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...