Essay Three

                There is no language for mental illness. Of course, a great many books have been written and read about people who lost their reason and survived, but none of them were complete truths. If someone ever truly and honestly -- with no romantic intentions -- sat down and wrote an account about his or her illness, no one would want to read it. Such a memoir would be just like mental illness itself.  It would be repulsive, it would be obscene and above all, it would be insufferably boring, a grocery list of atrocities all beginning with “I.” I suffer from chronic depression, I suffered a nervous breakdown, I hallucinated insects and orphaned waifs, I was a self-destructive brat who starved and spat and bedeviled my own body, who didn’t care if my mother woke up vomiting in fear every morning.  I now swallow medicinal Virgils to guide me through Hell, I am cured and controlled now, but still nothing seems to have a purpose! “What’s the point?” I ask as I lie in bed.
               “What’s the point, world outside my window?” The glass blocks its reply and the weather is too cold and the answer is too soiled to let it in.
               “What’s the point, folds in my curtains I took to be a manger scene as a child with a fever?” They continue to ruminate over the Christ Child, as they have been diligently for eighteen years now, with no reward and no regard.
              “What’s the point, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose name I still pronounce incorrectly when there is no one around to impress?” He googles his cross-eye at me, bites his pipe, and shrugs.
              “Okay, I get it. I’m not going to speak to any of you, either! I can tell when I am not wanted.” But suddenly something catches my eye. The way the books fall when I throw Sar-ter on top of them. They are exhaling! They are trying to speak, mimicking the symbols on their pages! I see that books are like lungs, like gills! They allow the author to breathe in his grave, to sigh to all four corners of the world!  
              There it is! Maybe a falling pile of books is just a mess to others. Maybe the afternoon sun on a Republican’s garage does not shine sinister for everyone, but it does for me because I was blessed with an illness! I did violence to myself and exorcized all I held true before, leaving splatters of shit and rosary beads all over the hospital floor! I have lived a dozen lives and died two times as many deaths! I was both a monster and the hunter of that monster; I was both predator and prey, and I am both villain and hero of my own story. I have so many things I could tell people, and I can scream loud enough on paper for them to hear! The lance of my mental illness has enabled to me to pierce the veil of reality in ways that no healthy person could imagine. At college, I hope to continue my explorations of the known and the unknown.