Reading novels about mental illness when you are in a limbo in your own mental health journey feels akin to dining in at a restaurant that gave you food poisoning a month ago: you can still vividly remember the sickness, and while you objectively know the chances of getting sick that sick again so soon are small, the act of consuming anything from this source after your history has you suddenly feeling the bile rising back up your throat, the depression reanimating in the dark corners of your brain, a comforting yet pernicious beckoning back into the feelings and state of mind you know unfortunately too well.
I haven’t personally been committed to the hospital for my mental illness, but I have spent the majority of my life committed to trying to live with it, barely living with it; it’s presence at points causing the living I am doing to be in the barest and simplest sense of the term.
Committed, is as it’s claim, on meaning and madwomen, encompassing the mental health environment of the 1990s to now, Scanlon’s personal history with it, and the ways in which writing and reading have been for her an unchanging life giving constant throughout it all.
Scanlon personally explores the literary canon of mentally ill literature, from Girl, Interrupted and The Bell Jar, to Virginia Woolf and Kate Chopin, deeply melancholic stories about and from women we have all come to be extremely familiar with in the literary sphere of unwell women. She unpacks the ways in which she unhealthily finds but also comfortingly seeks kinship in these women’s stories, testaments, and untimely deaths, moments of shared maddening clarity that provide a conflicted feeling of recognition and familiarity while also giving over a feeling of being head-achingly nauseous at the fact that you can relate so deeply with these women while seeing the sinister ways in which their lives ultimately turned out. “I identify with her, a girl says, and I’m not sure I’m supposed to.”
“The freedom of the madwoman, as Susan Sontag wrote in her journal, both dream and trap.”
As women, sometimes the ones who identify with our madness so dizzyingly are just as introspective and quiet about it, leaving us feeling lonely in it all. But as Scanlon expresses in the book, it is in literature where we can most easily identify ourselves, whether fiction or non; it’s easier to confess to and configure in words your own instability on your own time, in a room of your own, as Woolf says, somewhere not only to write but to come to terms with self, while alone but also in regards to others. “As James Baldwin put it, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are
unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’”
“I’m sorry, my dear, but this is all we have.
Words. This is our medium.”
“Where would I be without these women with messed-up lives?” A question I ask myself too often; If not for the reassurance that other women have felt this way have always felt this way, would I be better or worse off? I am not alone, I am not the only one who feels like this, but in constantly seeking out this feeling in others in order to make myself feel less guilty, maybe I am moving too much in a quicksand already trying to swallow me up. “The story is about your suffering and the story creates your suffering too.”
In writing about these things, I feel similar to what Scanlon expresses in the book, “I had the sense that if I could turn my own melting into something the way Audre Lorde did, the way Virginia Woolf did it would mean something. All my suffering, my stupid life, would mean something.” Through this desperate weaving of words in order to salvage something of the life we have felt has gone to waste, maybe we will make something that will make us feel it was at least somewhat worth it, that this madness had and has a deeper meaning. “— what is madness if not the horror of being misunderstood, of being unable to make a self comprehensible to another?”
Sometimes I know I am too committed to my own history and current situation with mental illness, but I am committed in a way you would find in a long-term relationship;
My mental illness has been there as long as I can remember, and even with all of my attempts and desperate longing to get better, to be better, I know deep in my soul that there is something about it’s presence and the excuse of it that is comforting. I am the way I am because of this crutch I have been walking on my whole life, and even if I have healed enough to walk without this crutch, at this point it is fused to my being and I only know myself in context to it. “—to indulge all of what you’ve been told is wrong with you.”
“— being sick is a cure for how bad you feel.”
I am not myself without my madness, and yet I wish I knew who I could be without it. I wish the metaphorical chair I have warmed for myself was more like someone else’s. But maybe I just need to stand up, or at least let this worn spot become less comfortable, even though this imprinted shape in the space I have taken up for so long might be the only place I recognize myself. One day I will be able to recognize myself as better, even if it’s only in fleeting moments. Scanlon succeeds in her exploration of madness, continuing with the ever present and profitable literary role of hysteria, that in itself is maddening to consume.
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