Every day my body betrays me. I can’t even open a doorknob without hurting myself. I lose my grip, bang into the frame, slam into furniture, drop whatever I’m holding. Most of it lands on my feet, and my feet can’t take it anymore. My legs are the worst — they carry the weight of this curse. The pain is constant, sharp, electric, like every cell is inflamed and ready to collapse. It’s not soreness; it’s excruciating, the kind of pain that makes you gasp, the kind that makes the idea of moving unbearable. I’ve been in bed more than a year, watching my body disintegrate. No medication that helps, no doctor who listens, no family who cares. Friends disappeared. Family wrote me off. When the prescriptions were pulled, I was left to rot. The rest of the world moves on — people buy homes, take trips, celebrate birthdays — and I’m here, collapsing in private, bruised and broken from hitting the walls of my own room. I’ve been abandoned in plain sight. The afternoons are the only reprieve. Aro...
A longform essay exploring the firsthand experience of Jonathan Harnisch—artist, author, and advocate—living through schizophrenia, dystonia, akathisia, and chronic neurological agony. There are no good metaphors for what Jonathan Harnisch feels. That’s because pain—real, disfiguring, mind-consuming pain—burns through metaphor. “It’s not that I’m suffering inside a prison,” he says. “It’s that I am the prison. I’m the cell, the bars, the locked door, and the scream no one hears.” For decades, Harnisch has written with startling clarity and poetic fire about living with schizophrenia, CPTSD, and various movement disorders, including dystonia and akathisia. His novels ( Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia , Pervo – Third Alibi ) and film projects ( Living Colorful Beauty ) are, at once, raw memoirs and surreal diaries—documents of someone trapped in his own nervous system, yet lucid enough to transcribe the nightmare in real time. “There’s this assumption,” he says, “that schizophrenia is...