My sense of myself had become disorganised: one self was telling me that I was all right and in control, and another - more embodied - self was sending me very clear signals that I was most emphatically not all right.
Related Quotes
I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.
It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.
That’s why I said to myself, “I have to be very original and clear myself from shit.” I was still hustling. Hustling to make bread. “I must clear myself from this mess. I must identify myself with Africa. Then I will have an identity.” That’s what I was thinking to myself.
Acknowledging and affirming a person’s vivid experience and the struggle towards recovery - and simultaneously seeking to modulate or attenuate the intense distress and confusion that is part of the process - requires a difficult and time elusive balance.
It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.
It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.