16 - Posturing [unedited]
by chastity vale
Catatonia is not, for me, greatly distressing. Its distressing in the abstract, and its distressing while its not happening, but during, its simply nothingness. Its like all of my volition and will leave my body entirely, and a deep nothingness sets over me, and i get to watch my body as i sit, or lie, or slowly slump over. When it happens, i sometimes hear things, sometimes see things, sometimes my mind shows me things. i slump over, or i hold a pose, or i stand and repeat a motion for minutes at a time.
The cultural understanding of catatonia is that it is someone on a psych ward, stuck in bed for days if not weeks at a time, absolutely still. My experience of it has been partially that, partially excited actions, pacing, moving jerkily, repeating the same action over and over to an audience of my concerned friends. Afterwards i have to tell them that i remember everything, but i still want to talk through what i did, what happened, what they remember me doing. i think i do that as a way to apologize, or maybe i want to give them closure that yeah, what they saw was weird and fucked up, but now its not happening.
Its a weird thing to have happen to you. You sorta watch yourself perform these nonsense actions, without a thought in your head. Its pretty rare. Research studies put the incidence at below 10% of people with psychiatric conditions. In my life, i’ve scored a great number of these statistical coincidences. Schizoaffective disorder effects maybe .3% of the population, and me. EDS effects 0.02% of the population, and me. Catatonia affects 10% of 6% of the population, 0.018%.
How am i to make sense of this? The advice my therapist would give me is that its not worth worrying about, that its just a chance and sometimes you lose the coin flip and it had to happen to someone. But the question isn’t “why is this happening”, its “why is this happening to me”. Is this punishment from god? Is this all a dream, a fantasy that where i’m just losing? Did i do this to myself?
Trying to figure out why i’m sick is basically a self harm exercise, because i will be sick no matter what afterwards. But the causes seem both manifold and extremely simple. At 18, kicked out of the house, stressed out, during the financial crash of 2008, i lived mostly out of the back of a car. i chain smoked hand rolled cigarettes because the tobacco was cheaper, i drank whatever alcohol i could get my hands on. i bought ecstasy from friends with nervous hands and swallowed the evidence immediately. i did acid, shrooms, amphetamines, anything i could get, because i couldn’t see a reason not to. i ate little, i slept enough, and one day i woke up to the voices. Did the drugs make me sick? The stress of my William S Burroughs years cracked me like an egg? Did the stress of everything do it to me? Did the stress of not transitioning somehow turn me inside out? How much of that stress was avoidable?
My psychiatrist looks up from the notes she’s taking while i relate this all to her. She pauses a moment, a look i haven’t learned to decipher yet across her face. Maybe its professional detachment. “Maybe it was the drugs that caused the psychosis. And then after that, you’re off your medication, eventually the psychosis always comes back.” It sits heavy in the air between us. i want to beg her to just tell me that i’m ok and i don’t have to be on my meds any more. i can’t think of a way to break the tension. “Anyway, catatonia isn’t a thing that you can just have. It comes along with another condition, so in your case you have schizoaffective disorder, depressive subtype, with catatonia.” This is the third time i’ve been given a schizoaffective diagnosis in six months. “Do you have any questions for me?” She ups my meds again.
Catatonia feels like the closest i’ve come to dancing in years. i can feel the damage it does to me after the fact in the way that my back and shoulders hurt, my arms which never tired of being held up in the air as if praising god suddenly ache from the exertion. When i look at modern dance, particularly the work descended from Martha Graham, i can see movements that seem familiar to me, if turned into a performance. Her piece Night Journey features a group of female dancers in front of two figures around a bed. The dancers enter, covering their eyes (a favorite of mine while symptomatic), turn, spin and curl around themselves, hold their arms at odd angles in relation to each other. They repeat the same actions over and over as they let the trunk of their body fall to the ground. Like Graham’s dancers, i pose. My hands become beaks which i use to tap my chest, my face, my palms. i rise to a standing position and fall to the ground, then up, then down again, then up, then down again. And then, suddenly, i freeze.
Episodes of catatonia only started after my third incidence of acute sickness. i suppose the correct term for this period of my life would be my second “relapse”, as the period previous to this was a long period of minimal symptoms. Or at least that was my perception of the time. Between work, some meds, and stable housing for the first time in a decade, i found my symptoms fading into nothingness. And then i simply forgot that i was sick. If you had asked me, i’m sure that i would have said something about how maybe once upon a time i was sick, but i was misdiagnosed or maybe the whole thing was behind me, or maybe i was one of the many who has a psychosis diagnosable as schizophrenia once in their life, and then never again. After all, explain where i was in my life, now working and paying rent and not hearing things, decidedly not crazy.
The relapse came slowly. i found myself getting more detached at work, angrier at my coworkers, angrier at my boss. More annoyed with things being out of place. Then, i stopped cleaning entirely. Eating became difficult, with everything tasting empty or rotten. my paranoia came on slowly, over the course of weeks, until i was terrified of my roommate and her girlfriend. Something was always happening in my house, something of mine always about to go missing. And then, one day i called my sister to tell her that i was terrified, i started hallucinating again. Then the movements. For a number of weeks my sister was there to talk me through getting back on meds, to make sure that i didn’t hurt myself from the movements, to make sure that i made doctor’s appointments on time, to make sure that i was eating. i asked her over and over again “what did i do?” and “what’s wrong with me?”, and then soon she knew how to answer that. i had schizoaffective disorder.
It’s hard to not think about the relapse in terms of failure. Like my recovery was some kind of success, and my inability to stay sane represents some massive failing on my part. Recovery itself seems like an impossible challenge, like spinning plates, like trying to ignore what is true about myself in order to hold on to some small part of a normal that never really existed.