Fate, Choice, and Mental Illness

by Jay Paul 

What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity.

Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring en masse, and there would be jobs. Problem is, no one anticipated that colleges and universities would fill those positions with poorly paid part timers, rather than full professors. I had a young family and needed a secure job, so I went to work in prep schools, where I could get a decent salary and benefits.

Deep down, I wanted to be a professor. But that was not in the cards. So my first loss, when it comes to profession, had to do with taking a job other than what I truly wanted. To be honest, I think I chafed at this all the 16 years I taught prep school. Sadly, I think I believed myself a little above the game because I had a Ph.D. I see now that what I should have done is accept my fate and thrown myself into the prep school game wholeheartedly. Instead, I tried to use my academic degree and the stature it entailed to challenge the administration and the way it treated the faculty. In some ways, this was noble. In others, it was just foolish. I was not accepting the job and career I had chosen.

And then I lost that very second place career, partly because the administration got fed up with me, partly because of depression, and partly because the administration was nervous about the parents finding out I had bipolar, as I was diagnosed with at the time. I certainly made some bad choices. However, when I look back now, it seems my losing that job was inevitable, was fated. My mental illness would not allow me the necessary stamina and focus to continue. Indeed, just a few months after I quit that job, I came down with idiopathic hypersomnia, which meant I slept 16 hours a day. I couldn't have worked with that problem. It turned out to be a side effect of taking Seroquel, and has gone away when the drug was discontinued.

Schizoaffective also played a destructive role in my family life. I think it contributed to my divorce. I also think it affected my relationships with my children. Some of the worst mistakes I made as a father occurred when my meds were screwed up or I was not in my right mind. In particular, I regret not having taken my younger daughter's needs into consideration when the separation, that eventually led to a divorce, occurred. It was, perhaps, my greatest failing. At the time, I was lost in the fog of being taken off Seroquel after about 12 years.

I now live alone in a one-bedroom apartment. This is not the way a Ph.D. is supposed to spend his or her 50s. From a conventional perspective, my life has been a failure. Indeed, fellow graduate students and friends from my time at SUNY-Buffalo have been nominated for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and have become major players in the academic world, with books published by Harvard University Press. I feel quite inadequate when I compare myself to them. 

But the context is different. They, as far as I know, have never had to contend with a serious mental illness, although they may have struggled with some depression or anxiety. When I look back on my life, I feel fated to be living here, alone, in a one-bedroom apartment. Something in my environment—ranging from stress to pollution to viruses—caused my genetic predisposition to schizoaffective to manifest itself. This fact has determined much of my life over the past few decades.

Yes, I have choice. But all of our choices take place within contexts, and these contexts are limited and specific. My context has been schizoaffective. From what I can tell, and in spite of the individualistic rhetoric of the United States, we are all much less the result of our own effort and much more the result of forces well outside us and our control. Luck is the single most important factor in success. In some ways, I have been profoundly and devastatingly unlucky.

Yet, I do have some choice. How do I respond to this difficult life, to a life clearly deemed a failure by the standards of my grad school program? For one thing, I write this blog. It helps me come to terms with who I am and what I can do here in my humble place on earth. It also might help some other people who have similar struggles. I like to think I write out of schizoaffective, that something of my experiences and reasoning and consciousness stem directly from the uniqueness of this perspective. I try to identify precisely what those are, but I have a hard time. They may be too close for me to see. But I will keep trying. 

In my part-time and volunteer work, I help people with mental illness. I use my own story and struggles to help show people that, in spite of the difficulties and challenges, they can live reasonably meaningful lives even with mental illness. I have even spoken at the Minnesota State Capital to legislators about my experience and its relevancy to discussions of Medicaid policy.

Finally, I write poetry, and my most recent poetry may be where I have succeeded in creating a specifically schizoaffective poetic. They are visionary poems that take place well outside standard notions of reality. In them, my main character has survived being eaten by animals or giants, falling through holes in the earth to worlds underground, flying as a bird into a raging volcano, and so forth. The experience of having hallucinations and delusions, perhaps, loosened my imagination so that I could create worlds well outside the typical and normal. What is the value in doing this? Showing that what we accept as "reality" is a construction, and that there is much more to life and experience than what normative reality allows for.

I am living out my fate, and it is clear to me that it is much wider, broader, and more powerful than my mere choices. I need to embrace its power. I see the limits and contextual barriers to my life quite clearly. In doing so, I see them in others' lives as well, including neurotypical people. We are just a little free, if freedom is understood as having choice and determining your destiny. I prefer to think of freedom as something else. I believe we are most free not when simply choosing, but when living in accord with the tendencies and forces of the natural and social world we find ourselves in, in working with the fate that is so much bigger than we are. In so doing, we accept our fate. To me, freedom is choosing to respond attuned to fate, so the moment can blossom in its full richness, reaching with fate's power into the past and future, and throughout all space.