Concerning Jess

In this blog, I have often mentioned a girl I knew once, a girl I have been referring to as Jess because I deemed it inappropriate to use her real name. Inquisitive readers will probably be able to discover the lass's real name from the clues I've dropped. In 2012, I went so far as to write a screenplay about her although I don't think I did her justice in it. In tonight's post I want to try to say something about the real girl.

I first met Jess I think in November 2009. I had been hearing voices since January and the fuckwits treating me had decided that it would be helpful if I went to a Hearing Voices group, a chance for voice hearers to get together and share their experiences of voice hearing with others who have acquaintance with the same 'symptom'. This Voice Hearing Group, which I attended in November and early December and then in February of the next year, was perhaps the most helpful treatment I ever received from the Mental Health System (medication of course being absolutely useless). Some research has suggested, by the way, that Voice Hearers tend on average to be more intelligent than 'normal' people – a finding that, if it was more widely known, might help reduce the stigma associated with mental 'illness'. Before the first session, I was sitting in the waiting room of the Taylor Centre with my mother and Key Worker, and noticed a young unusual looking girl also waiting for the first get-together, wearing a hat and a single glove, fidgeting restlessly with excitement – presumably, I think now, because this group was a novel opportunity to feed her curiosity about other people.

Sometimes you can tell that someone is extremely clever at a glance. The girl was fairly short, with an aquiline nose and, as I'd find out, the most extraordinarily penetrating pale blue eyes I've ever encountered. When subject to her gaze, as I was sometimes that year and in 2011, I found it both attractive and intensely discomforting. At the Hearing Voices Group, Jess, a few other psychotics, and I sat in a circle in one of the meeting rooms and shared our experiences. Jess said that she had an imaginary friend she called her 'comrade' who, when she was in shops, would point out where the surveillance cameras were. For my part, I told the group that sometimes I would hear voices so loud that I thought my head was going to split open – when I said this, she flinched. Years later, she would tell me that I was the first person she'd met through the Mental Health Service who didn't seem to be faking it. After the first session had finished, I approached her and complimented her on her shoes. She said, "They're just Doc Martins!" I said, "I like the colour."

I had fallen for her straight away of course. I was thirty and she was twenty-four or twenty-five – not an insurmountable age gap. We went out for coffee at one of the cafes near the Taylor centre. I asked her, "Why do you wear one glove? Do you think you're Michael Jackson?" I found out she was an avid reader of poetry – she quoted the first lines of Eliot's Prufrolk, "Let us go then, you and I, where the dawn meets the sky, like a patient etherised on a table." I didn't then and don't have now Jess's deep and comprehensive knowledge of poetry, but I do have Prufrolk more or less memorised and was able to quote another couple of lines: "I should have been a pair of claws, scuttling across floors of silent seas." My feelings towards her were from the beginning a strange mixture of desire and hostility, perhaps because she exhibited the same ambivalence towards me. We exchanged phone numbers and I spoke with her on the phone soon after. She asked me, "Do you like the Veils?" I told her that I was getting bad vibes down the phone and hung up on her. This is the one of the many small cruelties I perpetuated against her that have caused me sleepless nights since.

At the last session in November, she shared some issues with her family with the group and even got a little teary. She quoted the first stanza of Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse" and, by chance again, this happened to be a poem I knew, and I quoted the last stanza. She hated this. After this last session, she was whisked off to a respite facility (called Mind Matters) and on the way out told me sarcastically, "Good memory!" In December and January, I had the intense episode that I have described in other posts in which from the moment I woke until the moment I slept I spoke with Jon and Jess in my head.  After New Years I spoke to others, including, from around January 10, Barack Obama. I won't share the things I 'learnt' about her during this period, because much of it was wrong, but perhaps a story will give some idea. One night, in bed, I asked her (telepathically of course), "Why don't you like me? Give me ten good reasons why you don't like me." She quoted, from memory, the speech at the end of Ten Things I Hate About You. In February of 2010, I again attended the Hearing Voices group but, by then, the voices had almost ceased – I was only present in the off chance the real girl would come back but she didn't, and after a couple of weeks I 'graduated' from the group.

At the Independent Review I had most recently, my psychiatrist said that when I was put on Olanzapine I was first put on 12.5mgs, but that I couldn't tolerate the dosage, had 'side effects' and that the dosage was reduced to 10mgs in early 2010. Once again this is untrue – I don't know why the psychiatrist decided to put it it the official report she submitted to the Tribunal. I asked her at an appointment just before the review what 'side effects' I supposedly experienced but she wouldn't tell me. The truth, of course, is that the highest dosage I was ever on was 10mgs. Because this period, the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, is important I will try to provide some dates. I believe the last Hearing Voices session probably finished if not in November than in early December. Shortly before Christmas, my mother and I travelled to Taupo bay to spend the festive season at a bach belonging to a family member of my sister-in-law. We came back to Auckland New Years Day because the day I had to be at work (I was then working at the TAB taking phone bets). Around perhaps January 5, my mother and I travelled to Dunedin by plane so she could attend a wedding. We then drove across Southland in a rented car to visit Fjordland. It was at a hostel in Milford Sound that it seemed to me that Obama started talking directly, if telepathically, with me. My best guess is that this happened around January 10. I returned from the South Island to go to The Big Day Out, then New Zealand's largest music festival, which was held January 15th. By February, as I said, the voices had largely faded away. I had an appointment with Fernando that month – no side effects were mentioned. What I remember is telling him that I had fallen in love. He said, "A boy or a girl?". I said, "A girl." Of course, there was never any chance of me falling in love with a boy. But at the time I just thought, "Hopefully this will go on my record as proof that I'm straight." It was the only time he directly enquired into my sexuality.

