Tag: mental illness
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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…
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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…
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You Don’t Have to Have a Merry Christmas
The darkest evening of the year was yesterday, though for most people, it was just the longest evening of the year. Winter solstice. The shortest day. Here, in L.A., dusk came along around 4:30. That’s too soon for me. Going to bed has, for nearly forty years, been a reckoning with the shadow that comes…
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The Craters of Our Lives
Our couch came with craters installed underneath each cushion. Sit on it, and your rump plummets. The cushion caves in. You sink, your knees are as high as your forehead. You have to peer around them to watch TV. I pile three pillows together to sit. And still I sink. Lesson: don’t buy cheap-ass furniture.…
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The Things They Tell You Not to Write About
Our morning begins with the clack of the walker’s brakes a wall away from where I sit here writing—that specific clunk of two handles lifted to release the wheels. But for her, it began an hour ago, waking up, looking at the ceiling of her bedroom, deciding whether or not to rise. It’s a painful…