Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic by Barbara O'Brien

Author:Barbara O'Brien [O'Brien, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Mental Illness, Schizophrenia, Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780615509280
Google: Kg2rpwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0615509282
Goodreads: 12210651
Publisher: Silver Birch Press
Published: 1958-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

The Dry Beach and the Waves

For ten days, the dry beach. My scalp felt strained as if some nerve would break at any moment, but the interior of my head felt empty and dry as if its cells had been hollowed out by a ruthless knife and replaced with a sandy shore. The Spider had scalloped it out, I recalled. Then I remembered that the Operators had been delusions. The terrible world of Operators with their tremendous power over Things did not exist. All of that business had been nothing more nor less than insanity. Insanity. The word hung over the beach and the beach stared at it with a kind of mild surprise. Insanity. It was something like digging at the base of a tree in the backyard and finding no roots at all but, instead, a bed of uranium, a strange substance I had heard about somewhere. It wasn’t frightening to find uranium in my own backyard, just mildly surprising. The dry beach stared placidly at the uranium, felt a mild relief that it was uranium and not Operators, stared some more, and yawned.

Alertness, which had never failed me in insanity, seemed now to have completely deserted me. After a few unfortunate experiences in traffic, I avoided streets. I tried sitting in my apartment and reading; the words looked perfectly familiar, like old friends whose faces I remembered perfectly well but whose names I couldn’t recall; I read one paragraph ten times, could make no sense of it whatever, and shut the book. I tried listening to the radio but the sounds went through my head like a buzz saw. I walked carefully through traffic to a movie theater and sat through a movie which seemed to consist of a lot of people wandering around slowly and talking a great deal about something or other. I decided, finally, to spend my days sitting in the park watching the birds on the lake.

The dry beach irritated the analyst. He asked me to lie on a couch and to say whatever came into my mind. Nothing came into my mind. Pressed urgently to say something, anything at all, I finally described the ceiling. The analyst waved me off the couch and into a chair facing him, and shot questions at me. The questions made sense but I could think of no answers. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing going on in your mind,” the analyst stormed at me. But there was nothing at all going on in my mind. The analyst fretted and fumed as if he knew perfectly well that there was plenty going on under the sandy shore and he was going to bully until it came out. The dry beach listened to him and hoped in a vague, mild sort of way that if there were anything in the department below, it would please stay there because the quiet was so pleasant.

My face undoubtedly was as blank as my mind. After a while the analyst gave up looking at it and sat back in his chair and gazed out the window and talked.

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