“A Memoir of Everyday Challenges: Living with Schizophrenia” (Rex Malik, 2 versions)
I met author Rex Malik, whose family came from Pakistan, at a fundraiser in Arlington VA for a local food bank (AFAC). He has a book, in two versions, about his experiences as a gay man with intermittent schizophrenia.
The 2009 book is called “A Memoir of Everyday Challenges: Living with Schizophrenia” (96 pages) and seems to be the only version in paperback print. (Oddly, there is a reseller copy on Amazon for over $750, but the other one is about $16) from Amazon Create Space.
He has replaced it in 2021 with “A Memoir of Everyday Stuff”, about 150 pages, on Kindle only, $2.99. I had trouble with my Kindle but finally got it to download. But I first had tried the Kindle app on my iPhone which would not purchase it. It seems you have to use a real Kindle device.
Most of my comments so far are based on the paper, which is a bit choppy. I start looking at the newer one and it reads more smoothly. But I wanted to put something up on this today with some basic thoughts, as they would pertain in comparison to my own narratives.
The paper copy, by the way, has odd numbers on even pages (the reverse of convention) and sometimes the last sentence of a paragraph expands to the margin. I had that problem in Word with my own first DADT draft, which went away when put through Microsoft publisher for typesetting (by a contractor/editor whom I hired).
Rex’s (I’ve seen has first name as Ray, too) starts his narrative in 1990 when he starts college at Towson St, north of Baltimore. He notes he was always good with books but awkward for other real life things, like I was (it’s called dyspraxia.) But then he started to wander, with various odd jobs and episodes and a brief schizophrenic episode before graduating from George Mason University in Fairfax VA in communications.
Yet, his life seemed to comprise moving back and forth between Virginia and San Francisco or Los Angeles and dealing with all sorts of hostel-like housing with limited privacy and personal possession (quite different from my own life, which was always private and carried around a piano and large record./CD collection and books, but involved about 8 major moves). The episodes in his life seem short and repetitive, rather than taking some new direction and leading to a sequence of new situations (you know, like in a screenplay). He was often seeking some kind of assistance like Section 8. He would later have what seemed like a more severe episode of schizophrenia and spend some time at a hospital in Staunton, VA, which he said was rather like jail. In that section, he offers a discussion of medical malpractice, misrepresentation and identity theft.
He provides some description of the symptoms, of hearing or seeing things or believing false realities. One time Anderson Cooper demonstrated the symptoms by walking around with a headset pumping voices all the time while walking on the street. These simulations are sometimes seen as questionable.
There is no connection between schizophrenia and sexual orientation, their concurrence in someone’s life is coincidental. (In fact, Amazon has recently announced banning books which frame sexual orientation or gender identity as mental illness, which has led to a dispute about Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally”, from Encounter Books).
But a comparison to my history is instructive. My college career started in 1961 (30 years before Rex’s) leading to my William and Mary expulsion, where my situation as framed as “mental illness” and not homosexuality. I would spend six months at NIH as an inpatient in the second half of 1962. Much was made about “how I saw myself” and my willing to accept socialization, here with other patients, but generally in a group setting when demanded by others. There was some “bad karma” in my attitude, which I’ve explained before but which is tricky to grasp. The official diagnosis was “schizoid personality disorder”, sometimes with “compulsive personality”, but in any case that has nothing to do with schizophrenia (which a couple of the female patients in the ward in 1962 probably had). Schizoid means having little interest in bonding with others emotionally as normally expected in tribes or families. Schizoids separate off and interact with others (other than the very select few) from a distant perch, and like to initiate their own projects and public presence rather than join with others, like in protests, so you can see how this a problem for those who want to implement group or authoritarian ideologies (like CRT) today. In my case, it probably was an adaptive strategy developed to deal with mild autism or Asperger’.s It would be related to avoidant personality.
Author: Rex Malik
Title, Subtitle: “A Memoir of Everyday Challenges: Living with Schizophrenia”
publication date : 2009 rev. 2021
ISBN: 978-1442102460
Publication: Amazon Create Space, 2009 (rev 2021), 96 pages, paper, ebook
Link: (Under development) “sharemyspace.blog”
(Posted: Friday, August 27, 2021 at 2:30 PM EDT)