Crazy
In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, one hard drinking war veteran asks the other, “how did you go bankrupt?” The other responds, “gradually and then suddenly.” This is also how you go crazy. Gradually and then suddenly. And then you go bankrupt.
This is a hard thing to gauge from a first person perspective. It’s kind of like growing old. You always just feel like you. It’s easier to gauge against a backdrop, figure and ground, as the extent of drift. But this is really only useful in retrospect, as a post-mortem or reconstruction: the self-archaeology of madness. First you need to know that you’ve crossed a line that for the uninitiated, which is almost everyone, will forever remain elusive and incomprehensible. The way to tell you’ve crossed over is in the eyes of others. Not the way they look at you, but in their pupillary response at the moment of recognition. The pupils dilate suddenly, then constrict. Like a fear response. The face goes slack and loses color. The mind behind them starts to calculate. There’s never any words, but words aren’t necessary. It’s unmistakable. You’re adrift. And now you know.
In first-person illness narratives, or autopathologies (like for cancer, say) you’re really only ever dealing with two narratives: the battle and the quest. Cancer is war or cancer is a journey. There’s something to be overcome. In America it’s mostly the battle metaphor, or occasionally battle’s less violent little brother, the sports metaphor. There’s a third narrative, rare in medicine, because against it medicine is useless, and that’s exile. In most contexts exile is historical, as was the case for leprosy, the plague, TB, Ebola, and maybe AIDS at the height of hysteria back in the 80’s. Exile is also the case for crazy. In crazy you’re an alien. A stranger in a strange land. Shunned. An outcast. I prefer a word borrowed from post-colonialism, ‘alterity’, which is a marked sense of otherness. It’s a state of being different which is bidirectional. You feel the separation and also it’s reflected back to you in ways that there’s no mistaking. You know you’re different, and so do they.
With cancer you either overcome or you don’t. Either way, you’re one of us. With crazy you’re an other. A pariah. Your ship lies in tatters, smashed against the rocks, and there’s no way you’re ever going home again. So, how did you get here? Gradually and then suddenly.
