Half/Whole/Nothing/Everything

It has been some time since my last post, and in the interim a great deal has transpired. For one, and perhaps this is the most crucial to my journey through these experiences, is my family's quasi-acceptance of the idea of schizophrenia in Tavia. This is not entirely the magical solution I had hoped for, but rather brings up yet more sensations of alternative narratives and realities, shaded in colors of insecurity, ignorance, uncertainty, fear, and hope.

In the vortex of this mixture of multi-valent and diverse experiences of reality, lies the deep, deep dread that I am entirely alone in my understanding of my sister, and to some degree, myself. As we move deeper into the exploration of what it means to be a family in 'admission,' that is, in a state of admitting the culturally-agreed-upon label and solution to this issue, it becomes increasingly clear that others' views, memories, ideas, and generally their interest level in the situation all vary greatly from mine. The fear of being ultimately alone, and therefore truly experiencing the thing which I think I may have feared most through my campaign and my fear 'beard' of being somehow insane myself, is now lurking quietly near me. Sadly, I wonder if the ghost of all of this will haunt me, and me alone.

So to start, I air the questions that wind through my head: Did anyone else know the Tavia I knew? Did anyone else care for her as I did, or see her vulnerability? If I ever knew her, was it truly 'her,' or simply a schizo-affective shade of her? How might I feel differently about myself and my family if she were not ill? What parts of me that she appropriated are truly me, and what parts were her? (that is, how much did we intermingle, and how much were we truly separate?)

The very wary familial agreement to label the thing with which we all are dealing does nothing to lay my anxieties (above) to rest. And I think of all the questions, it is the last which truly bothers me the most. The re-reading and re-writing of my past through the lens of an agreed-upon reality of Tavia's illness has allowed me to also re-evaluate the self I have told myself I am.

A short history is required here. As children, Tavia, being three years my elder, was a great influence on me. Furthermore, we were forced to share a room, to both of our dismay and great disgust. We were always together, but it was a miserable pairing. Tavia was brutal, tyrannical, and controlling, yet I truly believe her intentions were no such thing. She explained to me repeatedly that she simply did not understand instructions to act in a 'normal' manner, or what she was doing wrong. Primarily, her weapon of greatest abuse was the idea that I 'copied' her in everything she did, and this constituted a sort of theft of self, as I tried to become her. There are two sides to this claim: the first, she claimed I copied her for any idea tha seemed good or she liked, that is, if I thought of an idea which she liked or loved, she claimed I had stolen it from her before she could think of it or say it. The other side was that if I were to create a different idea and present it, one she did not like or think suitable, she would deride it cruelly. In fact, any difference of opinion or even of something like a drawing, would draw her venomous criticism, including casting aspersions on my abilities, character, and intelligence. It was awful.

Throughout all of this, it seemed clear to me that Tavia was both a great bully, and terribly vulnerable. Either way, it was my job to make sure she stayed stable and ok, as it was me who would bear the emotional hurt and the abuse if she were to sway too far into a violent rage or depression. Her delusions of copying and stealing crept into me in a way I have a hard time describing. Everything in my life seemed to belong to her, every iota of me. And though others saw this, she never said the things in front of them that she said just to me. Telling on her either made it worse or made her so upset and uncomprehending I would relent just to stop her emotional downturns. And so I played along, and my brightness and energy sort of seeped away under constant stress and derision. I became more and more convinced I had nothing to offer and she everything. There was no way out, and I also loved her. It was a strange combination. As much as she did to me, there were definite moments of bonding, of fun, of love and caring (in her very odd way). There were moments where it seemed we could coexist, and being close and young and very intuitive, we seemed to be almost twins. Two who could do the job of a very good one. Perhaps this was due entirely to her illness. She needed a second who could take her through the vagaries of life, and I was stable and well.

As we go through this collective memory revision, it seems that that memory, and the idea of her as a true 'person,' a true personality and character, are also fading. And it frightens me for two reasons (that I can think of at the moment). On the one hand, it wipes away the memory of who I was as a child, very much defined by her and her actions, and on the other hand, it permits me to finally unfurl my idea of myself to include all the experiences she claimed were hers, but were, in fact, mine and mine alone. Her experience was much more alone than I can imagine, I realize, upon looking back now.

So here I am, waffling about and wondering if anyone shared my experience of her, an experience that is 1. now lost and 2. being revised even in myself. It makes me want to cry and scream. That is my experience at the moment.

Dividing Lines

It seems like in this period there are so many more questions than answers, but I feel it is better to share them, letting in a little ethnographic light to some of my more querilous meanderings.

