When I Didn't Belong to Me
by Masha Kisel
No one could tell me my great uncle Milia’s diagnosis. He had always been odd. Never married. Couldn’t live on his own. We blamed it on his trauma of an early childhood spent under falling bombs. He was born in Kyiv during the Second World War. He and his family evacuated to Saratov, experiencing terror and starvation.
Samuil (Milia for short) was not only born during a war, but he was born with fused fingers. In the U.S., they call it syndactyly. An easy surgical fix at birth. But in wartime Soviet Ukraine, it was yet another irreparable tragedy. As an adult, he adapted. He could hold a pen and a fork and worked as an engineer. Yet, for most of his life, he was labeled an “invalid.”
Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1995, my grandmother Rollana and her brother Milia left newly independent Ukraine to join my mother and me in Chicago. We had immigrated six years earlier. In the subsidized apartment building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, Milia, now fifty-three, lived next door to his older sister. His fridge was empty. When he was hungry, he’d come over to my grandma’s and she’d feed him, placing food on his plate, even though he could serve himself.
I visited my babushka often in the years before I left for college. She’d always greet me at the elevator doors so we’d have two minutes alone before we walked into the apartment where Milia waited on the couch. The apartment had the comforting smell of my Soviet childhood: valerian drops, smoked fish and cheap perfume. I’d mutter an awkward hello and, as he stood up to greet me, my babushka would push me into him to make sure that we embraced. As his caretaker, she wanted to provide him with his share of familial affection. I didn’t know how to include him in the conversation. Sometimes he seemed agitated at his own thoughts and made faces. Maybe he heard voices.
During my senior year as a psych major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I began to experience my own mental health crisis.
“I need to know what runs in the family,” I pleaded with my mom. Something very strange was happening to me. I didn’t feel like a person anymore.
“Of course you’re a person. I’m looking at you and I see a person in front of me.” It was difficult talking to my mom. Her face had a hologram quality, like she was beamed in from another dimension, flickering in and out.
“I didn’t know how to include Milia in the conversation. Sometimes he seemed agitated at his own thoughts and made faces. Maybe he heard voices.”
“Does Milia have schizophrenia?” I asked. In my psychology seminars, I’d been reading first-person narratives about the onset of the illness. I was sure that I was on the verge of my first hallucination. Sometimes shoes grimaced at me. The coat hanger in the classroom looked like an angry octopus.
My mother reassured me that I was nothing like Milia. His mother had suffocated him with overprotection and, when she died, my grandmother didn't allow him to do anything for himself.
But Milia’s troubles seemed more serious than co-dependence. He muttered to himself. He turned the lights on and off when he came into a room. He had facial tics.
“Is it OCD?” I asked.
“They had different diagnoses back then. Different names for everything,” my mom replied.
It was true that some disorders didn’t exist outside of the Soviet Union. For instance, “sluggish schizophrenia” was a uniquely Soviet psychiatric diagnosis used to punitively institutionalize and medicate political dissidents. But my great uncle wasn’t a political dissident.
“What do the psychiatrists in America say?” I insisted. My mother shrugged. The Russian-speaking doctors in Chicago apparently didn’t diagnose in English either. Perhaps there wasn’t a word in any language for what Milia had. Was there an English or Russian name for what was happening to me?
It wasn’t like any emotional state I’d ever experienced before. Not even like being high, when you’re unmoored but know that the familiar world waits for your return. I drifted away. I was no longer inside the story of my life. Every familiar object in my room looked as if it had been replaced by a replica, an imposter. Outside, the winter landscape looked barren, post-apocalyptic. I felt no connection to anything, not even myself. I was suddenly hyperaware of being in a body. Not my body. It didn’t belong to me. My body was a container from which I looked out. It was part of the dead world. How had I not noticed before that I could only see parts of my body? My hands, my legs and my feet, but not my own face?
This realization was accompanied by sensory changes. Everything looked flat, dimensionless. I could almost lift up the corner of the scene before me and roll it up into a paper cone. All depth and dimension disappeared. Even people looked flat.
