The+Last+Post

He's one of those people who hangs around on street corners and makes nice folk uncomfortable. A ne'er-do-well who ought to get a job and some soap. He's the kind of person that ceases to exist once you install a tasteful wrought iron gate, put arm-rests down the middle of the benches, close the park at dusk. He's a cast-off, a social write-off. One of the lost and hopeless. Homeless. Crazy. An addict and an alcoholic. He's 25 years old and my little brother.

The last time I saw him was about five years ago. He wore long sleeves even though it was summer. We went out for pizza and had a great time talking about literature, laughing, dreaming. It was probably the first time we'd had a proper conversation since I'd graduated from college. I don't imagine there will be another.

These days, my brother spends his time making death threats against the U.S. government, the Vatican, and my parents. He spends his welfare money on drugs. He's currently banned from a university campus ("known to frequent the library"). In the mug shot posted on the university's website ("please notify campus security immediately if you see this person"), he looks reasonably healthy. At least, he isn't emaciated. His teeth are bad, but his hair's been cut. He doesn't look angry. His eyes are shining and lively. Not the eyes of despair, not the eyes of someone in chemical desperation. What do I see there? Fear? Intelligence? Power? Pain? What of the self does the body reveal?

My brother was medicated as a young child for ADHD. He was an intelligent kid. Seven. A smart-ass. An extrovert and a boy. I like to think that this particular combination of symptoms no longer requires a Ritalin prescription. Were diagnosing and medicating my brother the wrong things to do? Did my parents try different ways of 'managing' him? Did his teachers try different ways to socialize him to the classroom? Did anyone //talk// to him? Would different choices have mattered, or was it all hard-wired, biological fate from the beginning? I don't know. I was 14 and deep into that parallel universe where teenagers live. When I reemerged and started paying attention, there was a lot of inertia behind the medication route. A lot of faith and hope. A lot of built-in reconstructions of history, the collaboration of family, physicians, social myths.

My mother, in particular, has gone to great lengths to reconstruct my brother's personal history, an almost conscious genealogical construction of personality. She points to stories from his infancy as evidence that //he's always been like that.// Example: When he was an infant and learning to crawl, he would often run into the door frame. Instead of moving to go around it, he would squawl and push harder, trying to make the door frame move. Clearly then, this stubbornness, this inability to adjust to the world, is an innate quality. Example: When he was a teenager, he was arrested for burning down a gazebo. His confusion about why this was wrong—"but we checked first to make sure we wouldn't hurt anyone"—was evidence that he really didn't understand the contextual connections, the repercussions beyond the immediate, of his actions. (Never mind that two other "normal" kids were involved.)

My brother has been diagnosed with the following, in sequence: ADD, ADHD, Depression, Manic/Depressive Disorder (revised to Bipolar Disorder), Borderline Personality Disorder. Schizophrenia seems likely. He's been prescribed more medications that I can imagine. He's self-prescribed an equally impressive number ranging from alcohol to heroin to Christianity.

17th century astronomers looked at the crab nebula and did not see it. Brent's daughters look at their toys and do not see a mess. My brother looks at the rules of society and //does not see// that they apply to him. It isn't that he doesn't understand the rules. He understands very clearly how they apply to other people and is quite willing to use that to his advantage. He understands the intricacies of how the system works better than most. But he does not see that such rules should have any constraints on himself. Just doesn't compute.

When things first started to go really sour with my brother, long after I'd left home but while he was still living with my parents, I would talk about him a lot. There was something about translating his actions into words that helped to pull them out of the bewildering fog of a bad dream and solidify them into a reality that could be manipulated. The words were a way to sort out the bits I could understand from the bits I couldn't. I could present the words to others, see how they reacted and thus build a repertoire of reactions that I could draw from in a hurry. But this technique quickly became unsatisfactory. Other people's responses invariably followed the same patterns. All began with expressions of horror and/or sympathy, followed by one of three dodging mechanisms: the tried and true subject change; earnest inquiries into how I was doing, how my parents were dealing, how anyone except my brother was doing; or equally earnest reassurances that my brother would "get better," that through some vague and mysterious means, he would become an accepted and acceptable member of society.

Middle-class society is obsessed with normalization. Someone like my brother does not, cannot fit as is into the accepted frame of how the immediate world works. (Sure, such people exist, but they're somewhere over there, always conveniently just out of reach). So we change the subject, and he simply falls out of the frame. We talk about everyone around him, and he fades into the fuzzy background. We talk about the future, when he will again fit into the frame and we'll know how to act and how to think about him. This is language in a knock-down dirty fight with reality. And my family was equally guilty of these tricks. My mother became especially adept at hiding knowledge, an expert language trick in itself that fostered the growth of ever more non-knowledge. I was never sure what I was "supposed" to know, what I was and wasn't allowed to share and with whom. I was never sure what my brother knew I knew, what I was supposed to pretend I didn't know. When the language tricks stopped, when the reality that my brother was never going to fit in that tidy normalizing frame set in, he was kicked out. Out of my parents' house, out of the frame. And for a little while, everyone could breathe.

