Esmé Weijun Wang

NOTE: No, mom, I did not get a tattoo. The above picture is of a temporary tattoo, which came with a purchase I made a few months ago. So don’t worry.

The last week has been challenging. You might think that living with the same chronic mental illness for nineteen years would make it more understandable. More logical. You’d start to look out for the same signs, the same signals, You’d settle on one medication regimen, and that one set of pills would have you going for life. All of this could not be further from the truth; at least, it hasn’t been for me. My illness has changed shapes. It takes off masks and puts on new ones. It alters my metabolism so that the pills I use to fight it become less and less efficacious, until I’m taking ten pills of the same medication to get to the bare minimum of therapeutic levels. I live with hallucinations for years, and then they become quiet and fleeting, leaving me with delusions and louder symptoms of schizophrenias. Maybe it’s like running on a treadmill. Some days, it goes fast. Some days, it goes slowly. Some days it doesn’t move at all, and I find myself standing, not knowing whether to get off or run in place to keep up my strength. And one day, the darn thing just decides to go backwards. Next it’ll turn into a eagle, and fly above our house in search of prey.

So I’m trying to protect myself in the best way that I can. I’m working with people on brainstorming contingency plans, and I’m reading blogs like Sustainably Creative for tips on how to do my job and keep up my work while allowing myself the space to rest. I asked my supervisor if I could start work an hour earlier, working from 9 to 6 so that I can have that built-in hour for walks, naps, or sipping tea on the couch while I stare out the window — whatever my wise mind tells me it needs at the moment.

On another note, I bought my first iMac (refurbished from Myservice, a company that I can’t recommend highly enough for Mac-related repairs and sales) for my home office, and I’m completely and utterly smitten. Oh my gosh! The HUGE screen! I’m in heaven, folks.

Am I totally asymptomatic right now? No. Am I functional? Yes. And I’d love to keep being functional, walking slowly on that treadmill, and taking care of myself.

You take care of you, too. Be well.

My ability to communicate is slowly coming back, but the delusions and fears are still there. I still wake up afraid that the dog and the man — but especially the dog — are not the ones I know; I am afraid that I have been transformed into someone who is not the real woman, but a figment. The house also is a figment; the streets are filled with figments. I wake up at five, go on walks with my camera. To anchor myself in even the slightest bit I take pictures. I use Polaroids because the images come straightaway in my hands, and I can hold them. I see colorful colanders. I ask the man who owns the restaurant if I can photograph them. He says yes. I snap the photograph and minutes later, the colanders appear. They are evidence. I go home and show the photograph, yes, what a nice shot. I order more film because even though I am over budget for film this month I need to ground myself to keep the fear at bay.

One part of my brain knows how to do things. The lizard brain knows how to make coffee and get dressed. The other brain is smothering the lizard brain, tries to confuse it, says, “What is this room? What are clothes?” It looks at images and cannot make sense of them. Yes, this mishmash of things — the lizard brain responds. I went to the optometrist yesterday. They asked for my phone number and the lizard brain said the number, but I did not know what a phone number was or what the numbers meant.

I chronicle this so that I will remember later.

A baseball stuck in a fence. A beautiful thing. Today is Mother’s Day, but I gave my mother her present yesterday, because in Taiwan everything is a day earlier. I made her cry, but in a good way. A beautiful thing. A beautiful thing.

I am unwell again. Symptoms slowly tricklerd in asy yesterday omrning, and then got orse as noon came. A t noon it hit like w a a wave. Frusrating, to say the least, and tiring. I am vey tired.  

TROUBLE

by Matthew Dickman

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the hollywood sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

My mother is an artist, a warrior, a highly sensitive person, and the reason I am alive — in more ways than the most basic.

I’ve been working on a project for her Mother’s Day present for the last couple of weeks, and doing so has brought me to tears on some occasions. Always, a sense of deep gratitude. Always, a sense of wonderment that this human being helped to produce me and is yet separate from me, has so many stories locked away, keeps sadnesses that I will probably never know. A sense of the ticking clock that tells me to value every moment, even if she is on the other side of the world, to Skype with her often, to take photographs of her, to tell her that she is beautiful, to share with her more of myself, now that I am grown.

