Self-Consciousness

My aunt, my mother's sister, was a young adult when she took her first job and was sent home the same day for disturbance. She reported that everyone was talking about her, saying things about her. My family, my grandparents and aunts, uncles, were baffled. So slight, foolish, yet disturbing, it took them some short while before realizing that this sudden and odd stance was not nonsense or silliness or even the expression of reluctance of a shy or nervous girl venturing out into the world for the first time, but a phenomenon suddenly apprehensively intuitively threatening, ominous, requiring the visit of the local doctor, and soon after, further inquiry with specialists. Not paranoia alas, which would have been completely understandable in the scrutinous and begrudgerous world of a small town Irish midlands village at the middle of the 20th century: Hyperawareness and deftness in accommodating others through self-deprecation being stock in trade social skills. No.


Diagnosis: schizophrenia.


I spent every summer until I was seventeen in that family household, and my aunt lived there with, until he died, my grandfather, retired Guard, and my uncle, retired Guard. I am someone who will shortly complain about a similar sense of hyper social awareness, but paradoxically I am often completely cluelessness. That I sensed something odd about my aunt, is true. That I never questioned her situation, her lack of occupation, or friends, or independence, or driver's license, is a fact. That I had a vague understanding of health problems is also fact, but I was for some time in the understanding that they involved sinus and allergy suffering. Behold the great observer! My uncle had to tell me her story when I was well into my twenties for me to finally say Oh yes! Now I get it!


Since seventeen, I have visited Ireland many times, and have lived there twice, for three months, and for seven months. The family household is now my uncle's. My aunt lives in some form of institutional 'supervised-independence' housing situation in Mullingar. The family report is vague. The vague report includes: she seems to like it very much.


My uncle also informed me of suspicions he had of similar symptoms in at least two other family members, cousins. It's amazing I have been told anything about this, since the Irish don't talk about anything. As the saying goes "They wouldn't tell you if your coat was on fire." Or something like that . . . :|


I wonder: Isn't there a link between the very style of Irish culture: the hyper-aware social skills, the possible begrudgeries, the "valley of the eyes" sydrome, and the symptoms of schizophrenia, or other less serious neuroses? A post-colonial critic would probably understand much of Irish culture in terms of strategies that have been developed as resistance: their power of language, especially their love of irony; and frankly their love of making a fool out of another, especially setting someone up to make a fool out of themselves.


This is no doubt one reason why an Irishman can't take a compliment. He wouldn't trust that it is genuine, just an opportunity to see if he would run away with his own self-importance. The Irish pursue an "overextended humility", to use Maureen Dezell's term, in Irish America: Coming Into Clover. It is a culture in which one must always be aware of possible subtexts. And irony is a tool that requires an awareness of subtext. In The Gutenberg Elegies, author Sven Birkerts argues that one reason young readers today dislike works by the likes of Hnery James or Charles Dickens, is that they miss the complexities of tone (IE Irony) in the language. Rather, they are just aware enough to know they are missing something. How paranoid might an already sensitive person become in a culture in which you are always in danger of "missing something?"


Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy posited: Are there neuroses of health? Well. Are there neuroses of culture or ethnicity? I did a quick Google search on ethnicity and schizophrenia and found surprisingly little, but it was only a quick search. Interestingly, there are some studies relating the heightened psychological troubles of immigrants. Sounds similar. Doesn't the liminal state, or the experience of the Outsider, relate to paranoia, for example, in some way?