At the high school I was privileged enough to attend, I lost myself in beautiful, poetic words of colourful plays and singing. When the play ended, I took T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral script home and revelled in his poetry for weeks. Hitting hockey balls in the cooling, crisp Nairobi air, I was part of a blue-skirted team where I always felt lost, and yet the game energised me. In spite of my loneliness, I still loved school. Sloshing potassium permanganate in test tubes in Mrs. Mould’s chemistry lab; solving intriguing geometry puzzles with Mrs. Meynink; being challenged mathematically by the logical but interesting Mrs. Priestley. All these activities brought warmth to many days. Our strict headmistress, Sister Pauline, also encouraged me. School became my lifeline. But, I was still afraid of the world which seemed to hate me. My brothers’ anger and psychoses drained me. I worried about my dear, overworked father. I felt tense. Too tense.

Chronically shy. “I feel like nobody likes me” swirled endlessly in my head and sometimes found its way out of my mouth when I was alone. I explored fantasies of being loved in scribbled poems. I asked my mother why I was expected to do so many chores when my brothers did none. “Because you’re a girl,” she’d reply. “Because you’re an African,” my aunt would remind me. Unfair. Too unfair. I resisted and killed any chance at a relationship with my mother. I was a disappointment: I was not the African girl she wanted me to be. Still tense. Way too tense. How does one escape the pain of living when rejection seems unending? Scribbling? Psychosis? Lock yourself in a room for decades? Run away like Malova? I didn’t want to become ‘mentally ill’. I needed to save myself, to bolt, to out-run those demons closing in on me. But where could I run to? How fast could I run?

Flirting with Demons.

I had nowhere to go. So, I stayed and flirted with the demons. Flirted like a widow spider that needed her enemies close, watching them and using them. Eventually disposing of them to protect her interests. I got close to my demons by learning everything I could about mental illness.

Pain. I could only think of pain. Wasn’t our pain more entangled in this messy schizophrenia web than the clinical science of brains and genetics seemed to suggest? In all this pretentious, convoluted jargon, through all this arms-length talk of diagnoses and symptoms and causes, why was there was no talk of pain? Why was there no talk of what was causing this anguish in our lives?

I did an unscientific analysis in the laboratory of my mind, conducted on my three younger siblings born long after Kenya’s independence, those who fit fluidly into predominantly African environments. I tried to imagine them sliding into psychosis. I could not. Provided new stressors didn’t come along, they appeared safe. They were not, as young children, looking for a sense of belonging in a world that on multiple fronts was rejecting them. 

I read more. I listened to Malova. And then read more again. Many decades later, I would read Update: Schizophrenia Across Cultures, in which NL Myers states that schizophrenia and paranoia are over-diagnosed among racial minorities in the United States and Britain where the percentage of minorities in the community is extremely low. Was this not similar to the concentrated white areas in which my brothers and I had grown up in Kenya after independence? Why was there so much schizophrenia in my family when only one in a hundred people is supposed to suffer from the disease?