Explosions in the Sky

In all of our lives, we reach a point where the ease of childhood gives way to a harder study; a time when we pierce holes through our beliefs and our steps become more uncertain. We cautiously manoeuvre from one point to the next and learn which rabbit holes are better left alone. We try to maintain a sense of what it all means, who we are, and how we can be of service to the world.

In my early teenage years, certain changes had drawn me into this new study of life. Emotions had dimmed and life seemed strangely wanting. It was a peculiar feeling - almost as though I had seen behind the curtains and a beautiful illusion had been broken. I chased after what was lost but didn’t really know where to look. I couldn't bring myself to discuss mental health with my parents, so I went online to find answers. As the years went by, I became increasingly agitated. I withdrew within my family home and rarely, if ever, met girls my own age. I still pined for the idealised teenage life but for the most part, I learned to contain myself within those walls. My home was old and full of intrigue: the roof often leaked, drenching the books crowding the hallways. Pages were warped and stuck together but they remained where they were, paying tribute to the knowledge within. Knick knacks, photographs, and old dinner invitations cluttered the mantelpieces, and my father’s exotic mementos gamboled up the walls: a taxidermised cheetah head gifted from a sabbatical overseas, an oar from his Oxford rowing crew, and ceremonial Scottish swords to name a few. Plaster and paint flaked away from the walls and Persian rugs reeked of our decrepit pets. The house positively groaned with memories and I was enchanted by it.

When I was seventeen, and in my final year of school, my parents were at dinner one night and I was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling. Surrounded by the murmur of an old gas heater, I heard an eruption from outside. It was so fantastically loud it shook the walls for three or four seconds. I immediately felt a sense of dread for what lay outside and prepared myself to face the neighbourhood catastrophe. I opened the door and it was calm - bewilderingly calm. I watched over a light rain swirling under the streetlights and waited for a moment for any sounds of panic or commotion. There was nothing - only the perfectly ordinary sounds of night. I went to the other end of the house to ask my little sister if she had heard the explosion. She hadn't.

I put the incident out of my mind until some months later when doing some research into my problems - what was wrong with me and what I could do about it. I came upon the account of a young man who had schizophrenia: he described his muddled and confused thoughts, which I somehow likened to my own. He then described the phenomena of lying in bed hearing explosions. As I read that line, panic swelled and every strand of my being was drawn of colour. My family has a history of schizophrenia on my mother’s side. My father, a university lecturer, would caution my sisters and I about smoking marijuana. He would say, "Other people need to take drugs to get where we already are!" I suppose it gave rise to a certain pride, as though we were of that rare breed that tread a fine line between genius and madness. I heard my parents speak of an aunt who developed schizophrenia. She had smoked marijuana heavily in her youth and her illness was further complicated by a horrendous alcoholism. I only vaguely remember meeting her but I imagined her life: I imagined looking into a cell, and seeing a maddened woman with a mat of dirty blonde hair and a face clumsily daubed with eye shadow and lipstick. I was told when I was a baby, she had wrapped me in wool to protect me from evil spirits. I had heard of her interrupting my father's lectures with vulgar outbursts about his relationship with my mother. I heard of her bringing the most horrible and violent people into the family home; people who would terrorise her ageing parents and much younger brother. However, before her illness set in, there was a photo taken of her at Mount Bulla. Wearing a fitted ski suit; she is tall, shapely, and giving the camera the most perfect side on smile - she looks like a model. My mother has always kept the photo in her wallet and still speaks almost mythically of her beauty. But weighed against this, and the bonds of shared childhood experience, is a lingering resentment of what her family had endured. And so, to come across that young man’s account brought to mind the dark impressions of my aunt. I had diagnosed myself with her illness but felt more as though I had received a death sentence. I kept vigilance over my mind, perhaps thinking I could control the illness if I heightened my awareness of thoughts. And so, if I saw something unusual, I would ask someone nearby if they could see it too; I would usually raise it in passing so it didn't seem such a jarringly odd question. At home, I was usually able to distract myself, but for the most part, I was sick with fear and life had become harder than I knew it could be.

