Am I Wearing Shoes?

As a wise person once said to me, “You know you’re tired when you have to check if you have shoes on.” This is totally true. One time a few years ago, I accidentally went downtown without any shoes on. It was summer. The train security people looked at me like I was crazy.

I like ‘crazy’ slogans. “It’s such a nice day. I think I’ll skip my medications.” “I smile because I have no idea what’s going on.” “Some days it’s not even worth chewing through the restraints.” “I do what the voices in my head tell me.”

Ah, slogans: where would we be without them?

I wish I could plan my entire day beginning in the afternoon – for some reason I always feel better as the day goes by. Right now, I’m almost chipper. So much so that I’m absolutely certain I’m not wearing shoes.

But, back to my ‘real’ subject. Which I haven’t introduced yet. This morning, the people I was hanging out with were talking about hearing voices. Someone was remarking that some schizophrenics speak slowly because they have trouble hearing you and gathering their thoughts because of all the voices.

That got me to thinking about how it is we as a culture perceive certain types of psychiatric disorder, even just the phenomenon of people hearing voices. A cacophony such that one has trouble making out individual voices, and such that it’s almost impossible to pay attention to anything else, is sometimes a symptom of schizophrenia, but it’s hardly the only manifestation voices can take. People can hear malevolent voices or helpful voices, voices that keep up a running commentary on your life, voices that tell you to do certain things, voices that only show up occasionally. Voices that tell you the winning number on a lottery ticket. Not everyone thinks their voices are pathological, and at the same time not everyone can cope with them. It’s so easy to believe we know what it means to hear voices, but really there are manifold ways of experiencing the phenomenon, and it’s so hard to get inside the feeling of another person’s inner world.

It reminds me of people thinking that “Beautiful Mind” is an accurate portrayal of schizophrenia, even though his hallucinations are so complex and enduring. In reality, it’s extremely rare to have multisensory hallucinations, and the only time visual hallucinations are common to psychotic experiences is when those experiences are triggered by drugs such as LSD and mescaline. Let me put it this way: if you see a vision of the Blessed Virgin and she speaks to you, you’re probably not hallucinating. Bonus points if she gives you a cloak with her image on it and that happens to be full of roses.

Part of the discussion turned on the remark that if you did hear a voice, you’d be terrified. And then to think about what Moses felt when God spoke to him. On the one hand, it’s natural to be fearful when confronted by God, and it’s natural to be scared of what you don’t understand. But, on the other hand, it can also be comforting and even thrilling to hear voices. We’ve forgotten, I think, that the phenomenon of hearing voices is deeply and fundamentally linked with what it means to be human, a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history and over the whole world. We pathologize so much of what we don’t understand…sometimes I wonder if it’s not a form of jealousy, of secret longing to have an experience that can be so transformative. I think we have to be more careful, more selective, and rely on people’s own sense of their experiences before we decide what’s normal. If a person likes their voices, who are we to call them a symptom of illness? After all, many of our Saints heard voices. But if a person is deeply disturbed by them, we are we to say they’re part of a metaphysical reality?

On this subject I have no personal experience to share, because I’ve never heard voices, so I can’t tell you what it’s like, and I don’t think anyone can ever really imagine a phenomenon so personal. But I do think it’s worth taking the time to realize that we don’t always know what we’re talking about, not really, even if we ‘know’ everything there is to know about it. It’s especially worth me taking the time, since I so often think I know everything.