Essay #3 (About Crazy People)...Yes I am skipping #2

Creativity and Crazies

For weeks she had been screaming. The cries came from the room closest to the door, which is always locked, and always she cried out the same thing: “Help me.” Inside my glass cage I was safer than the nurses from potential threats, but the screams cut me still. Katherine was a patient at the hospital when I was still new and unfamiliar with what “crazy” people do. Eventually, she began to walk up and down the hallway, clinging to the railing, her long black hair hanging grossly down her back, she was always dripping drool. Yes, she did scare me, especially when she groped to my window hunched over, spittle drizzling down her chin, asking me, “Did I want a ticket to the show?”

Catatonia is a strange thing, and it is even stranger when this absence of just “being there” is undercut with bizarre, terrifying schizophrenic hallucinations and the inability to control the body’s natural functions like bowel movements.

Since beginning my job at the locked psychiatry ward of a hospital, I look at the mentally ill in a different way. It is difficult to see those who are screaming, tearing at their skin, talking in tongues, or urinating on their pillows as people. When humans are not acting like humans, something makes us recoil from them, both in fear and in disgust. Katherine was the first “crazy” that turned back into a person right in front of my eyes and she changed the way I viewed mentally ill people, and forced me to acknowledge that I needed to change my view in the first place.

It seems as though Zelda Fitzgerald was not viewed in the light of humanity, but rather as a fragile “thing”—according to Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay. I don’t want to assume that Hardwick’s miniature biography is the complete truth, and I would like to believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald did wish the best for his wife, but that little was known of mental illness during the 1930’s. Is it possible that the mentally ill were treated not as human, but as subhuman creatures that needed to stay out of society’s way as much as possible?

One day, I was sitting at my secretary’s desk, dealing with the usual administration, and Katherine sauntered up to my window. She was walking straight; her hair was not stringy but brushed smooth and luscious. She had hazel eyes that were clear and sharp. I opened the window and she smiled that full, warm smile of a woman who has spent her entire life caring for others. She was only the day before a creature living in a person’s body. Now she was telling me I looked lovely, and about her education at Columbia University, about her beautiful children all grown up and doing work for their communities. She was married and worked as a Pastor at her local hospital.

Creativity is something that we all have, and as human beings we are constantly creating things, from art to children to clean space, safe space, all numbers of things. Zelda’s creative energy intimidated her husband, possibly because the energy of a schizophrenic could be seen as subhuman, or inhumanly intense. Some of the artwork and writing I’ve seen at the hospital has been unsettling. Some of it has been beautiful; some of the artwork has been given just to me and is hanging on my wall. If Zelda had been allowed to create as freely as she had desired, what would she have made for herself, and her audience? The nurses will often discourage patients from drawing sexually disturbing pictures especially if they depict staff members. Are the two comparable? Every time that a person is told to stop creating that thing, are we unknowingly hindering the birth of something that will be truly genius?

Katherine never drew any artwork, and if she wrote, I never saw anything. She left the hospital with her husband, wearing one of the nurse’s sweaters because her husband, in his excitement at taking her home, forgot to take her jacket. She told me I was sweet, and wrote down her address for me. I never did write to her, thinking that the long interruption in her life was memory enough.

Even now I see people shrink away from “crazies” on the street. They might be dangerous after all, which is true. But I see passers by looking at these people as if they are not people, but a suspicious and troublesome type of animal, or is the carrier of a contagious disease. Neither of which is the reality. I am sincerely grateful that Katherine was able to teach me to treat all people like people. And I hope that F. Scott Fitzgerald did not have to learn this lesson as I did, but recognized the humanity in his wife, even as the schizophrenia did its best to mask it.