Tag: childhood trauma
-
How Madness Hides
My smile in the photo isn’t a lie, but an attempt. It was my idea to take the family Christmas portrait, one of those last-ditch efforts to get into the holiday spirit. We took it Christmas eve. Sixteen hours later I crumpled into a corner of the kitchen, screaming about childhood and the demon in…
-
Notes From This Recent Psychotic Attack
I had nicked my arm with a razor blade earlier in the season, and thought at the time that it would suffice. Just a little cut above the crux of the elbow, no more than an inch long, though deep enough to leave a scar among all the other crisscross of scars. It worked, for…
-
Madness, Poetry, and Choosing Not to Die
Robert Lowell wrote those two lines in his poem “Night Sweats.” It’s one of my faves (the full poem is below). It’s a love poem, about a man who suffers mental illness, and his wife, who keeps him alive. It’s a brutal poem. Lowell suffered from manic depression. These days, people say “manic depression,” and…
-
Careful, who you read your journal to…
In the middle of writing the first notes for the novel The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, I recorded the above dream. My son Ben had been born two months previous. He was our last of four children, and my mind had focused on that—the youngest. There was a brittle feeling about it, though…