Zoey

“There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“I'm still trying to figure out what "okay" is, particularly whether there exists a normal version of myself beneath the disorder, in the way a person with cancer is a healthy person first and foremost. In the language of cancer, people describe a thing that "invades" them so that they can then "battle" the cancer. No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold. In my peer education courses I was taught to say that I am a person with schizoaffective disorder. "Person-first language" suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusion and the rambling and the catatonia.

But what if there isn't? What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am?”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“This must be the most important factor in your choice of a life partner," he told Ada. "Who will most patiently and enthusiastically support your ambitions?”
― Liz Moore, The Unseen World

“A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way: one that has been experienced and recorded not just in modern times,”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays