![]() Wang’s recently published essay collection, “ The Collected Schizophrenias,” explores the peculiar questions of identity that the ill, and especially the mentally ill, must contend with. “What I feared was the in-between space: a purgatory for those too sick to truly live.” “I was so sick for so many days that I could feel hopelessness nipping at my edges,” Wang wrote in the Catapult essay, of one particularly rough period. Her symptoms sometimes got worse with treatment instead of better. In the past two decades, Wang has been committed to a mental hospital three times. When she began to experience new symptoms-weakness and fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, fainting, extreme weight loss-in 2013, doctors at first suspected an autoimmune disease, or even cancer, and eventually diagnosed her with late-stage Lyme disease. Twelve years later-eight years after her first auditory hallucination-she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Wang would know: as a teen in the Bay Area, in 2001, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “To be alive and sick is a far more complex endeavor than we like to admit,” Esmé Weijun Wang wrote in an essay for Catapult, in 2016. In her new essay collection, Esmé Weijun Wang elucidates the experience of having a mind that is both her proudest asset and her biggest liability. ![]()
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