![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More Story Notes
Sep. 21st, 2016 01:29 pmPart of what I'm looking at with Nightcrawling is the fact that I've known at least two people who I once considered friends who disappeared inside a sudden onslaught of mental illness. In both cases, I eventually felt I had to detach myself from them, an action I felt like a blow--it seemed cowardly and cruel, which it probably was. It seemed like an unforgiveable betrayal, which it probably was as well.
In one case, the cause was schizophrenia, which the person in question had always feared, given he'd already watched his mother succumb to it at close range; I remember going to his house and finding her always sitting there in the dark, face swollen to the point of deformity from whatever drugs she was taking, chain-smoking endlessly. He was a a good-looking kid, delicate enough that I mistook him for a girl until I introduced him to somebody using the female variant of his name, and he quickly corrected me. Another friend later told me he'd shot through puberty and straight into the thick of his disease, becoming tall, hairy and grossly fat. I never had to see that, though, because I'd already cut myself away from him using sharp words, unkind observations. I made it so he wouldn't want to be with me anymore, so I could be elsewhere.
Bits of my other friend's illness have made it into various stories, particularly those starring Carraclough Devize. I'd known her since grade school--she and I actually met at Deer Park, sharing those horrible years before separating when I escaped into the alternative school system, then meeting again at City School. We drifted apart again when we got into different universities, and by the time I next saw her she'd begun to wrestle with manic depression, which first presented during her graduate studies and led to a full-blown episode while she was working south of the border, ending in her being committed to an American hospital, where she racked up enormous debt and was treated with drugs that damaged her heart. She's the person I once went to visit in the Clarke Institute for Mental Health, signing her out for a three-hour jaunt during which we couldn't see a movie because she had to get back early (she was under suicide watch). Once released, she settled into a routine: change prescriptions, adjust to the cocktail, feel better, stop taking it, have an episode, go back on until the meds stopped working, change prescriptions again, etc. Then she threw herself off a bridge, ending up in a wheelchair, and I stopped taking her calls.
The pain was a lot worse with my second friend. What hurt the most was that throughout the process, she kept claiming I was her best or only friend, hearkening back to Deer Park, to the impression I'd made on her. She thought I was brave, self-confident, honest--like Lawrence of Arabia; she'd tell the same anecdotes over and over, reminding me of when I'd blown up at her abusive, belittling mother on her behalf, screaming at her in her own kitchen, or when I'd confronted her stepfather for essentially saying she was functionally retarded just because she wanted to study physical education rather than a more academic subject. But the more she praised me, the more I knew I couldn't possibly be any of those things, most especially so because of how uncomfortable she was making me feel. So I cut her loose and I moved on, not looking back.
I understand now that that was self-protection in action, "self-care," an instinct which came directly out of my own issues, and I accept the consequences, even though I still consider scuttling both friendships one of the worst things I've ever done, the worst sins I've ever committed. God knows I've cut other friends loose since then, for similar reasons, and been far less divided about it; maybe it's because I knew exactly what I was doing, those times. Maybe it's because I had what I considered genuinely practical reasons for doing so, beyond a vague sense of "I just can't stand to be around you anymore, because you remind me how weak and context-dependent my own grasp on sanity can be."
One way or the other, however, I understand all too well what it is to feel so guilty you consider yourself forever stained, a social leper whose marks only become visible if you admit to them. And I know how it is to be listening to a story someone's telling about someone else while thinking: "But this is you, right? You're describing yourself. And I can't say anything about it, because you don't even get that yet. You wouldn't believe me, if I did."
So this is where things will start: with one person telling another about the awful thing they did when they were younger, how they loved someone who went insane and felt it like a betrayal, then betrayed them in turn--but seen through the eyes of the second person, the one increasingly unsure of how reliable a narrator the first person is. Thinking, more and more: This is YOUR story you're telling me, whether you know it or not. There's something wrong with you, and I want to help, but I don't know if I can. I don't know if that's even possible.
Back to it.
In one case, the cause was schizophrenia, which the person in question had always feared, given he'd already watched his mother succumb to it at close range; I remember going to his house and finding her always sitting there in the dark, face swollen to the point of deformity from whatever drugs she was taking, chain-smoking endlessly. He was a a good-looking kid, delicate enough that I mistook him for a girl until I introduced him to somebody using the female variant of his name, and he quickly corrected me. Another friend later told me he'd shot through puberty and straight into the thick of his disease, becoming tall, hairy and grossly fat. I never had to see that, though, because I'd already cut myself away from him using sharp words, unkind observations. I made it so he wouldn't want to be with me anymore, so I could be elsewhere.
Bits of my other friend's illness have made it into various stories, particularly those starring Carraclough Devize. I'd known her since grade school--she and I actually met at Deer Park, sharing those horrible years before separating when I escaped into the alternative school system, then meeting again at City School. We drifted apart again when we got into different universities, and by the time I next saw her she'd begun to wrestle with manic depression, which first presented during her graduate studies and led to a full-blown episode while she was working south of the border, ending in her being committed to an American hospital, where she racked up enormous debt and was treated with drugs that damaged her heart. She's the person I once went to visit in the Clarke Institute for Mental Health, signing her out for a three-hour jaunt during which we couldn't see a movie because she had to get back early (she was under suicide watch). Once released, she settled into a routine: change prescriptions, adjust to the cocktail, feel better, stop taking it, have an episode, go back on until the meds stopped working, change prescriptions again, etc. Then she threw herself off a bridge, ending up in a wheelchair, and I stopped taking her calls.
The pain was a lot worse with my second friend. What hurt the most was that throughout the process, she kept claiming I was her best or only friend, hearkening back to Deer Park, to the impression I'd made on her. She thought I was brave, self-confident, honest--like Lawrence of Arabia; she'd tell the same anecdotes over and over, reminding me of when I'd blown up at her abusive, belittling mother on her behalf, screaming at her in her own kitchen, or when I'd confronted her stepfather for essentially saying she was functionally retarded just because she wanted to study physical education rather than a more academic subject. But the more she praised me, the more I knew I couldn't possibly be any of those things, most especially so because of how uncomfortable she was making me feel. So I cut her loose and I moved on, not looking back.
I understand now that that was self-protection in action, "self-care," an instinct which came directly out of my own issues, and I accept the consequences, even though I still consider scuttling both friendships one of the worst things I've ever done, the worst sins I've ever committed. God knows I've cut other friends loose since then, for similar reasons, and been far less divided about it; maybe it's because I knew exactly what I was doing, those times. Maybe it's because I had what I considered genuinely practical reasons for doing so, beyond a vague sense of "I just can't stand to be around you anymore, because you remind me how weak and context-dependent my own grasp on sanity can be."
One way or the other, however, I understand all too well what it is to feel so guilty you consider yourself forever stained, a social leper whose marks only become visible if you admit to them. And I know how it is to be listening to a story someone's telling about someone else while thinking: "But this is you, right? You're describing yourself. And I can't say anything about it, because you don't even get that yet. You wouldn't believe me, if I did."
So this is where things will start: with one person telling another about the awful thing they did when they were younger, how they loved someone who went insane and felt it like a betrayal, then betrayed them in turn--but seen through the eyes of the second person, the one increasingly unsure of how reliable a narrator the first person is. Thinking, more and more: This is YOUR story you're telling me, whether you know it or not. There's something wrong with you, and I want to help, but I don't know if I can. I don't know if that's even possible.
Back to it.