At this time, my school year was undertaking community service in Melbourne. I was barely able to see out a full day at school but I forced myself to join my classmates. On the first night, we worked with a soup van. A few of us then joined a volunteer group bringing soup to residents of a city boarding house. They were mostly men, as I had expected them to be. Some still had enough pride to shave and run a comb through their hair. Others had clearly been living rough for a long time. I suppose the experience was designed to jolt us all from our middle class comforts, but in my state of mind, I found it all quite overwhelming. The next day I was paired with a nurse to visit some patients around Melbourne. The nurse was probably the same age as my mother and I was glad of her company. We first visited a sweet old lady who offered us a cup of tea and asked me to guess her age (which I purposely undershot by about fifteen years). The nurse then took me to see an old Italian couple: the wife was terminally ill and remained in a bedroom while I waited outside with a little man in a dark suit. He sat grimly on a sofa and barely acknowledged me. The nurse later remarked that his wife did everything for him and she didn't know how he was going to cope when she died. He probably didn't.

We visited a small terrace in the inner suburbs of Melbourne to see a woman severely afflicted with diabetes. Her home was terribly rundown - I recall a mass of ivy spreading throughout the hallway and ancient carpet worn through to the floorboards. The woman sat on her bed and took off her socks: her feet were swollen and flaking, and all but a few toes had been amputated. I was seized with fear, not at the sight, but the sense that what I was seeing and feeling would somehow become my own life. In the same way I had set my aunt’s life ahead of my own, I seemed unable to separate myself from this woman - not only her but all the people I had seen over the past days. Their isolation and loneliness were now my own; bleeding into my life like a shared dream. I felt so vulnerable, as though the walls of my reality were now wafer thin. On our last night in Melbourne, we were taken to a swimming pool for some recreation. While we were on the bus, Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out came on the radio. I remember all the boys broke out into song and it seemed to me they had every reason to sing.

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That was nearly twenty years ago now and due to an overwhelming lack of evidence, I came to accept that I was not developing schizophrenia. However, I remained a fearful person. It takes time, and perhaps concentrated effort, for the fatal neural pathways to erode. In the intervening years, however, I came to feel strong enough to undertake study again. Owing mainly to a steady routine, what were bad months and weeks, are now bad days or mere moments. I pay attention to my body and keep note of what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ve become more adept at managing my responses and learning how not to respond. It would also be remiss to neglect to mention the importance of faith in my life. Whether the explosion was a micro fuse blowing in my brain or a neighbour testing the limits of their surround sound, I’ll never know, but I sometimes wonder how many years I was set back by that one incident.

I'm still a worrier but my life has reached a place of social normality I never expected it would: I'm married and pay a mortgage. I have a young son and now a daughter on the way. I don't really know what came of the boys on the bus: one became a professional footballer, I know that, but he retired five years ago after a so so career. As for the others in my year level - it's the usual mixed bag of fates. I rarely see my own circle of friends from school. Sadly, one of my close friends took his own life and another did actually develop schizophrenia: he briefly toured Europe with orchestras but his promising music career has come to an abrupt stop. I don't know what this all means, other than to reflect on the tragic irony of ruminating on your downfall, only for it to be quietly awaiting others who have no reason to suspect it. I suppose that's just life - some would say that’s why we have to treasure the moment and sing while we can. Personally, I've always found it difficult to do so. Nevertheless, there's a Zen parable I like where a man hangs from a vine after falling from a cliff. Above him, rats are gnawing away at the threads of vine he's clinging to, and below, ravenous tigers are circling. In the corner of his eye, the man notices wild strawberries growing on a ledge - he reaches out and takes one. As death draws nearer, the last line of the story is this: "He popped the strawberry into his mouth. It was perfectly delicious."

Thank you for reading.

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Note: It's possible those reading have or know people suffering with severe mental illness. I don't mean to make you feel worse or suggest that those lives are irredeemably sad and hopeless. I also know of others with this illness who live mostly happy and productive lives.