Many other bloggers have a feature like this, in which they share links to specific posts that they’ve enjoyed; I tend to be lazy about culling such things, and so I haven’t done the same. However, certain features in my new reader apps (Reeder on my laptop and Feedly on my iPad/Phone, if you’re curious) have helped me to keep track of, well, Places to Go, People to See. And so I will try to be consistent about this feature, which will post on Saturdays. An experiment of sorts.

• JSA wrote a very brave post about the decision to go on lithium.
• A picture-heavy post about wearing silk scarves on sfgirlbybay, which has been tickling at me ever since — I’ve got to try some of these looks out.
• Emmadine’s post about Lynn & Lawrence makes me crave knit hats, even though it was 80 degrees yesterday (in San Francisco, this is like seeing a unicorn drive a MUNI bus).
• I so desperately need a meal planning/recipe collection system, and Kyla Roma’s seems like a good jumping-off point.
• If you haven’t seen my guest post on Paper Lovestory about my planning/organization system, you might want to take a look — especially if you, too, tend to geek out over stationery and planners.

Thanks for reading, as always, you lovelies — have a splendiferous weekend!

This is part of a larger piece that I am currently working on.

My elementary school library kept what I imagine to be a stranger variety of books than most other elementary school libraries; or perhaps it only seems that way to me now, looking back in adulthood, at my childhood spent plucking from the shelves mid-century books about subjects such as soap carving (which I attempted, poorly, with a butter knife), sculpting clay busts (resulting in postmodern monstrosities), and other how-to books that caught my eye. In particular, I began to check out every survival manual the school had, which was, for a school located in a mostly white, affluent suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, about three or four too many. In these survival manuals — also, I suppose, from the 40s or 50s — there were instructions on how to survive in every landscape that Mother Nature could try to kill you with. Armed with such books, I learned that human ingenuity could thwart such murder; if you were lost at sea, you could drink from the eyeballs of sea turtles, and slit their throats for blood, which made catching sea turtles seem much easier than I’m sure it is; if you were stranded in the desert, you could dig a funnel-shape in the sand, line it with cling film, and condensation would niftily accumulate until there was enough water to drink at the bottom of the funnel to keep you alive.

I don’t know why I was so interested in these survival manuals. I hated camping, having done it once with my Girl Scout troop, where I attracted all of the mosquitoes in the entire wood, although I did enjoy telling the other girls that I’d seen the fiery numbers “666” in the outhouse — an incredibly mean trick in retrospect, not knowing if it forced any of my fellow Scouts to relieve themselves on the forest floor. I had never been in a desert, nor was I planning on being in a desert, and even though I lived within an hour’s drive to the Pacific, I was certainly not going to be lost at sea anytime soon. But I continued to be obsessed with survival manuals, renewing them over and over until my interest expanded to first-aid manuals, which is how I learned to create a tourniquet.

Was I afraid of death? I had never been to a funeral, or lost anyone I loved. I did go through a period, common enough in children, when I cried and panicked regularly about the fact that my parents — and my mother, in particular — were going to die. She reassured me that she was not going to die anytime soon. She told me that when she was old, which would be in the distant future, I would be an adult, and therefore ready to accept her death. She also pointed out that people tended to die in a certain order, and both my grandmother and grandfather, who I thought of as very old, were still alive. I was an anxious child, but these reassurances sufficed to keep me functional.

My obsession with survival, with how to catch fish and the differences between a first- and third-degree burn, made it all the more confusing when I first heard of suicide. It is one of the few childhood events that I remember without a record or a retelling by someone else. I was older than six, the year we moved from San Jose to the suburbs, and I was sitting in the living room of our second house, the one I would live in for twelve years — which was, in the beginning, very 1970s, with orange-brown carpeting, enormous gold-framed mirrors. I was watching television with my parents. According to the television, a man had jumped from a building and died. I was baffled.

There is a yellow jacket struggling against the windowpane. Silence, then buzzing. I could try to trap it and let it go, but I find myself wondering how long such a thing will take, especially since I’m trying to write a blog post.

I can’t hear it anymore.

