A History of Scars

Research will reveal, too, how much exposure to stress, especially earlier in life, contributes to the development of schizophrenia.

I’ve gotten used to pretending, to hiding. To acting more capable than I feel. But as I worsen, this becomes impossible. I can’t navigate the outside world independently anymore.

I think of how much my mother was able to do for so long, despite her illness, perhaps because she had no other way forward, no one to help her. I think about how with both of us, intelligence masked our conditions, so that people could mistake us, at least initially, as fully capable, perhaps even normal. I think about how despite how unable my mother was to do simple things, like sign her own name to a piece of paper and understand what she was signing, she kept working. She didn’t just survive financially. She put her children through college, accumulated retirement savings, paid off her own house. She left behind resources for her family’s survival.

And I think, too, about how filled her world was with fear. How lonely she was. How alone she was, without resources to turn to in society, for help. I think about her students, who didn’t have a fully functioning teacher. I think about how there wasn’t an alternative path—one in which she received help, in which she didn’t have to be a money earner while simultaneously being unable to care for herself.

I live with similar sorts of fears now, as I once witnessed in her. Fears about how to fulfill, each day, the smallest of necessary tasks, to proceed to the next day. You move through the world differently once you’re unsure of your capability to care for yourself. Life becomes consciously, acutely, about survival.

In the company of those whom I value, who value me, too, as I am, there are moments of great joy. Of relief, and of beauty. Pleasure comes in the small moments, in the textures of the everyday, in moments of health, in moments of reprieve—when, in summertime, my partner and I buy boxes full of fragrant mangos on Devon, after being elbowed aside by the auntie eager to pick out the best ones. When our kitchen accidentally overflows with bananas—banana bunches everywhere—so I spend days processing bananas, freezing them, and we visit the pleasures of drinking the iced banana shakes she grew up with as a child. When we stand on chalky mats, staring up at a problem in the gym, arms waving wildly, unlocking a new sequence. When laughing over red wine and a home-cooked meal with friends.

I’m grateful each day for what hasn’t been taken from me yet, what has been preserved, even as I fear my condition may change and worsen. I’ve gotten sicker; who knows what the future holds. I want to keep up with my partner, to build a life together that doesn’t involve holding her back. Whether this is possible is a question to which I don’t have an answer, or which I’m afraid to contemplate.

Even if parts of myself deteriorate, I’m also equipped with the skills I learned in youth and beyond, in how to take care of others and myself. I’m blessed with love—the capacity to feel it deeply, to be motivated by it, and to possess and share it with someone equally aware of its worth.

I feel keenly the divide between what I want to achieve, to contribute, to do, and what’s possible for me. I feel my limitations. I’m too sensitive for this world. And yet I’m here.