![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2014\/03\/asylum-300x300.jpeg\" "\\"asylum\\"")
<\/a>It\u2019s probably not okay to call it the insane asylum. It\u2019s officially the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, a mixed-use development with a brick-oven bakery, a coffee roaster, farm-to-table restaurants, a nature school and a place to buy ethically sourced yoga pants.<\/p>\nBut there\u2019s something satisfyingly shocking about calling it the insane asylum. It seems right to acknowledge why this place of luxury goods and services looks like the setting for A Series of Unfortunate Events, <\/em>why it\u2019s so beautiful and so obviously, poignantly, haunted.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s the word insane that\u2019s the problem, for who could dislike the word asylum, which connotes protection, refuge and safety?<\/p>\n
I love the idea that we used to shelter not only the criminally dangerous but the sick in the soul, the depressed, exhausted and nervous of the world. Not just for our sakes, but for theirs. The words insane asylum <\/em>speak to me of what the Victorian-era psychiatrist Thomas Kirkbride\u2014the designer of these buildings\u2014described as \u201crespectable decorum.\u201d<\/p>\nTraverse City has some of the last standing Kirkbride buildings in America, and as I walk the grounds I feel perhaps a little too much sympathy with the former residents.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My thoughts turn to my uncle, a paranoid schizophrenic who spent most of his life in hospitals and a string of halfway houses, where he lived with other people\u2019s families in a sort of adult foster care system in rural Mississippi. We\u2019d visit him and I\u2019d wonder who these people were and why he didn\u2019t come home. We\u2019d bring him books and cigarettes and I\u2019d wonder if he spent entire days smoking in a rocker on the porch. I\u2019d imagine how bored he must have been, how long and lonely the days, even as I was desperate to leave the unsettling quiet and the foreign smells of someone else\u2019s home. Later I realized he was heavily sedated.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve struggled with depression my whole life, and was prone to melancholy and anxiety even as a small child, well before I had any real reason. The trauma of my mother\u2019s illness and death fanned the flames, but the fire was already burning. I started my first bottle of Prozac when I was thirteen.<\/p>\n
And then I started to write, which is both a burden and a relief. To write is to exist momentarily on a plane where one can make connections, discern patterns, uncover and even force meaning from experience. The relief comes when I manage to write to that brief exhilarating moment when everything falls into place, a satisfaction so rarely felt in life. The burden is everything else about writing.<\/p>\n
My uncle hunted patterns too. My sister sent me a box of his papers, which she discovered in her attic. It turns out he spent a lot of time and energy connecting our family to the Confederacy, beginning with his own initials, Cyril Solomon Arnold, the Confederate States of America. He also founded and edited a Catholic literary journal during his stay at Southeast Louisiana State Hospital.<\/p>\n
He loved Walker Percy and Flannery O\u2019Connor long before I discovered them. He was the only reader in our family, and it was in his abandoned bedroom at my grandmother\u2019s house that I discovered a world of books where I could both hide and thrive. I inherited all those books. My sister and I are his sole survivors.<\/p>\n
When I write I think of him. When I\u2019m anxious and depressed I think of him. \u00a0And now, when I go to the asylum to wander the grounds, buy coffee, and admire the architecture, I think of him, and wish he could have taken refuge in its respectable decorum. And I wonder at the fine line between writerly tendencies and pathology.<\/p>\n
In so many ways I am his heir. My overwhelming need to be alone. My obsession over single words or images for weeks at a time. My excessive religiosity. My ability\u2014no, my need\u2014to make connections between seemingly disparate ideas and images, to articulate a relationship that\u2019s invisible to others but as obvious to me as glowing line from point A to point B.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve often suspected that this was all symptomatic of some sort of mental illness, and now I\u2019ve got the paperwork to prove how vague the boundary between creativity and insanity has been in my very own family. Paranoid schizophrenia runs in families, I\u2019ve read. And if you experience trauma before adolescence the risk is even higher.<\/p>\n
To be continued tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\nJessica Mesman Griffith<\/a><\/strong>\u2018s writing has appeared in many publications, including\u00a0Image<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Elle<\/em>, and has been noted in\u00a0Best American Essays<\/em>. She is the author, with Amy Andrews, of the memoir\u00a0Love and Salt, A Spiritual Friendship in Letters<\/em>. She lives in Michigan with her husband and children.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s probably not okay to call it the insane asylum. It\u2019s officially the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, a mixed-use development with a brick-oven bakery, a coffee roaster, farm-to-table restaurants, a nature school and a place to buy ethically sourced yoga pants. But there\u2019s something satisfyingly shocking about calling it the insane asylum. It seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1472,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[328,49],"tags":[804,494,803,802],"class_list":["post-5536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jessica-mesman-griffith","category-writing-topical-categories","tag-creativity-vs-insanity","tag-mental-illness","tag-pathology","tag-thomas-kirkbride"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>It\u2019s probably not okay to call it the insane asylum. It\u2019s officially the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, a mixed-use development with a brick-oven bakery, a coffee roaster, farm-to-table restaurants, a nature school and a place to buy ethically sourced yoga pants.<\/p>\n