To begin with, I have been diagnosed since childhood with “psychotic disorder not otherwise specified.” The “symptoms” of my “illness” come and go, and although it’s true (as it is for sufferers of any chronic illness, particularly chronic mental illness, and especially chronic mental illness with psychotic features) that my “illness” does to some degree affect how I think and behave even during periods in which I suffer none of its “symptoms,” I’m nonetheless pretty much like anyone else. Or as the self-empowerment salesmen would have me phrase it: I’m not a disease, but a human being. If I’d prefaced this memoir with anything resembling, “My name is Belt Magnet, and sometimes I’m psychotic—at least that’s what they say,” then, even had the rest of the text remained the same, you would have spent the previous pages reading not about a recently young American writer and onetime semi-intimate of Jonny “Jonboat” Pellmore-Jason on a quest for cigarette money in 2013, but rather about a disturbed man. You wouldn’t have been able to help but to do so.
Please understand that’s not a hostile accusation. I’d do just the same. Show me, for instance, a blank-faced man atop some bleachers who’s watching a bunch of kids play baseball, and I figure he’s on fatherly Little League duty, tired and bored. If before, while, or immediately after showing me that man, though, you tell me he was sexually molested as a child, I’m no longer thinking he’s tired and bored. I’m thinking maybe he has suspicions about one of the coaches, and he’s keeping a close eye out to protect his son. Or maybe he doesn’t have a son, and he’s picking a victim from among the players. Or he’s picking a victim and does have a son, or fighting the urge to pick a victim. Or maybe while knowing what others watching might imagine him thinking if they were to learn he’d been molested as a child, he’s bittersweetly appreciating that, despite what he suffered, he has no desire to harm any of the boys who are out on that field, or any children anywhere else for that matter. Whatever it is that I think he’s thinking, though, I assume it concerns his having been molested, regardless of the fact that he’s been alive for decades, and spent 99.99+ percent of those decades’ moments not getting molested.
But show me this blank-faced guy in the bleachers, then show me him taking his son out for ice cream, struggling at a job interview, fighting with his wife, visiting an oncologist, dancing with his wife, then drinking with a friend he’s known since childhood who keeps telling him everything will be okay, and only then tell me he was molested as a boy—I won’t, when I recall his sitting blank-faced in the bleachers, assume he’d been thinking about child molestation; or, at least I won’t assume he was mostly, let alone only, thinking about child molestation. Nor do I imagine that you would either.
In light of all that, and considering that I wasn’t suffering any “symptoms” of my “illness” during any of the scenes I’ve so far described—not to mention that I’ve never been entirely convinced my “symptoms” even indicate an “illness” (as I’m pretty sure you’ve gathered by way of all the scare quotes, which, from this point forward, I’ll happily dispense with)—I thought it would actually be more straightforward to begin this memoir—again: a book about me, not my illness—without pushing my diagnosis in your face. Obviously, I still feel that way. And as you’ll see momentarily, I’d pretty much have to push my diagnosis in your face to sufficiently answer any of the aforementioned questions. But it was not my intention to trick you, reader, into thinking of me as a human being, and I can only hope you’ll accept my assurances that no further surprises of this nature lie in store for you.
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How does your psychotic disorder not otherwise specified manifest?
Sometimes I converse with inanimate beings. Sometimes a sense of alienation ensues, other times a sense of profound connection and gratitude. The sense of alienation doesn’t count as a symptom. The sense of connection and gratitude sometimes does (depending on whether the attending psychiatrist perceives my reaction to it as joy or mania). The conversing, however, counts as two symptoms: the hearing of the inans and the responding to them.
Though I do respond to inans by conventional means (i.e. speaking or, far less often, writing), I don’t, when I talk about “hearing inans,” mean to suggest that my ears are involved. The inans communicate straight to my brain. I’ve known that pretty much from the beginning. At eleven years old, my age when the inans began to address me, I conducted a test with an Olive Garden booth and confirmed its results with multiple inans on any number of occasions thereafter. The booth had said, ||My upholstery’s cracked. Steam from the pasta condenses inside me,|| and I plugged both ears with the tips of my fingers. ||My stuffing is swelling and it’s straining my seams. Help me,|| it continued, clear as a syllogism.
And so thusly ergo: straight to my brain.
What’s been harder to figure—impossible, really—is whether or not the inans speak English, or any other human language. It seems no less likely an organic mechanism etched in my gray matter translates inan language(s) automatically. I’ll probably never know. Inans are slippery, epistemologically. I’ve tried to corner a few, but it hasn’t ever worked. I once asked an heirloom woolen afghan from Austria (knitted by an aunt of Grandfather Magnet) whether it preferred to speak German or English. ||What’s English?|| said the afghan. “That’s weird,” I said. ||What?|| “You didn’t ask about German, which suggests you know what German is, but you don’t know what English is, and yet you used English, or seemed to use English, to ask me what English is.” ||So?|| said the afghan. “Do you know what German is?” ||Of course,|| said the afghan. ||Who doesn’t?|| it said. “Do you speak it?” I said. ||Do I what? Yes, of course.|| “Will you show me?” I said. ||The edges of my holes are fraying,|| said the afghan. ||It’s like an itch and a pinch all at once plus a burning.|| “Can you say that again in German, though?” I said. ||How do you know I didn’t?|| said the afghan. “I heard it in English.” ||Maybe that’s your own problem.|| “Did you say it in German or not?” I said. ||You disappoint me,|| said the afghan. “Please?” I said. “Say something in German.” ||I’m not your damn pet,|| the afghan said. And that was the last I ever heard from it.
To reiterate, I do recognize the possibility that I hallucinate—I’m entirely aware of that possibility. I’m a rigorous thinker, and I pay attention. I’ve noticed, for instance, how the inans have a greater tendency to speak to me when I’m feeling desperate (desperately happy, desperately sad, desperately afraid: any kind of desperate)—though they don’t speak to me every time I’m feeling desperate, nor only when I’m feeling desperate—and since desperation is a flavor of stress, and stress a well-known trigger of psychotic reactions, I understand how this tendency might seem to indicate that I’m having a psychotic episode when I hear the inans. Yet I think it would be foolish, and I know it would (at least from my point of view) be counterintuitive, to dismiss the possibility that those times during which I’m feeling desperate are times when I’m more sensitive to the world around me and might thereby be capable of superperception.