A few things that have become clear about the situation with my sister and her illness, is the way it reflects/refracts/amplifies/externalizes bigger, older, or hidden issues that lie within the family. The primary issue that we have been faced with is the way in which we have divided over her illness, and our differing ideas of how it should be treated. For many years I have thought this was simply due to a strange dis-reality that my parents lived in, especially my Dad, when it came to issues with which he had trouble. And I think he does disassociate himself from others and the possible opinions of others when it comes to issues over which he feel sensitive, uncertain, and most importantly, wrong!

However, what I am coming to realize more and more is that my sister's behavior, and her own anti-socialism, her own psychotic dreams of escape and desire to simply 'have everyone be at peace' (without each other) in fact reflects our own family's biggest trouble: we have been told since childhood that too many people, too much family, too much society, (in the the end, too much support) is poisonous, it has been modeled to us from our father to break apart and become solitary in times of trouble. And that is what this illness is highlighting. It is casting into high relief the struggle we are all going through to unite, as we truly desire to as a family, despite the since-childhood message of divide and scatter in hardship. Even my father seems to be turning his views, slowly - ever so slowly - toward a more whole family.

Furthermore, it is this divide, not so much the still-extant (as it has always been extant) illness of my sister that seems to cause us the most pain. It is the running blood of family history, and all our growth as adults to turn around the rejection we felt I think first from our father, and then perhaps from each other, as we were taught and followed the path of silence, cutting-off, non-communication. As adults, though, we are slowly shifting the system; today I think there is some hope.

Folie en famille

There is something that happens in cases of delusion called folie a deux. It is defined by wikipedia as:

"Folie à deux (English pronunciation: /fɒˈli ə ˈduː/, from the French for "a madness shared by two") is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie en famille or even folie à plusieurs ("madness of many"). Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as dependency psychotic disorder (DSM-IV) (297.3) and induced delusional disorder (F.24) in the ICD-10, although the research literature largely uses the original name. The disorder was first conceptualized in 19th century French psychiatry."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follie_a_deux)

What is more interesting is that it can be imposed, simultaneous, and even contagious. In my family, it seems like it has been contagious, amplified, and worsened by the psychotic disorder of schizophrenia.

A little background history is required here. My family during my childhood (and my parents still today) believed in a set of very strange spiritual beliefs, headed and led by my father. These strange beliefs stretched from a belief in the inhabitation of demons in everything (including ourselves), and the need to 'cleanse' these from our houses, our things and ourselves, on a constant basis, to the belief that one can change the world through faith. Just before and during my adolescence, my parents became great believers in the evangelical faith movement, the main belief of which is that the physical world can be changed through faith and belief that it is not how it appears, but how one would like it to be. Practices surrounding this belief include 'confessing' how one would like things to be (saying things are what they currently are not in order to bring about change), and acting as if things are as they are not, but as one would like them to be (in order to live more entirely in the spiritual world in which one believes wholeheartedly). As well, my parents habitually isolate themselves from others psychologically and physically, having no real close friends, and often shrouding their beliefs in secrecy from the 'world.' The fact that these practices smack mightily of psychosis and delusion has clearly interwoven with my sister's schizophrenic delusions to create a situation that is at once frustrating and poisonous for her, as well as for my mother, and the remaining siblings who are endeavoring to help our parents toward a sound medical solution.

The current state of things is that my father, unwilling to truly admit to the problem of schizophrenia, and wanting desperately to heal my sister through 'faith healing' (a miracle), constrains my mother to not speak about my sister negatively; that is, to not discuss her symptoms or problems with others outside the house, and not often within it. As all the children have left (fled?) the house and chosen to live sane lives, my mother is left within the situation to slowly be convinced, even as I was during my 2 and 1/2 year period with my schizophrenic sister, that my mother herself is the one who is mad. She is left to slowly drift into a folie a deux (or a trois, if you include my father's less-involved, yet definitely delusional state), with my sister. And that is certainly the case at the moment. She is feeling the dark pull toward madness, even as she is trapped in the situation with little recourse.

When I finally left my parents' house and my sister when I was 20, it took me some months to fully extricate myself from the strangest of my sister's beliefs. Unfortunately, I am still working toward a place of balance and reality in the more intimate areas of my life which my sister violated: my self-esteem, my belief that I have a firm grasp on reality, and more than anything, a supportive relationship with my parents and my other siblings. This last is the most difficult for me, because it is out of my control. And because I am the one not enabling la folie, and furthermore, the one most feared by my sister, it is I who live with the brunt of familial coldness, and betrayal, as my mother clings to a husband who is hurting her, and my siblings endeavor to not allow this process to rule their lives. In my life, it is not a question of ruling, but of healing. And if I don't work to heal, then I will live in a sort of folie myself: the delusion that it is I who am to blame.