Not long after, my brother decided to take himself off all chemicals. His reasoning was this: "I don't know who I am without medicines". Who could argue with that? It's an explanation that haunts me. It's hard to imagine having never experienced the world without a chemical intermediary; more, never having the choice to experience the world any other way. Chemical experimentation for most kids is a chance to experiment with your own personality, to try on new lenses for looking at the world. What could you do, what would you do, if you were just a little braver, a little sillier, a little more relaxed about it all? What's it like to feel emotions that come from outside instead of in? To think in ways you've never thought before? When you come down, and compare the high you to the sober you, what do you see? Maybe high, you tapped into parts of your personality you hadn't really known before. Maybe high, you felt good. Maybe sober, you try to work some of those discoveries about yourself into your 'real' self, your everyday, sober self. But all those reflections and negotiations between who you are and who you might be, only work if you have a sense of who you are, a kind of base-line you against which to compare the chemically augmented you. But if you've always been chemically augmented, you have no way of knowing what's you, really, and what's the chemicals. What positive characteristics can you lay claim to, be proud of? What negative ones do you actually have to account for, and what can you blame on the medications? Should you keep trying out different chemical combinations until you get the 'you' you want? But how will you know if that's the 'you' you want or just the 'you' that the chemical 'you' wants? It's an impossible puzzle. Enough to drive you crazy.

My brother is quick-witted, with a sharp sense of humor, an absolutely contagious laugh. Creatively kind, and surprisingly thoughtful. His rages are sudden, unpredictable. His eyes flash and you know you have about 15 seconds before he loses control. His anger is righteous, but based on a logic that is impossible to understand, let alone untangle, diffuse. My brother would often be chagrined after one of his outbursts, claiming that he knew what he was about to do and didn't want to do it, but couldn't help himself. It was the "couldn't help himself" part that triggered the prescription-writing urge of his psychiatrist, of course. If you, that mysterious brain/soul/personality thing that's supposed to be steering, can't stop yourself, it must be because your biochemistry is screwed up. The vehicle isn't responding correctly to the steering wheel. But what is rage if not uncontrollable anger? What is the vehicle, exactly, and where is the steering wheel?

My brother and I grew up in the same household. We share the same genetic lineage. Why is my brother on the streets with society's curses and I am ensconced in Ye Olde Ivory Tower with society's blessings? Here's one answer: I was just as angry as my brother, but I turned that anger inward. As a teenage girl, that was socially expected. My brother turned his anger outward. Not socially accepted. Here's another: My brother got the genes for addiction. He got the genes that screwed up the brain wiring. I didn't. Here's another: My brother isn't crazy. He just decided to walk out of the frame.

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How do I conclude this? If I were more clever (and had more time), I'd probably drop in a lot of citations, show how this and that are examples of what Famous Theorist X is describing. That was the original plan, and I know it's in here, but I can't bring myself to do it. Theory is impersonal, depersonalizes. It parses out even as it complicates. My brother has been parsed enough. His 'self' has been so analyzed, the parts so manipulated, it's a wonder he can function at all. How many times can you take something apart and put it back together again before the whole thing just collapses? There's a mystery to the way life works that our methods of understanding destroys.

I think of my brother whenever issues of mind/body/society come up. He transgresses boundaries, mixes them up, erases them. How do you use categories to describe someone who denies that such categories exist? On the one hand, he's just an ordinary specimen of homo sapiens. A couple of kidneys and lungs. Hands and feet where you'd expect them. Cells chuggin' along, doing what cells do. And yet, he's decidedly different. And the way our science works, that means there must be something biologically different that requires a biological response. In another place and time, the explanation, and response, might be spiritual or demonic. In another social system, there might not be any particular response at all; he would just be one of the accepted varieties of human.

From Sean: Not to the same extent, but...brother progressively diagnosed with learning disorder, ADD, depression, ADHD, depression, anxiety disorder. The tough thing has been attempting to engage my family in some sort of discussion rather than judgment about him. For all intents and purposes the only thing that differentiates me from him is that I communicate more freely and do better in regimented school environments. He is as smart as I am, more empathic than I am, works as hard as I can, and can focus when the topic is challenging enough. It's a sad state, in a different less medicated era he would likely have been an exceptional, if unusual, genius.