The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open for days. I hid them from my parents and grew out my hair, thinking that the weight dropping from my head would lighten the one inside of me. It worked—not by making anything lighter, no, but by making me feel more balanced, like one weight was pulling the other and the strain on me had been lessened. Perhaps I had just become the fulcrum, the point on which everything hinged, the turning. I don’t know. I just know that I hurt a little less with each inch of hair I refused to cut. Looking back, I really don’t know what I thought it was going to protect me from.

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.

The second mistake I’d made was more serious. I’d wanted to make sure every idea we had was communicated properly, so I’d insisted the team learn a spiel. I’d made them performers, ruling out any possibility of a real, quality conversation between them and the guests. Of course the experience had felt inauthentic to Wells; there had been no room for Natasha to connect with him. I had taken away her ability to be herself at the table.