don't speak

i'm not talking about onset or duration. i mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.

there are a lot of names: depression, catatonia, mania, anxiety, agitation. they don't tell you much.

the predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity.

experience is thick. perceptions are thickened and dulled. time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception. the body temperature is low. the pulse is sluggish. the immune system is half-asleep. the organism is torpid and brackish. even the reflexes are diminished, as if the lower leg couldn't be bothered to jerk itself out of its stupor when the knee is tapped.

viscosity occurs on a cellular level. and so does velocity.

in contrast to viscosity's cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. there is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having the perceptions. digestion could kill you! what i mean is the unceasing awareness of the processes of digestion could exhaust you to death. and digestion is just an involuntary sideline to thinking, which is where the real trouble begins.

take a thought -- anything; it doesn't matter. i'm tired of sitting here in front of the nursing station: a perfectly reasonable thought. here's what velocity does to it.

first, break down the sentence: i'm tired -- well, are you really tired, exactly? is that like sleepy? you have to check all your body parts for sleepiness, and while you're doing that, there's a bombardment of images of sleepiness, along these lines: head falling onto pillow, head hitting pillow, Wynked, Blynked, and Nod, Little Nemo rubbing sleep from his eyes, a sea monster. uh-oh, a sea monster. if you're lucky, you can avoid the sea monster and stick with sleepiness. back to the pillow, memories of having mumps at age five, sensation of swollen cheeks on pillows and pain on salivation -- stop. go back to sleepiness.

but the salivation notion is too alluring, and now there's an excursion into the mouth. you've been here before and it's bad. it's the tongue: once you think of the tongue it becomes an intrusion. why is the tongue so large? why is it scratchy on the sides? is that a vitamin deficiency? could you remove the tongue? wouldn't your mouth be less bothersome without it? there'd be more room in there. the tongue, now, every cell of the tongue, is enormous. it's a vast foreign object in your mouth.

trying to diminish the size of your tongue, you focus your attention on its components: tip, smooth; back, bumpy; sides, scratchy, as noted earlier (vitamin deficiency); roots -- trouble. there are roots to the tongue. you've seen them, and if you put your finger in your mouth you can feel them, but you can't feel them with the tongue. it's a paradox.

paradox. the tortoise and the hare. achilles and the what? the tortoise? the tendon? the tongue?

back to the tongue. while you weren't thinking of it, it got a little smaller. but thinking of it makes it big again. why is it scratchy on the sides? is that a vitamin deficiency? you've thought these thoughts already, but now these thoughts have been stuck onto your tongue. they adhere to the existence of your tongue.

all that took less than a minute, and there's still the rest of the sentence to figure out. and all you wanted, really, was to decide whether or not to stand up."

--girl, interrupted [susanna kaysen]

***

"i am in Prep now, writing this at my desk. on my left is a girl named cathy preshill. on the right is a girl called sophie smith. cathy seems very thin to me and i wonder if she has anorexia, but she probably doesn't. i do though -- anorexia of speech."

--so much to tell you [john marsden]

***

words so well written. you don't know. you don't know what it's like, to be crazy. there you go. try to make sense of it.

i have no words to speak. i cannot function. i hurt so bad.

hurt so bad, hurt so bad, so bad. if i have tears, i cry them in blood.

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