Letter for August

Personal Letter from June 2026

Dear family,

I hope the days are passing with hope and relief, my people :) That you are well and breathing deep and seeing far into the wilderness that is this beautiful life. New parents, growing toddlers, aging grandparents and dying friends are all bittersweetly the instances of time rolling by, and are the treasures and tragedies of life.

I know things can be hard. Things get harder when a loved one so close to us is suffering. Today I wanted to write something with all my heart, for the sake of all of us, and for the sake of August. As you all know, I’ve been through something really similar. And I am hoping I can shed some light on what he’s going through from the perspective of someone who experienced such a “near death” and extremely fearful experience firsthand.

It’s hard. It’s really hard when something like this happens. It can feel confusing and absolutely bizarre when someone starts talking in a way that feels out-of-this world. When they don’t seem here. Yet couldn’t be there, and most certainly are not with their feet on the ground.

The talk is scary. The ghostly look in their eyes is daunting, and the dribbling words dripping from their mouths as from a faucet is something unearthly and somewhat disturbing. Psychosis is real. The emotions for all pound burdened in our chests, and the way to healing is hard.

Take a breath. Sip some hope. And read on knowing I come at this from the other side.

I can say with confidence, that though everything gets amplified, your nerves become fried, and you feel sick with the intensity of your mind, that many of the realizations you make in psychosis are real and very pertinent to your soul. Your deepest hopes, though grandiose and hard to explain reasonably, spill out of you faster than anyone around you can catch their breath. Psychosis is terrifying, thoroughly wringing, and often fares you closer to insanity than to home. And of course, you feel saner than you’ve ever felt before.

What I’ve come to learn about the psychology of it, is that psychosis is like a prism. Everything before the episode– memories, dreams, inner yearnings, traumas, regrets, thoughts or concepts about relationships all pierce through a crystalline prism in the mind, destined to refract against the walls of our consciousness. Imagine everything you’ve ever learned about yourself in the world getting refracted and splayed in true color and mystery across the terrain you see ahead for your life. It’s incredible. Psychedelic, and deeply liberating. The result can mean epiphanies, shocking realizations, and even a resounding closeness with God.

But it also means your body is taking an inordinate amount of energy and emotion to move you there. And of course, since you aren’t a prophet or an angel or a being that might be able to withstand something like that and are instead altogether human, your faults and misperceptions might refract and glow across the living room of your mind like a sharp hue of red, evolving into delusion and possibly scaring the people around you. Or yourself. It is incredibly intense.

I’ve been through this twice. Once when I was 17, and once when I was 19. First I was diagnosed with bipolar I. But they realized I didn’t have too many lows associated with bipolar disorder, and once I hallucinated in episode two, they told me I had schizoaffective disorder. Mood was present, but not the defining factor of my psychology. This is the dark and misty part of my life that I haven’t shared with too many people until now. A part of me I’ve kept private for a long time, but am called to share now, because of two reasons. As Mind the Gap readies itself for launch and a big break, I climb down from my stone tower of privacy and quiet diagnosis to prepare to share the medicine of what I have learned. And just at the moment I let down my Rapunzel golden hair, my dearest cousin and friend in the family is suffering the same illness as I once did.

August and I have always been close. Recognizing sensitive soulfulness in each other, and cherished artistry in our hearts, the music and the language of softness have always flowed easily between us. He really is so dear to me. In a family of big dogs and loud, boisterous but altogether adoring wonderful people, sometimes the quietness in our inner oceans of depth and poetry was soothing when the family got too loud. Sensitive children, with proclivities for art and dreaming, we became such close friends when I reached the age of say nine. Memories tenfold around beach chairs and shores leap to my mind as I mourn his hurting soul now.

I went to visit August two Sundays ago and I was relieved to see him there. My heart melted three times over. Teary-eyed at times, and holding each other in hugs, we were so happy to see each other. My heart, my heart, my heart. My poor cousin was going through the exact same thing as me. A desperate grasp for a new way of living. A closeness to God and in his case, the dead. A disastrous but altogether revitalizing understanding of his life as it’s been. Urgent, aching hope for healing and a dashing effort to go on in a way that keeps him alive in the deepest sense of the word. August wants to feel like he can bear to go on.

The many things he mentions are dishwashing, Poppy, singing, American Idol, and healing people through music. All of which, to me, point to the fervent prayer to relieve the pressure he’s been feeling all his life. If you think about it, it’s a pretty incredible self-realization he’s going through though it is loud and perhaps scary.

The biggest challenge of experiencing psychosis is the raging loneliness of feeling like no one understands that self-realization. And unfortunately, despite our best intentions to calm the person with our version of reality or our opinions about how they can get well, the perceived invalidation of our experience is utterly devastating. I know firsthand that it drives the motor of psychosis ten times faster and more intensely, and we feel suffocated and desperate for someone to believe us.

I’ve been trying to bring a different energy to August. I believe him, despite the spiritual and otherworldly experiences he’s been having. I know in my heart that his realizations are precious to his reality and hope, and I want more than anything for his spirit and soul to feel free. It’s clear what he’s asking for too, amidst the ‘delusions’ and psychotic symptoms. Relief. Belief. A chance to do what he feels called here to do. A dream. A prayer to be who he needs and hopes to be. He told me achingly, “I just want to feel like my family is on my side.” He wants to feel like we all believe him and trust him to take hold of his life how he wants to. And we all are on his side– we all are. But perhaps our fears and treasured realisms for him have been unintentionally devastating to him all this time, and perhaps we haven’t yet known how to help him in this way.

