Helder said the goal of therapy was to make a container to hold all the disparate selves. I was going to need a big container. One that could hold hordes.

I couldn’t bear to think of my mother loving me but unable to face me, to stare into my eyes, to care for me emotionally, to offer me her face. Like any daughter, as much as I wanted to separate from her, I wanted to be deeply connected to her, I wanted to redeem her, I wanted to protect her. I wanted to love and to understand, in that order.

Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful.

I giggled and he took it very seriously and wrote everything down. I thought it was going too well, I was doing too well, it was going to look like nothing was wrong. I’m not this great! I wanted to say. Really, I’m a wreck, help! But I couldn’t speak up. I smiled and tried to look brilliant.

He said I was learning to talk about my life more objectively so that it felt like a part of my life and not a part of myself.

I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn’t even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.

Schizophrenia is without a doubt the most dreaded psychological disorder. If depression is the common cold of psychological disorders, schizophrenia is the cancer.” The cancer.

Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece.

I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one. It’s the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in. The day you stop drinking, or the day you start. The day you know things will never be the same again.

Trust the comfy clothes you reach for day after day, your plain, regular, essential self.