Most people have experienced the difficulty of trying to do something in a loud environment that is usually done in peace and quiet. Reading or studying, for example, can be almost impossible in a place full of noise and distractions.
For the moment, I want to try and invert that experience.
Imagine a room where every wall is lined with televisions, each one playing something different. Some show documentaries, cold and clinical, where others display the most amusing comedy or the most touching drama. Some simply display static, loud and disorientating white noise. Some show familiar scenes, others footage you’ve never seen featuring people you’ve never known. All have their volume turned up and, most confusingly, almost all of them randomly change channels with no discernable pattern to the changes and no warning that the channel is about to flick to something different.
The windows to this room are open all the time, and a constant stream of traffic noise comes through each one . People can be heard walking past and talking, and you constantly catch bits and pieces of their conversations. Occasionally you’ll hear an indication of some kind of change in the weather; rain, maybe, or thunder. The windows cannot be closed.
Wherever you stand in the room, four men stand around you, yelling constantly. Theirs is the only noise that varies based on feedback from you: Any subject that enters your brain prompts them to yell out anything they can think of that even vaguely relates to that subject, be it anecdotes, quote from various reference material that they never bother to quote the source of, or even random words. They also throw bits of paper at you as constantly as they yell, which are covered in pictures and sketches that illustrate your subject visually, although there is no guarantee that these depictions will be done well.
Most people would have great difficulty concentrating on anything in this room. If you sat them in the middle of it and handed them a book, they’d likely go mad before they could manage to read a single page.
This is the room I grew up in. This is the way my brain worked from childhood until the year I turned nineteen. Not only did I learn to read in this room, I learned to think, to write, to interact with other people. I learned to focus a lot of my energy on shutting out various forms of noise and avoiding distraction, and I did this for a long enough time that it became an automatic process costing very little effort at all. Everything I thought was fueled and assisted by those four metaphorical yelling men, who of course represent my brain itself throwing everything I had read or thought or heard at me if it could vaguely be connected with my current train of thought. I knew no other way to think.
And then, two weeks after my nineteenth birthday and two days after I was first admitted to Northside Psychiatric Hospital, I was put on an antipsychotic. I fell asleep, as people are wont to do when given potent psychiatric medication, and slept through until the next morning.
When I woke, I sat bolt upright, eyes wide and heart thumping. I had one thought racing through my head, a rare enough occurrence in and of itself but all the more dramatic with that thought being what it was.
“Why is it so quiet in here?”
It took me a little while to realise that the “in here” in question was the inside of my head, and longer still to accept the ramifications of this. I knew I had symptoms that needed to be controlled by psychiatric medication; I had not realised that the very manner in which I had been thinking my entire life was one of them. Over the next few weeks as I continued to take the medication, my “room” got steadily more and more quiet, until I found myself more or less alone in my head. The “voices” representative of my psychosis had thankfully departed, but with them had gone my yelling men, my televisions, even those open windows. There was a quiet murmur of background noise, but little else. To anyone else, it would have been the most perfect environment in which to think, to read or to study. For me, it was hell. When your entire life has been lived with a certain noise in the background, nothing disconcerts you more than the removal of that noise.
I have been on that medication for five years now, and I can finally say that I think I have a future. I am working, I am able to maintain relatively normal human relationships and interactions, and my brain doesn’t constantly try and convince me to kill the body that keeps it alive. I live a more or less normal life, with a few mental quirks and a dose of medication every night to remind me that I’m not quite like everyone else. I would overwhelmingly agree that things are better.
But some things are harder to do. I cannot create like I used to, as I have lost the four men who scream ideas at me even when I’m sleeping. I have no constant muse, no well of concepts and constructs to tap at will. When I cannot think of a word, I must look it up, rather than just monitoring the inevitable stream of synonyms pouring through my head until the one that feels right appears. My thoughts move slowly, more deliberately than they ever have, although still are prone to tangents.
I have been repeatedly assured by brilliant mental health professionals and medical staff that this is how the brains of most people work. As far as they have managed to comprehend how my mind functioned before, they say that it was not healthy and not sustainable; that the breakdown was prompted by trauma but would have occurred inevitably at some point. I barely slept for over ten years, they point out, and that is not something that can happen without consequences. They apply a label to what was simply thought of as “weird kid”, and that label is “childhood pre-schizophrenia”. I am grateful for my health and my life, but if the option was available to have that brain without the resulting sickness, I would snap it up in a second. I do not understand how people manage to achieve so much with brains that work this slowly.
Five years. In five years I have healed and grown and adapted, and I have slowly made ground in what I call mental physiotherapy. From the ground up, I have learned how to think with this new brain, and while I am certainly not the person I was before, I can find bits of her hidden in here. I have gained so much ground, but there are things I have not done in all that time and they are things I miss.
I have not painted, sketched, drawn or sculpted anything. I have not played a single note of music, and I have not listened to music intuitively, knowing what sound translates to what note on a page, knowing how it is put together. I have not written a word that was fiction, or that was intended for some purpose other than communication, or that was written in any voice other than mine. Five years is a long time to live in a world without music and art when ones’ previous habitat was so rich in such things.
Writing this makes my eyes prickle with tears. Yes, I still cry for what I have lost, and I don’t know if I will ever regain my art and my music. But my writing? It has occasionally peeped around corners, waved at me from the darkness, and whispered in my ear when I do not expect it to. I have the chance to learn to write again in this quiet room. The words come slowly and painfully where once they flew thick and fast and frantic, but every journey begins with slow and awkward steps.
I believe I may have just taken that first one.
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