for our collective lives — I’m entering a new phase, one of learning, seeking, discernment, understanding. I want to understand what is happening in his mind in the hopes that I may be the one to hold it and bring him back.

Next up, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.