Content Warning: Rape and Self-Harm
“Come with me/and you’ll be/in a world of pure imagination,” Gene Wilder once said as the brilliant, eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka in the 1969 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And perhaps that’s all there is to it--an active imagination. An active imagination under the tight-fisted control of a medicinal concoction of green and white pills I take just before I go to sleep at night. It is probably for the better, when my world tends to take the form of Willy Wonka’s river of terrors than a candy wonderland. We have lived, and we have learned.
I was eighteen-years-old and sinking knock-kneed into a faded psychiatrist’s couch when they first danced around the idea of a diagnosis.
“Strange thoughts,” my psychiatrist wondered aloud in a rather theatrical fashion. “Perhaps the product of loneliness, of total isolation with nobody around to keep your strange ideas in check.” The conclusion was drawn in the wake of a claustrophobic screaming episode in my college dorm when I was convinced that my hands were stolen and secretly replaced. My mother drove up from our hometown to meet me to find me huddled into an armchair in the university health emergency center with a vacant stare across my face like a mask. Alarming enough to parent and staff, I was sent home for the semester with an augmented dose of antidepressants and a fervent recommendation to postpone my final exams.
It took a few more months and a few institutions before these worsening episodes were identified as psychosis; in the meantime, they took theme and form that soon became clinically recognizable--putrifying corpse, body of glass, infestation of parasites, a world full of the foulest poisons, eyes of murder and rape in the common man, ghastly betryals. I thrashed about within this nightmarish world of mine, where the veins in my hands became the seams of cracks in my flesh-turned-eggshells about to fall to pieces completely and the hunger spread across the faces of my group therapy brethren chased my out of the room as I feared for the worth of my virginity. It was an imagination so formidable, it made manifest in my reality; just as one may see a spoon on a kitchen table, so did I see my own flesh rotting to the bone in ribbons of flesh festering in my own coagulated blood, so did I see poison in my routine medication regimen. Weeping in fear, I would hold my eggshell hands of an eggshell body in front of me in a fear both wondrous and monstrous out to a nurse, a parent, a therapist, a lover, to be told in prosody that resembled baby talk that I simply would not shatter--useful advice for someone with eggshell for hands. If I had not been lonely before, I certainly began to suffer in solitude now, as my reality and imagination intersected entirely into an actuality that was not shared by anyone else. In fact, I was terribly lonely in my world, where not even my closest confidants could permeate the foggy barrier with which psychosis had cocooned me. As the episode ended, I would emerge into a form of reality, thickly laden with a dreamlike haze, confusing fact from fiction, fiction from fact. It was a perfectly dysfunctional life, a perfectly dysfunctional pure imagination.
A particularly clever psychologist noted the embodiment of trauma in the body, surfacing in ways that I could only truly grasp through somatization; my narrative was bleeding through skin, bone, and coloring my world in a cry for help that I was suffering. Here, imagination was a warning for the lobes of the mind that were necrotic with torments past, painting vivid fables and ghost stories into my vision to shock me into attention of subsurface torment. Suddenly, I could see all of my fears before me in a beautiful, terrible way--a way that only made sense to me in my lonely world.
Psychiatrists were soon given reason to worry and began pumping me through with antipsychotics in addition to the already heavy-handed prescription list I wielded. Eventually, the fog began to part, and the world became safer than it had been for months. Psychosis still percolated within the crevices of my brain, however, still making itself known in subtle yet terrifying ways in unexpected moments: flashes of feelings, snap-transformations of people before my eyes, even complete episodes. I once even found myself clutching a knife with the intention of carving my own flesh. Who is this person, I asked within, clutching my hair in horror of the person I was momentarily, only to realize that it was me all along, caught in the clutches of pure imagination.
The more medication I am prescribed, the more psychosis is erased, and I can be safe again. And yet, do I dare to miss it, my head full of stories? My brain and body are imbued with gothic horror tales, the stuff of body horror, thrillers, and slasher films. They are the narratives that make up the anthology of trauma in images of torment and fragility; rape lives in my body, surgery lives in my body, anorexia lives in my body--it is the psychosis that is the words to these stories, the anaphoras and ekphrases, the menonymies and synecdoches. Pure imagination lives within this diction, creating vivid stories from nebulous hurt within. They are stories I can live, see and touch, even if I must cower before them. And they are the stories that saved me, perhaps, from being quietly consumed alive by moldering memories.
I float along my chocolate river, puffed up by those little pills working their magic, wondering what magic and what monstrosity lies percolating behind my eyes. Who am I to know in what reality I exist, if psychosis is really just another name for truth, and perceived sanity is a collective consciousness upon which we agree in fear of our own stories that lie within us. Despite the pills that keep me safe from my greatest fears, I am secretly grateful for the moments of madness that shine through to remind me of my body’s macabre anthology within and without, of those shimmering inklings of pure imagination; for a very wise man once said: A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
By Kaitlin Kan.