It’s okay not to know, it is okay to think practical, and it sure is okay to fear. My mom and dad went through so much of that too, wondering if I’d ever come back home to this world. I did, but only through an integration and permission from a psychologist and healer to accept and embrace the realities I had craved and created during my psychosis. What I mean is that only through my forgiveness of myself, only through releasing the embarrassment of having been psychotic, only through embracing the fact that perhaps I had really been ever so close to the breath of God, did I heal. Did I start creating and realizing my health and grounded truth for good. Without that, I would not– absolutely would not– be here in the same way that I am today. In the 99th percentile of those with my diagnosis.

I want to shed light on something else as well– because none of this happened before getting out of the hospital. This wasn’t something that an inpatient unit could do for me. No. Realizing truth and integrating my realities healthily is not something the mental health institutions yet know how to recognize or espouse in their patients. In fact sometimes it can be the opposite, much to the devastation of people on the schizophrenic spectrum. The primary goal is stabilization. And that is important, has its place, and feels deceivingly like healing. Medicine perhaps, holistic healing up the staircase of transformation and relief, perhaps not. It’s my hope that one day they will know how to heal us completely– perhaps with some psychological research of my own.

The truth of what got me out of the hospital wasn’t my health or wellness, wasn’t my “coming-to”, wasn’t my salience magically healed. I was in fact, sedated beyond belief. What had gotten me out of there, was a meticulous calculation that had exorcised my humanity, to the point where I left a husk and a shell of a person, so sedated that one minute ticking by, I perceived and actually felt as if it were an hour. That quietness, the defeat I had accepted, the surrender I had undertaken through the last week of my being there, had been the relinquishing of all that I had realized, hoped, and dreamt while in psychosis. No longer was I begging to be seen. I now decided to shrink myself down into a pill they could swallow. Into a husk of a person so they believed I was sane again. Stable again.

A number of sociologists and psychologists have come to understand and name the phenomenon of “The Good Patient”. They observed in a number of asylums, prisons and mental institutions that good behavior meant complying with faintly human but concrete observable signs of “health”: showers like clockwork, attending every group, taking every medication compliantly, food, sleep, medications and waking up on time, and most importantly, adopting ever-so-passive behaviors so they don’t see any fight or resistance in you anymore. That is how they trust you to be sane again. That is how I got out the second time, after a month of fighting for my own truth. But in the end, the pain of being inside there alone was far more painful than forfeiting that. So I decided to swallow all pride and dignity and get myself home to my family.

I want to take a step. I want to venture forward gently towards you all, and remind you of the tender soul and painful ache it is to be alive in a mind that catastrophizes and amplifies alike. I have faltered many times in trying to explain the pain. Beyond trying the impossible with my doctors, my own family struggled to make sense of my words and experiences. It didn’t make sense through the filters and layered seasons of memory wound up in the loving relationships we had. Meaning that those closest to me had their own stake in our relationship– they weren’t a neutral party in the story of my healing. They love you immensely, but misunderstandings reflect and dance across conversations and arguments and tears, and my feverish convictions that no– I am not okay– and not because of this. Because of the motor you drive against my worried heart. The times you unintentionally faltered when I needed you. Even though I still love you. Even though you’re right here. Despite that fierce love, those fierce words that no, daughter, you are not okay, I’m in crisis. And I need you more than ever to see me.

My venture is this that follows. Because I believe in heart and grit, healing and soul, August and me. We are the village. Despite living miles apart, cities, states and at one time continents, we always have been the village for each other. And I love that so much. This family is joy. Laughter. Games. Music. We have life and light and new beginnings and mighty curiosity and brims of chapters of stories of human love. Our stewardship, our faiths, our journey towards hope and deeper love is miraculous. Is astonishingly beautiful. And my hope is the following for our most vulnerable family member right now: can we surround each other with tenderness and navigate August’s struggles together? Can the hopes and dreams of us idealists, and the pragmatism and practical reasonings of us realists, and the truth of us mystics all come together? Can we pray and congregate and commune for him? Pitch in for him? Sing for him? Let’s surround him with love, and support his courage and healing with his wishes at the center.

I want to preserve his hope to sing and play. I want him to be held by us and supported by a community of like-minded and abled people who can hold him up, and not let him fall. I want him to stay cheerful and believing, stay hopeful and true to his heart. The doctors will stabilize him; the social workers will teach him return skills. But it’s our job to support and nourish him from the soil up. I want to venture for him.

And disability housing exists– group homes with friends and supportive allies are out there. Nonprofits with missions pure as moonlight are out there with open arms and hearts to the ones who falter sometimes, who stutter, who fall down. We should build social infrastructure for him. Architecture so sound he won’t be dismayed or feel betrayed by his thoughts or fears, and lesser still by family members who love him as dearly as we do. Whether he finds this joy and purpose in Hickory, Charlotte or elsewhere, let’s craft an adventurous life for him, within means of safety and relief for everyone. Let’s nurture this life of his, and protect it from harm. Let’s hurry, hurry, to do so too.

I’m planning to visit him a lot. Call him too. I’m hoping to hold him close and emit the healing I’ve done into his bones. I’m going to swing him on my back and carry him up the mountain called healing. Support him every step of the way. Create new pathways he could discover and ultimately believe in him as he makes his way to the top. And I won’t let go.

I’m not sure exactly how it will pan out, and I may venture at times this way or that, but I want us to stay open to him not just being the impossibly “Good Patient”, but the incredibly real August. He can do this. And so can we. I trust his residency like rocks and earth and rain. And I know he’ll get better. And when the time comes, let’s welcome him back with the support and radical acceptance and validation he needs. One piano piece, one prayer at a time.

With gratitude and love,

Phoebe <3