Saints, Angels, My Brain, and That Belgian City For The Mentally Ill

"Huh," he says, "has anyone ever told you that you have brisk reflexes?"

The first known person with what we today call multiple sclerosis was a woman named Lidwina of Schiedam in the 1400s.

Her symptoms started after she fell and broke her leg while ice skating as a teen. Subsequently, she suffered from ailment after ailment (with all of them possibly stemming from one disease). The Catholic Church designated her a saint after she died, because even as her body was literally falling apart, she dedicated herself to healing others. Lidwina is the patron saint of ice skating (okay, kind of rude) and of chronic illness.

Lidwina spent a lot of her life fasting and not sleeping as a result of — or maybe in an attempt to cure — her illnesses. A medieval scholar named Caroline Walker Bynum wrote that Lidwina became progressively more disabled and eventually she could not use her legs, blood poured from her every orifice, and her skin, her bones, and parts of her intestines started falling off of her in chunks. (Possibly an exaggeration.)

In her authenticating document from Schiedam, specialists reported her parents kept pieces of her organs in a vase in their home, and that it gave off a “sweet odor.”

The Catholics are freaks.

I’ve never studied the saints. I barely knew the famous ones apart from friends having St. Christopher or St. Joseph medals. But I’ve started looking into them. Maybe for guidance? Maybe just to know more trivia. (I recently invented something called “Plant Jaunt” where I walk around taking pictures of plants and learning their names. Only had time to do it twice but I highly recommend it.) Maybe the saints are just another random hyper-fixation that’ll pass. (I guess it’s been here a while actually without my realizing it.) My friend Leland got me a baseball cap for my birthday that says “The Vatican City Cardinals” and when asked about it by another friend, he replied: “Gabe is Jewish. He’s more like a fan of Catholicism.” (I’m not really.) I just think everything they do is so dramatic and a lot of their stories are really fucked up (non-derogatory). Maybe in the hard lives of the saints, I’m looking for solidarity.

There’s something wrong with my brain. Beyond mental illness, I mean. I’m on this rollercoaster of finding more and more symptoms but not wanting to seem hysterical. Maybe I’m not really sick, I tell myself, and I’m just scaring the people who love me. I feel embarrassed. It’s probably nothing. I should stop talking about it. I should stop looking into it. I’m giving myself problems. I’m overthinking. I probably just want attention. I’m wasting money. I’m aimless and searching for my life’s plot, but I’m not the main character in a John Green book, for fuck’s sake. Is it really worth spending thousands of dollars (after insurance) to find out I’m a hypochondriac? Maybe the doctor is right, and I should just lose weight. (I am 5’4, 148 lbs.) Won’t I feel stupid when it turns out I don’t have a serious neurological condition and I was just fat all along? (I know. I can hear myself. I know.)

Maybe like Lidwina, I need the proof of my guts actually falling out of my body to believe anything is wrong. My parents probably would not display my intestines in a jar in the living room. I mean… My mom might want to, but I have to believe my dad would put his foot down.

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In my research, I discovered the non-binary saint, which I’m extremely late to. (Gender scholars love religious minutia and many have written about this saint already. Those academic nerds know more about God than any church-going good old boy.)

The saint’s name was Wilgefortis. Her father forced her to get engaged to a king when she was a teenager. In response, she prayed to become ugly and God grew her a beard. Her father was furious and crucified her. So all in all, a pretty standard coming out story.

Here’s where it gets fun: Some scholars believe that “Wilgefortis” is just a wood carving of Jesus Christ that people found too feminine, so they had to scramble to make up a story. “Oh her? Don’t worry. It’s not Jesus with a BBL. It’s a different ‘bearded woman’ saint. What was her name? Uh. Wilgefortis?” Sounds legit. Completely explains the bearded figure with feminine features up on a cross.

“Some older images of the crucified Christ were [then] repurposed as Wilgefortis, and new images [were made to] clearly intended to represent the saint created, many with female clothes and breasts,” Ilse E. Friesen wrote in her 2001 book “The Female Crucifix.” (Sick title.)

The person in the art (Wilgefortis/metrosexual Christ) was dressed in a “full-length tunic that might have appeared to be like that of a woman” instead of the loincloth men were typically crucified in. (You’ve seen sexy shirtless Son of God before.) In the ensuing 150 years, the telephone game turned the figure into an “androgynous icon” and the legend of Wilgefortis was solidified.

Anyway, in related news, some lunatic Christians with a lot of power want trans and non-binary people to die. Maybe afterwards, we’ll all be made into saints.