I suspect now that Fernando either didn't specify the gender in his notes or possibly wrote down "A boy". This seems unbelievable but the terrible truth is that the psychiatric community lies constantly.

My relationship with Jess could have ended there but it didn't. During the period when I was hearing voices over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I had asked them once, "When will I get to speak to the real girl?" They said that I had to wait a year. I said, "A year? That's too long!" During 2010 I recovered and I even participated in some personal growth groups sessions and training at Youthline in the second half of the year. In early 2011 I texted Jess, a year after the voices had told me to wait that long. We met at the Library Bar. Over the year I hung out with perhaps six to a dozen times, less than I wanted but enough to acquire some idea of who she was. She seemed reluctant to see me more than that. Although I didn't see her often I felt I gained quite a good understanding of her. In the film I wrote about her in 2012, I mixed up her life story with mine – for instance, I gave her an interest in quantum physics although in fact I knew a lot more about quantum physics than she did and I also suggested that the root cause of her illness was her parents' divorce but I believe this etiology applied more to me than to her. But I still think I captured quite accurately the way the real girl spoke.

From an outsider's perspective, Jess probably didn't seem particularly alluring. She lived in a little flat she called her 'hutch' with only an elderly cat called Tigger for company, just down the road from her mother's. I think she spent a lot of time at her mother's place and sometimes slept there. She was unemployed. Although I am sure many people liked her, she considered herself friendless. Despite all this, I thought she was incredibly cool. She had fantastic taste in clothes and music – she introduced me to Frank Zappa. She kept an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on her living room wall. Whereas my hobby outside writing is music (I play the guitar and the piano), her hobby outside writing was art. She would drawn pictures of semi-naked men with KFC buckets over their heads – she wasn't very good at depicting faces. At parties, her party trick was to recite Pi to a thousand places. The first evening I spent at her hutch, she showed me her poetry. I might have been one of the first people in the world to realise that she was that rare thing, a true poet, although the wider world knows this now.

We had some things in common, of course. Early in 2011, I told her that I had diagnosed myself with Avoidant Personality Disorder. She said, "I have that too!" Both of us had experienced delusions of being the Antichrist briefly. I was then taking 10mgs Olanzapine and she was taking Aripreprizole. She'd been on about half a dozen different types of antipsychotic at different times. I was well but she wasn't. On one occasion, I met her at a bookshop (Borders) and she told me, bleary eyed, "I heard you on the radio last night!" She thought she'd heard me on National Radio talking about etymology. She'd even woken up her mother to say, "Andrew's on the radio!"

Although in some ways we could understand each other better than others did, in other ways we were very different. A big difference between us, I think now, was our understandings of sexuality. I was always a bit homophobic in my music taste. I didn't like Queen or Elton John; I had liked George Michael when I was a child but went off him when I became a teenager. I didn't even like bands who gave off a gay vibe, like the Smashing Pumpkins and REM. I liked the Beatles; I had no time for David Bowie. I liked the Smiths but only because I had decided Morrissey was straight. I didn't like Nick Cave because I picked up the mistaken idea once that he wasn't. Jess, by contrast, I think now, liked androgynous men. To get some idea of what she looked liked the summer I first met her, google "Experience of Mental Illness as a Teenager" and "The New Zealand Herald" and a picture should pop up. Note that she's wearing a Ziggy Stardust t-shirt.

I am unsure how to end this post, or how much more to say. I very much wanted to see her more than I did. I gave her a ticket to Modest Mouse once (I had been unable to go because of another commitment) and hoped to see her afterwards, but she decided against it. In 2011 she apparently asked a psychologist if it was possible for schizophrenic girls to have boyfriends. In 2013 I saw her twice and again she seemed to entertain the possibility of taking me up as a boyfriend but, for some reason I've never understood, the relationship never eventuated. Of course, if we had settled into a relationship in either 2011 or 2013, I would never have written this blog. And it is possible that her success as a poet was somehow contingent on her remaining single.

Like I said, I am unsure what more to say about Jess. I think this is the last post in which I shall discuss or even mention her. Jess is significant because she is the proof that I'm straight. Of course, I had girlfriends before I became 'unwell' in 2007 but she was proof that I had remained straight through the terrible psychotic episodes I suffered in 2007 and 2009, periods in which I had believed for extended periods that there was a microphone in my glasses and that everything I said was being transmitted to third parties of some sort. The film I wrote about Jess in 2012 is also, in its way, proof. I had written love poems to both my previous girlfriends and the film was, in its way, a kind of long love poem. I made mistakes with respect to Jess but I still feel that, like King Lear, I am a man "more sinned against than sinning."