Wang says that it is far more common for people who suffer from mental illness to be written about-by caregivers, by researchers-than to offer their own accounts. Wang’s recently published essay collection, “ The Collected Schizophrenias,” explores the peculiar questions of identity that the ill, and especially the mentally ill, must contend with. “What I feared was the in-between space: a purgatory for those too sick to truly live.” “I was so sick for so many days that I could feel hopelessness nipping at my edges,” Wang wrote in the Catapult essay, of one particularly rough period. Her symptoms sometimes got worse with treatment instead of better. In the past two decades, Wang has been committed to a mental hospital three times. When she began to experience new symptoms-weakness and fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, fainting, extreme weight loss-in 2013, doctors at first suspected an autoimmune disease, or even cancer, and eventually diagnosed her with late-stage Lyme disease. Twelve years later-eight years after her first auditory hallucination-she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Wang would know: as a teen in the Bay Area, in 2001, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “To be alive and sick is a far more complex endeavor than we like to admit,” Esmé Weijun Wang wrote in an essay for Catapult, in 2016. Not much was changing for her - but everything, I had to believe, was possible for me.In her new essay collection, Esmé Weijun Wang elucidates the experience of having a mind that is both her proudest asset and her biggest liability. “She was the one who had come to this clinic every week for the last decade.

“I was the one at the head of the table, visiting,” she writes, subtly implicating the reader who has made the same calculation. She is hired to tell her story to patients at a clinic but flinches when one of them identifies too strongly.

If I’m depressed, I skip everything but the lipstick.” These are survival skills, but also, she suggests, concessions to a noxious respectability politics, meant to distinguish her from others who share her diagnosis. I can dress and daub when psychotic and when not psychotic. . . In another essay, “High-Functioning,” she interprets “other signifiers”: “my wedding ring, a referent to the sixteen-year relationship I’ve managed to keep” a makeup routine that is “minimal and consistent. “ ‘I went to Yale’ is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless,” she writes.

Wang is a sharp critic of the ways we use badges and prizes to decide who is trusted to tell their own story.

The collected schizophrenias essays