I was very fortunate to stumble upon my very good friend, Nancy... we were in a classroom with other children who had similar disabilities as we did. Nancy had a heart defect along with a learning disability, and I was, and still am, visually impaired as well as having a hearing disability. Our friendship developed helping and supporting each other during school days. For example, when we went down the hall for different activities, she would guide me safely to and from our destination, and I would counsel her when she needed advice.
I love getting the chance to examine and start conversations about art in any capacity, and thanks to a history of working with the differently abled community (and theater companies that focus on stories by/for the differently abled), I enjoy putting a spotlight on shows that explore their stories.
On a Saturday morning in May, the Bottom Line Yoga Studio, deep in the heart of the sleepy weekend loop was buzzing with activity, and the smell of fresh baked treats you wouldn’t normally associate with deep breathing and meditation. What emerged from the studio were tables full of delicious cookies and cakes that also happened to be witty and poignant without saying a word. This was Brit M. Ashe and Andrea Wichman’s (and several Chicago bakers) first foray into an international community of cooks and artists devoted to the cause of raising awareness of mental illness: The Depressed Cake Shop.
In ‘World Builders’, Max (Andrew Cutler) and Whitney (Carmen Molina) are in treatment for a shared personality disorder that renders them both fixated on internal worlds of their own creation. Alone they are socially isolated, focused so much on the maintenance of their private internal retreats that they may be a danger to themselves, but they’re brought together for an experimental treatment designed to quell their internal worlds until they fade away.
The doctor sent me home with a recommendation for a colonoscopy to see if I have inflammatory bowel disease – not to be confused with irritable bowel syndrome. This is where my Google searching picked back up. I furiously searched for answers. What is inflammatory bowel disease? What is the difference between IBD and the more common IBS? Was this disease life threatening?
Put another way: instead of existing inside the world of a film, people with CBS are instead watching a silent production unfolding around them, a production of which they are not actually a part. Indeed, the fact that the hallucinations do not directly interact with the individuals themselves often distinguishes CBS from other disorders like schizophrenia. Patients with CBS are well aware that something isn’t quite right. They are lucid, articulate, intelligent; testing negative for a swath of possible psychiatric and neurological diagnoses.
As I walked down the corridors I remember the sticky feeling on the floor. I could hear the socks peeling up off the heathered white tiles. I remember the man who threw up on himself and then dropped to the floor to do push-ups. I remember the woman I was rooming with who started talking to the ghosts at five a.m. I remember the old woman, white and frail with skin that hung slightly from her muscles, who was terrified that she would be kicked out of her house and ostracized by her daughter’s husband. She was just crying. She was inconsolable for days and then she was moved to a different ward and I’ve never heard of her since.
Friends sometimes ask how my spouse or I are adjusting to my recent neurological diagnosis. It's unusual that someone asks how the changes have affected my immediate family, even though it has caused a massive rewrite of our collective past. So many times before my behavior was described as “difficult” or “frustrating” and needs to be changed to “struggling.” We realize kids born in the 80’s were rarely diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder prior to adulthood. Still, it’s hard not to wonder how my life might be different if I had started therapy a few decades earlier.
It’s a rare, powerful thing to experience an authentic difference in ability in the titular Richard, or to see the disparaging remarks levied on him by friends and enemies directed to an actor that may have a passing familiarity. Rare and powerful is exactly how I’d describe The Gift Theatre’s “Richard III”. This production does more than entertain, it empowers us to demand more representation of long under-represented artists from the theater we see.
The physician's cure for this “slight hysterical tendency” was rest, fresh air and absolutely no work or social gatherings. It is clear as the story progresses what harm this isolation does to the main character. By the end of the story the woman does not want to leave the room that has been enlisted for her rest and envisions herself as a part of the rooms yellow wallpaper – the only stimulus in her secluded world.