I took so many photographs this morning. 90% of them are junk, I’m sure of it, but there might be a good one in there somewhere. I picked some jasmine off of the wall of jasmine along the fence in the backyard, which reaches up to our bedroom window, so that if I am lucky enough and weather permits, I can leave the window open and the scent of jasmine will come in, a rare gift. For now I have a few skinny twigs of those flowers on a glass dish a foot away from my left hand. There are two elderly women who throw a fantastic garage sale every few weeks. I never plan to go, but usually stumble upon it, which makes its appearance all the more exciting. These golden glass dishes, they said, are from the 1930s. Oh, I said, that’s my favorite decade, aesthetically speaking. So I had to bring them home.

I’ve been thinking about possessions and materialism, and how I was once asked by a friend whom I liked very much if I “liked to buy things.” I don’t remember what I said, but I think it is true, I like to buy things, I like to surround myself with things that I think are beautiful. I am a magpie who works best, who lives best, with an aesthetic infrastructure. Some of the things I surround myself are found — holly berries left over from winter, all kinds of plants, old photographs, pamphlets, abandoned bottles — and some are bought. I do not spend beyond my means, but my spaces are far from minimal.

For my birthday I am taking a memoir class in the summer.

This October I will be going to a retreat in the English countryside. I have never been to England.

In July something fun will be happening. San Franciscans, take note.

I have been showered with opportunities to do things that speak to me. But I need to go slowly. I need to schedule time for rest.

Time to go, dear hearts. See you around here next time.

I spent Saturday surrounded by people and noise all day, and since then I’ve felt even more desperate for silence and solitude than usual. 

Here are some photographs from my life recently. And some wordlessness. Oh! Please note the beautiful new header for this site, illustrated by the talented and very professional Natasha Thompson.

Have a beautiful Wednesday, chickadees.

Friends, I have been stretching my wings.

Yesterday I had my interview with the SOLVE program, a peer-based stigma reduction program run by the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, and I am pleased to say that I was chosen to be one of their team of peer educators. For the next eight months I will be traveling to schools, companies, and so forth, to tell my story and answer questions about living with mental illness, specifically schizoaffective disorder, and how my ability to live with said mental illness has changed over the last eighteen years.

After my interview, I left the building and immediately saw the UNIQLO in Union Square that I’d been wanting to go to, but hadn’t because Union Square is a nightmare of tourists and shoppers. I called C to tell him about the interview and the UNIQLO and he said, Go ahead, spend some time walking around. So I bought a pair of new jeans. I haven’t bought a pair of jeans since 2009. Not joking! They needed to be hemmed, so I spent a lot of time walking while I waited; I also bought a soft black T-shirt and a bright pink, very 90s blazer with zippers up the sides. In the end, the jeans fit perfectly.

I’ve been taking Susannah Conway’s newest course, Journal Your Life, and it’s been quite illuminating – and fun. I’ve been a diarist since I was wee; I’m not sure what made me decide to take this course, aimed at both beginners and long-time journalers, besides the fact that I find Susannah’s courses generally intriguing. The recent JYL exercises led me to write what amounts to a manifesto of myself, which now lives on the About page; I was so excited by the so-called manifesto that I typed it up for posterity. Here it is:

I adore sinking into everything gorgeous and delicious; I am a woman of sensual living; I love beauty.

Photography is one way that I engage with the beautiful world — and I use the word “beautiful” broadly, as it is oft-misunderstood — because reaching out to the beautiful world is important to me as a very internal person.

I seek out comfort and coziness. I am a creature of solitude.

Though I often keep to myself, and find raucous crowds and overstimulation tiring, I long for emotional connections and to be understood. I thrive on intimacy. And I love to be inspired and to be inspired. It lights me right up.

And so linking together the vertebrae of all of the above leads me to the written word. Language is my backbone. The sound of prose; prose-making that sings; the content of that prose which brings me out of myself and into a world of intimacy, of connection, and of human understanding, is why writing constitutes so much of my being.

If you had a manifesto of your self, what would it say?

There are many more exciting things on my front and back burners, but they’re not quite ready to talk about yet. Let’s just say that my summer will be a good time to turn thirty.