Why I Read, and Maybe You Should Too

I think most schizophrenics would agree that it’s a pretty lonely ride. Social settings become very difficult when you’re suffering from delusions of grandeur thinking you’re the future queen of England. You believe people are trying to manipulate you while you’re busy remapping your associations. Meals are especially tricky when the brain is working on overload. Why is she holding her cultlery pointing towards me? Why is she eating from that side of the plate? More importantly, how should I be eating? Does the fork go in the right or the left hand? Do you eat the broccoli or the potatoes first? You read intentions into people’s behavior that simply aren’t there. You don’t trust anyone. It makes it difficult to maintain true friendships. The TV is your nemesis, beaming images onto your retina and into your brain. You can’t watch it.

Over time, you adjust. You become less observant, as you no longer hyperassociate. You learn to control the urge to analyse every move people make around you. You tell yourself there are no hidden meanings. She is not wearing a red dress to trigger aggression in you. He is not a secret agent following you on the metro. You learn to concentrate on yourself and pay less attention to others. It’s hard, but you get there. It takes a long time though, about a year, and during this period you are mentally isolated. Even when you’re in a room surrounded by friends, you are somewhat on your own because your paranoid delusions makes it impossible to trust them, even though they’re trying their best to make you feel comfortable. How should you spend this time?

I would have been dead long ago if it wasn’t for books. When I became cut off from others, the fabulous stories of people I didn’t have to interact with became my main link to the outside world. I read biographies and got lost in the lives of strangers. I read history  – a lot of it, in the hope of finding explanations for why the world no longer made sense to me. Somewhere there in Winston Churchill’s six-volume account of the struggle between the axis and allied powers I was searching for the answer to why the world looked as dystopian as it did today. My interest in history held strong and a little over a decade after I suffered my first psychosis, I graduated with a master’s degree in the history of ideas, a field that requires a love for reading because it’s heavy on the literature.

More than anything though, I enjoyed science fiction, as it allowed me to lose myself in a world that wasn’t mine. It contained mindbending concepts, like time travel, colonisation of distant – sometimes imaginary, as in Frank Herbert’s Dune – planets, alternate history, and the possibility of parallel worlds. Among the books that left me mesmerized were Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love where interstellar traveler Lazarus Long wrestles with immortality and Neal Stephensen’s Snowcrash that gave name to the Metaverse, long before Facebook stole it for their shitty virtual world of legless avatars. I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods three times. I totally fell in love with Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a trilogy in four parts.

You would think that science fiction wouldn’t be a genre to recommend for people with delusions, but for me it worked wonders. When I was reading I could finally switch my brain off as it gave me something else to think about that wasn’t my own miserable existence. There was still a world out there that went beyond mine. Interesting things were happening. Some days, I would read for fourteen hours straight. No wonder I need glasses now.

I read a bit less than I used to, but I still get through a book or two a week. Reading allows me to escape the existential dread on days when I wake up anxious. It’s liberating. I make a nice cup of coffee and allow myself to spend the whole day with a good book. If you’re feeling down, perhaps you should try it too.