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![]() ![]() Not much was changing for her - but everything, I had to believe, was possible for me. “She was the one who had come to this clinic every week for the last decade. Compared to mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, schizophrenia is still so stigmatized, so it is rare and beautiful to read a candid perspective like Wang's. “I was the one at the head of the table, visiting,” she writes, subtly implicating the reader who has made the same calculation. In The Collected Schizophrenias, Esm Weijun Wang writes about her experience with schizoaffective disorder and Lyme disease. She is hired to tell her story to patients at a clinic but flinches when one of them identifies too strongly. If I’m depressed, I skip everything but the lipstick.” These are survival skills, but also, she suggests, concessions to a noxious respectability politics, meant to distinguish her from others who share her diagnosis. I can dress and daub when psychotic and when not psychotic. . . In another essay, “High-Functioning,” she interprets “other signifiers”: “my wedding ring, a referent to the sixteen-year relationship I’ve managed to keep” a makeup routine that is “minimal and consistent. ![]() “ ‘I went to Yale’ is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless,” she writes. Wang is a sharp critic of the ways we use badges and prizes to decide who is trusted to tell their own story. ![]()
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