She’s here again, so I’m not having as okay of a day as I thought.
The backyard is mostly dark, but she’s there in the shadows of the bushes, darting or teleporting around. Compared to what I usually see in dark shadows when my mind turns on me? I’ll take the puppy.
“Hi, Farrah,” I deadpan from the swingset in the AA tone. It has been a long day, I guess, and I no longer care if the neighbors can hear me. Still, I take out one headphone, still blaring Hamilton, like it matters.
Farrah smiles at me in this way that real dogs don’t really smile, wags her tail and bounds over, under where I swing. Back through. Again and again. Like she’s trying to get me to kick her at full speed. She’s worse than the little kids at the park. I sigh and, properly distracted, stop swinging.
My darling hallucination races in circles around my feet. A lot of energy for the evening. What? I ask her mentally. You’re not a herding dog. But she wants me inside, much the way the real cats start herding me to the bedroom around this time.
But it doesn’t seem to be sleep she wants. I’m determined to sit in the living room and write down an idea I had on the swing before I do anything else. When I do, Farrah settles down. I can feel this weird sense of relief on her, like I feel it as my own when I get the idea safely on paper before my mind gives up completely.
I look at my notebook. This was what she wanted?
I look back up. She’s gone.
All right. I’ve accepted that Farrah’s basically a mirror of my own emotions most of the time, and if everything about her says, “Write now now now,” then I guess now is the time.
…
Writing the schizophrenia fiction piece I’m working on is hard at times. There’s a lot of me in it, even more than in most of my fiction, and in a trippy, intimate way. There’s a lot of Farrah in it, too—even more literally. I give her the same role in the schizophrenic main character’s life as she has in mine. So now she’s not only my schizophrenia tamagotchi, but one of my characters.
And my characters, like Farrah, have minds of their own to an extent. Many authors think of it like that, but for me it’s even a little more true, I think. My characters jump ahead of me both in plot outlining and in daydreams that slip away from me. I fade into a somewhat omniscient position in their world and often find it hard to come back whether I want to or not. When I do, it’s often disorienting, especially if I totally lost track of the real world and snap back abruptly due to the doorbell ringing or dissociation suddenly clearing or such. My world, the real world, goes away entirely, and here I am in theirs, less and less in control the longer I stay in and the emotionally deeper I dive.
It’s kind of like Ahtohallan in Frozen 2. You can go deeper and deeper into this world of sensations and memories that are not your own. To a point, you can get back out, though the journey back gets longer and longer. After a point, well:
“Dive down deep into her sound
But not too far, or you’ll be drowned”
So what does it mean now that Farrah—originally, and, still, a recurring hallucination—is now a character in one of those worlds my mind vanishes to? Does she get to play a double role in my psychosis, not only entering my world—which my characters generally don’t—but finding me trapped in one of hers? Is that why she beckoned me to the notebook—like asking me to come home?
…
Usually, when I write, it’s taking something only I can see—the story in my head—and turning it into something other people can read. It’s creating—Real from Not Real, in a way. Completely imaginary concepts floating through my brain turn into hundreds of pages I can hold in my hand. It’s not making the story Real, but making that dreamscape in my head widely accessible, like handing out a key, a map—in the form of a book.
But if I take something as deeply Not Real as Farrah, and give her that quasi Real form… does she become any More Real? What if other people can know Farrah, too—by the power of words on a page? Does that make her less just a quirk of my brain chemicals? Someone saying that they hallucinated Harry Potter, for instance, would be much easier to communicate with than someone hallucinating some boy with round glasses and a lightning shaped scar who could do magic, with seven books’ worth of story that only they could see. At that point, we might not share the exact vision of Harry—but I sure have a clue what they’re talking about, and the seven years of magic seems a lot saner.
When I write and get feedback, people tell me their thoughts on my characters. They might have a different opinion than me about their moral stances, or a slightly different picture of what they look like. They might even go off and have them in their own daydreams, their own versions of them that don’t just follow the script, but are based on their identity more than their role in a plot. People tell me about gasping when my characters are surprised, holding their breath when they’re afraid, crying when they’re upset, developing crushes on their love interests.
These characters aren’t just concepts in my head at that point. They’re out there in the world and I can talk about them with other people the way I talk about people I know in real life, or about Harry Potter. It’s not uncommon for my wife to walk into a conversation I’m having with my writer best friend and ask, “Wait, are we talking about real people?” (The answer is usually no.)
So what about Farrah? If I make her just as accessible as any character—if others can talk about her like someone they know, or like any known fictional figure—is seeing her saner now? Is her identity something like a socially acceptable shared delusion, when we can both hold the key to her world in our hands?
If she got as popular as Harry Potter? Probably.
The Schizophrenia Diaries 