The small artistic pleasures we had shared, the simple pleasures that bonded and comforted us, were now considered signs of a disease. Writing was my lifeline, it was how I talked to myself, the only way I expressed words I dared not speak as I tried to hide the pain of rejection hidden deep inside me. The more pained, scared or unwanted I felt, the more I wrote to soothe myself. My own words comforted me. I scribbled and scribbled and scribbled some more. I hid my writing. I would now see Malova sporadically, as he spent decades of his life in and out of psychiatric institutions. He would slide into psychosis when he was on the verge of imploding from stress. He didn’t speak about his pain. But my parents and I could hear the anger and strain in his voice when they told him he needed to focus less on distracting music and writing and go back to school.

There were many arguments: days before he became psychotic, we knew that whatever strain he was under, was leading him there. Almost as if a psychotic break was a relief. An escape from the pain of living.

“No, don’t listen. He’s sick,” my uncle would say. 

Is he ill? Or is he just unhappy? His eyes looked sad even when he smiled, and I found it hard to separate his distress from the sickness. Sometimes, he was clearly lost in his psychosis. At other times, I found myself questioning why my parents and relatives were calling his sadness an illness. He would tell me secrets my aunts told each other in his presence because they wrongly assumed that because he walked around talking to himself, he was too ill to hear or care about what they said. Never revealing my source, I enjoyed seeing their shock as I questioned them about what he’d told me. He would tell me they were wrong to say these things about me.

When Malova spoke to me about how much he hated the psychiatrist who coerced him into taking medication that was harming his body, he was focused and fully aware of what was happening to him. Soon, a second brother would take the same path. Prolonged anguish led him towards psychosis. He would also be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then, as with hikikomori in Japan, another one of my brothers grew so afraid of the world that he hardly left the house, or even his room, for the next three decades. He, too, would eventually receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Many years later, I would meet the sister of his once good friend, Victor. She would tell me that, like my brother, Victor was extremely shy and sensitive. He, too, had refused to go to school and had also isolated himself in his own room at home.

Three brothers with mental illness. I was the fourth child. Was I next? I had no doubt in my mind now that prolonged anguish was a speedy one-way trip to psychosis. I needed to calm myself. I walked for miles and swam tens of laps to relax. Dearly beloved teachers offered me lifelines in the form of praise like “Excellent!” or “Good!” in my text books. By now, the desire to emulate Europeans and criticisms about being too mzungu were waning. My brothers and I encountered more Kenyans in the school system and in our neighbourhoods. I became proud to be an African. For my three older brothers, it was too late: terrible damage had already been done. Two stopped going to school altogether. Malova had been a student at the Duke of York School (which was later renamed Lenana School). He ran away from home when my father insisted that he return to classes. I looked at the world through frightened eyes.