“It wasn’t like any emotional state I’d ever experienced before…I was no longer inside the story of my life.”
Looking at their cardboard, cut-out faces filled me with despair. When people spoke, it seemed to me that their voices came from elsewhere, part of the non-diegetic soundtrack.
Hyperconscious of existing in time, I no longer felt cushioned by the certainty that the next moment would happen. I could fall off the edge at any moment. It was as if I had been placed into a simulation created by a procrastinating coder, giving me just enough slack to make it to the next thought, the next word, the next movement. Just barely. Whoever controlled my reality wasn’t benevolent. They hadn’t bothered to give me a narrative or a character to play. I was a senseless glitch in the programming, stumbling around a slipshod, half-built world.
At the time, I was certain that I had glimpsed the true nature of reality. I’d never be able to unsee it, so I’d never be allowed back inside my life, to believe that I or anything around me was real.
On the surface I was still passing for a person. I continued going to college classes and spending time with my boyfriend who tried to be supportive at first but got angry and bitter when I confessed that I didn’t think he was real either. I thought about killing myself. But I was too scared that the afterlife might be even stranger.
I finally saw a therapist when the panic attacks began. She wasn’t at all shocked by my symptoms, which to me had seemed so extraordinary they were beyond treatment. She prescribed Zoloft for anxiety. I didn’t believe that a little blue pill could turn me back from an untethered consciousness drifting out of space and time, but I still took it.
To my amazement, the Zoloft worked. For a week I slept 14 hours a day. Little by little, I came back to the familiar way of seeing things. Wellness for me wasn’t the overcoming of obstacles, it was a gradual forgetfulness of the thoughts that scared me.
I still don’t quite know what happened to me. I’ve read that depersonalization is common after trauma. My uncle always had a war waiting under his bed. Soviet culture pathologized all differences, so he was never allowed "to be normal," not even in his own family, who debilitated him with their well-meaning control.
“I still don’t quite know what happened to me. I’ve read that depersonalization is common after trauma.”
I had my own history of damage: the inner schism brought on by immigration, sexual assault, parental neglect, betrayal and abuse by trusted family members. I repeatedly escaped hopelessness by reinventing myself. I was good at starting over. By my senior year of college, I had already lived many lives, traveled between many versions of myself. Like stepping between the cars of a moving train, I made transitions in graceful leaps. But suddenly I looked down to see the ground beneath me slipping, everything familiar crushed under the train’s merciless wheels.
I never had a chance to have an honest conversation with Milia before he died. An invisible barrier stood between us, erected by my mother and grandmother to protect me. In my family, there was a superstitious attitude toward mental illness. Like conjuring a demon by saying its name three times, you brought it upon yourself with too much introspection or by spending time with others who had it: “Don’t dig around in your feelings” and “Crazy is contagious” were common family refrains. My great uncle was dutifully tolerated, “taken care of,” but none of us looked him in the eye and tried to ignore diagnosis no one could name.
Milia and I weren’t very close, but he had a profound impact on how I saw myself and what I feared would happen to me. I tell this from the privileged vantage point of knowing how the story turns out. I graduated, went to grad school, got married, got a job, had kids. My adult life so far has been the most stable of any woman in my family for generations. The mystical dread I felt then is safely aestheticized into literary form.
But most days I’m still scared that at some point in the future, I’ll lose the ability to communicate, that I won’t have my own life, that I’ll be as inaccessible to others as Milia was to me. I pretend to spit three times–tfu, tfu, tfu–an ancient superstitious custom to keep away evil. I perform wellness rituals from the modern world for good measure: I meditate, go for a run, write down my bad thoughts and my rational responses to them. Maybe I’ll be lucky. Maybe I won’t fall out of my story again.
Masha Kisel is a Jewish-Ukrainian-American writer, originally from Kyiv. She holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Northwestern University and currently teaches at the University of Dayton.