A History of Scars

The biggest problem in this instance was the disruption to her routine. She had no pattern to fall back on, and so we were lost.

I felt betrayed. I had done so much for her, and yet she couldn’t do this simple thing for me. As usual, she needed me to take over. I needed someone who, for just this brief sliver of time, was capable of taking care of me.

I wondered how other responsible adults—the ones with the authority to matter—her doctors, my father, my sister—could not see what was so clear to me. My mother was not okay. She was not too young.

I made yelling noises through the metallic, blood-soaked gauze in my mouth, gesturing, while she got more upset. Mmmrph not suppose to talk! ERGH!

I tried to stay mindful of warnings of dry sockets. But I was angry. We sat side by side, feeling equally helpless and disoriented, for different reasons.

I wondered how those same doctors, and those who say maybe it’s better not to know, might feel if they knew my mother was driving on the same streets as them, veering slowly—and as unpredictably as amyloid plaque tangles in the brain—across four or five lanes of traffic, relying only on the watchfulness of other drivers to move out of her way.

* * *

Nearly every time someone learns that my mother had early-onset Alzheimer’s, they try to relate by telling me, “my grandmother/grandfather had Alzheimer’s!”

I want to respond by saying the illness is an entirely different beast when it strikes decades earlier. That it’s different when it’s your mother, when you’re young when the decline begins. I want to say that this beast of an illness upends conventional expectations of who will be responsible, who will be the caretaker, and when. But as with my relationship with my sister, there are some truths that are too difficult to discuss. There are some truths that are too hard to hear.

* * *

Over the decades my oldest sister’s and my relationship has endured, despite periods of not speaking, alternating with periods of pointless fights. We have supported each other over the years, in the worst of times. Our relationship has been shaped by emergencies—each of our responses serving as pivot points on a graph. Perhaps the forge of family blood is unique in how it weathers such rifts. But as with sawn wood, look closely and the grain is always visible.

5 WRITING LIFE

When I was in the hospital, I scribbled away furiously. I felt as though, along with more valuable things like my very sense of identity, writing was being wrested from me, and so I fought harder for its preservation.

I clutched the only pen nurses would allow, a half-stub toy of a thing. Gel-coated and squishy, it made my left hand sore. Still I carried on, scrawling in the two wide-lined notebooks my sister brought me, my handwriting even messier than usual.

Little did I know that my hospital writing, under the auspice of its fuzzy panda and fuzzy fox covers, would contain more logic than any of what followed. Little did I know that after I left, empty months would follow in which I couldn’t write a word.

* * *

So many of my fears during my psychotic episode actualized after the fact—around how people portrayed me, their intentions, and their lack of trust.

It’ll take me years to unpack how conflict with a person in a position of power, someone whom I sho

uld have continued skirting, escalated to the degree it did, or the tremendous consequences that followed.

I was meant to be writing my MFA thesis. Instead I was confronting the hangover effect of my episode. My life had flipped into a nightmare, much as it had during my episode. The larger issues still loom and are hard to discuss. They boil down to how mental health emergencies are viewed in the law, something over which I have no control.

The instigating events rendered the small town I lived in miserable. I avoided triggers—a purposeful strategy, yet no easy feat. A friend tried dodging encounters with her ex in the same town; she essentially couldn’t leave her apartment. I clung to Zadie Smith’s words on avoiding cliques, gangs, and groups instead—relieved that at least one writer could be both brilliant, successful, and an outspoken critic of the tyranny of the majority.

The larger consequences of my episode unfolded gradually, each fresh blow landing just as I’d recovered from the previous shock.

I arrived at a juncture where I was teetering. My future might involve impossible highs—five years without financial worries, writing at a dream school with dream professors, in a dream city. Or impossible lows—jail. Both extremes originated in the same decision: moving to a place where I knew I’d struggle, in favor of getting a writing education.

I could justify the three increasingly hellish years I’d spent in rural Indiana by finishing my MFA, or I could fall one completed thesis short of a degree. The only thing I could control was my work, and at that I was utterly failing.

“Your essays are lacking a sense of purpose,” my thesis advisor told me. With her usual clarity, she hit upon the fundamental issue in my writing, as with my life: that I’d accumulated images and experience, without knowing what to make of any of it. The utterly fracturing experience of a breakdown, in which my very mind felt cleaved in half, hadn’t helped.

“You have all the tools,” a visiting writer had told me just a few days before. “Now you just have to put it all together.”

Cohesion—what I’d always desired and lacked.

* * *

There’s value, nearly always, in writing through the pain—capturing the images. The notes I wrote in the hospital were surprisingly usable, even if the conditions under which I wrote them were less than ideal. A psychotic episode renders a person overly fixated on the sorts of details that comply with the “show, don’t tell” mandate that’d been hammered into my skull. It was the larger picture, seen in a clear frame of mind, zoomed out from the details, which no longer reflected reason.

Imagine a mouse running down a string, parcels of gouda tied at regular lengths. Imagine the mouse’s joy. This is what writing technique is meant to accomplish. Even in nonfiction, art isn’t meant to mimic life. It earns its power only by distilling these most painful and joyous moments into consumable morsels, all tidily arranged for the reader to discover.