Have you ever found the meanings you make intolerable?
Do you feel things that there are no words to say?
In the summer of 2020, following my discharge from a psychiatric hospital and in the worst depression of my life, I slipped into a state of consciousness in which I experienced the world within me and the world around me as one. The clicking of my bathroom heater was the metronome of my despair; the dust on my desk was the objectification of my paralysis; and my heart sank daily with the sun.
It was a world of terrible significances.
Desperate to capture this state—to put it outside of me—I discovered that if language took the shape of my experience, rather than my experience conforming to the norms of language, I could communicate what it was like. I found this shape in metaphor, personification, and symbol—language that mirrors feeling, instead of naming it. I wrote from within my Madness; and I called it inside-writing.
After drawing out the core themes from months of inside-writing using Gupta’s Cinematic-Phenomenological Method (2018), I pieced together excerpts to create the voiceover script for a short film. From there, I constructed a visual and sonic script to stand in for and evoke those aspects of this experience for which “there are no words.”
The result is a cinematic prose poem that invites viewers to move beyond the habit of viewing extreme psychological states solely through the lens of psychopathology, and toward forms of understanding the experience of “Serious Mental Illness” that are also experiential.
