My narratives, living with schizophrenia, this blog...
Schizophrenia is a family illness. It permeates the familial structure, taking its toll on the patient and his/her immediate family. Families endure the chronic symptoms of schizophrenia, we watch our loved ones struggle to control the disease using anti-psychotic medication and we endure patient relapses. Schizophrenia is incurable.
As writers we have many stories brewing in our subconscious. We let these stories percolate in our bodies, live in our minds, inform our daily lives until finally in cathartic release they reveal themselves on paper or Microsoft Word. My sister and my story began thirty-seven years ago, back when we were too young to know how we would affect each other’s lives. It is a story of sisterly love, loyalty, resentment and disconnection exacerbated by mental illness. The best way to tell our story is through narratives that will eventually lead to a performance piece.
Narrative performances are personal to a writer and therefore different from scripted monologues, because they create a sense of vulnerability within the artist. As an actor I have enjoyed living behind characters that are unlike me. I have played characters that I share a similar history with, but the similarities were masked by subtext and someone else’s words. I was performing, not sharing my personal truth.
My truth began with these narratives, and the truth became a journey of self-discovery. When I decided to write this story, my relationship with my sister had been fractured for twenty years. Twenty years of nursing resentments and avoiding the reality that is her schizophrenia. I was also negating my pain and the love that still exists despite my frustration with her illness.
Writing about schizophrenia was not an impulsive decision. I was not writing a performance piece about a generic family. I was writing about my family and my relationship with my sister Rebecca. This story is personal and revealing. I am committing a cardinal sin and revealing my family’s ‘dirty’ laundry, and I haven’t even changed the names to protect the innocent. As a Mexicana, I was taught you never talk about the family outside of the family. I felt like Fredo Corleone going against the family. I was just waiting to get taken on a boat on New Year’s Day, very Godfather, but true.
Moving forward was a big step, one that consisted of personal evaluation and fear. The fear of exploring my own feelings and revealing my personal struggles with depression, because if I was going to share my sister’s mental health story I in turn had to share my own. This is where the kinship takes place and this is how at some reluctant level we connect. Our connection is reluctant on my part. My apprehension of somehow being like Rebecca is strong. I don’t want to be labeled under the same category and being depressed and unable to handle the two breakdowns I have experienced has created this illogical fear. Although my depression has not been diagnosed as clinical I have been prescribed medication and accepted the prescription in order to handle the emotional situations. But once my therapist and psychologist suggested Zoloft as a prescription, my reaction was a visceral, “NO! That’s what Rebecca takes, I’m not taking that!” It was an irrational reaction, but I could not block the voice in my brain that told me that Rebecca and I weren’t that different. And the truth is we aren’t. I may not be a paranoid schizophrenic who is not only on anti-depressants, but also on anti-psychotics, but I am struggling with a mood disorder that sometimes prevents me from functioning in stressful situations, while Rebecca is struggling with a mental disorder that prevents her from functioning in life. The stories took a while to come out, because my reluctance to accept my struggle with depression was stunting the words and distancing me from acknowledging her world and how the memories reminded me of how imbedded we use to be in each other.
The emotional struggle in writing a narrative performance causes writers block.
It took me almost a year to overcome it. In that year I discovered resentment towards my sister and her schizophrenia. I was angry because she ‘got away’ with her behavior. I realized how her illness had molded my thought processes and dictated my behavior and trapped me in a state of emotional adolescence. In her book, Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings, Clea Simon writes, “What I was discovering was how the illness that controlled my brother and sister defined my life…their illness had been present in my life for years before those first breakdowns, and it would be present for years to come, as I lived out the patterns set in those times of noise and fear. The work continues. Even today I occasionally find myself reacting as I would have as a child in that house, with panicked anger, with unexpected courage or with terror.” Simon describes the emotional residue to a ‘T’. It is what I have been living with for the past twenty-years. My involvement with East LA Rep, a Boyle Heights theatre company, led me to an opportunity to combat my writers block and helped me face my emotional turmoil through art.
