As I’ve been adding my notes to this text I’ve made a few changes to the body of writing, what I thought was already finished, with my notes being my reflection on the truthful story I’d told.
Changing the extant words could be thought of as my memories changing as they fade and integrate into my knowing, or as I reconsider and re-contextualise what I’ve been through. The problem with this is that what I wrote was specific (if not explicit, although I don’t think schizophrenia can be made explicit to someone who isn’t schizophrenic.) And changing what I wrote post-hoc asks me to consider why I don’t integrate all of everything-new into all of everything, and so everything new resaid for the first time. What is enough? Where is enough? Is it even proper?
I will say that the truth of the story already exists and to change it would be to deny reality. The meaning of the truth, as I give it shape, does not yet exist, cannot exist for anyone but me as the author, the experiencer. To read this story fully is to fully live it, and no novel, yet, has achieved such a task. At the very least I know I have never lived the complete truth represented by a novel. Then, so, my edits are to better allow an integration, for the reader, of the truth, much like the purpose of my annotations.
The reality is this is all a communication, or about communication: this is its purpose. During my first few days attending the psychiatric hospital—before this story begins—I was asked what I wanted from my care. What I said I needed was someone I could talk to, honestly, that I could trust (perhaps a difficult ask.) This need remains, to a degree.
If the reflective, hopefully recursive nature of my storytelling speaks of anything then I hope you’re hearing that a lot of my illness is doubt and questioning. What is real? What meaning is? What the self is? What thought is? I am in conversation with myself, never truly ascribing anything I’ve clumsily stumbled upon as a matter of fact, at least in the times of sanity. This is all a conversation. In writing this it’s with myself, if someone eventually reads it, then with them. If my prose is effective they will converse with both my writing and themselves, and their self that exists as this story. This isn’t a telling, dogmatic and one-sided, it is a back and forth between imagined (or real) aspects of the self, including the self I’ve put forward, or my self as seen as by my readers (a dream would be a reader for whom this acts as a—temporary—experience of their-self.)
That, again, brings me to how to achieve this purpose in writing. This time, however, from my imagined third-party perspective rather than in my somewhat knowable muttering away alone. How does my need to write in conversation with myself keep strong with my need to communicate with the reader, a reader who will hopefully begin a dialogue with me and themselves? What are the markers, the signs, the gentle nudges that will bring them to that state? How does a story, one I feel is atypical, with an inability to fit into a form, become a form where so many ask for realisation?
One mark given over to this is that the story is broken into chapters, and chapters, like stories, have an arc: rise, fall, etc. Schizophrenia does not follow an arc. Life is not compartmentalised to satisfy anyone, even if we try (foolishly, sometimes) to match it to the narrative satisfaction we take from stories on TV or in movies.
In the first chapter I added a note towards the end that didn’t match the seeming winding-up of that segment of the tale. It opened questions not answered in the text, and seemed like a thought in interstition. It’s not that it was an incomplete thought, or that it raised half-a-point to be left unaddressed, it simply interjected a reality of life on what could be thought of as a somewhat completed portion. This seems narratively unsatisfying.