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In the 2012 University of Alberta research paper titled “Workplace Functional Impairment Due To Mental Disorders,” the authors examine disabilities that stem from mental illness and how that pertains to workplace accommodations. FTW (or fit to work) designations specifically for mental health are made by humans, and humans have biases and humans make errors. It doesn’t help that these decisions can be stagnant, but mental disorders are non-linear. Flare ups happen. Impairment fluctuates. People relapse. Exhaustion exhausts. Mania… manias. “Disability” isn’t a fixed state with fair rules.

“For most people,” the authors write, “work is probably second only to love as a compelling human activity.” Wilgefortis! (This is my new way of saying Jesus Christ. Is it happening?)

Work being the metric for which psychiatrists were measuring disability seems dubious. Disability assessments for mental health are especially precarious when ability to work determines it. I’m able to work, and that’s probably a symptom of my mental illness.

In fact, I’m in a bit of a manic episode right now. (Isn’t it self-aware that I know that?) (Will it stop me?) (No.)

I’ve gotten three small tattoos in the span of 36 hours, but I’ve also had three job interviews. I don’t want to sleep, and can’t really. I’m babysitting a cat who longs to eat my dog’s food, and my dog would die to eat the cat’s litter and they fight each other to the death over it. I am making frenetic notes in my notes app. I got quoted 3,400 dollars for MRIs of my brain and cervical spine because the neurologist suspects I might… how to put this gently? Be the patron saint of figure skating. It was 11,000 before insurance. I’m gonna have to call around and see if one of those off-brand radiology centers will take me. I also want to cancel my cable but I can’t find my cable box anywhere. A bill passed in the Senate that makes me so scared for my friends that I have thrown up in my mouth thinking about it. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is bragging about getting the bill’s name changed and Noem has opened a concentration camp in Florida, which is wild because as a Floridian I didn’t think it could get any worse down there. (I’m sorry. I don’t know where to put comedy anymore.)

I can’t remember if I did something yesterday or five minutes ago or in a dream.

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The patron saint of mental illness is St. Dymphna. (It’s not actually our lord and savior Carrie Fisher? I don’t buy it.)

Dymphna was 15 when she was martyred, also by her own father, because she wouldn’t marry him. Her father. Her father wanted to marry her. It’s a whole thing. She was Irish. She carried lilies and a sword. But the most interesting aspect of St. Dymphna is the town she is the patron saint of, which to this day acts as a deinstitutionalized center for the mentally ill.

In the city of Geel in Belgium, most people “adopt” residents with mental health issues or disabilities into their families. Instead of being put into a hospital, psychiatric patients are placed with these host families and taught to integrate into society. They hold jobs, help with tasks, and spend time being part of a loving home. (Check out this article from March 1969 in Time Magazine about the town.) Some stay full time in homes, others sleep on the hospital.

There’s no stigma. There’s no separation. There’s no fear. It started centuries ago when Dymphna’s church was first founded, and a couple thousand people with mental illness flocked there to pray to their saint. The farmers took them in and they helped with daily tasks and eventually became part of the fabric of Geel.

Some of these “boarders” have been in families for decades, the idea of hosting being passed down from grandparents to parents to children. The kids of Geel grow up around people with varying disabilities and mental illnesses and can choose to keep participating in the system if they want to. (Both the boarders and the families are put through a selection process.)

“Here no one is afraid of mental patients,” psychiatrist Herman Matheussen told Time Magazine. “When a schizophrenic plowing a field suddenly stops and begins gesticulating in a hallucinatory argument with an imaginary persecutor, his foster father may say calmly, ‘Joseph, why don’t you finish that furrow?’”

Because of this openness and kindness, “the number of patients grew in proportion to the growing city’s reputation abroad and the economic benefits flowing to the city provided further motivation to the inhabitants,” according to Jackie L. Goldstein and Marc ML Godemont’s 2003 essay “The Legend and Lessons of Geel.”

It’s not lost on me that I’m becoming obsessed with a city like Geel as the future generations of our lawmakers’ families are etched into the book of death. The names of those who voted it in (Vance, Thune, Murkowski) will be remembered among Eichmann and Goebbels and Himmler, I hope. (Even as I know that we’d be lucky to survive this and come out the other side where there might be any such Nuremberg-esque trials.) Millions of disabled Americans will lose their healthcare. Children will be traumatized by ICE arrests and family separations. The unhoused will lose access to much needed social workers (who are freaking out in the r/socialwork subreddit). Nursing homes will close and where will the elderly go from there? Is that who the ignorant or hateful pawns of this administration think they need protection from?

No one has more of a boner for trauma than a group that has never faced trauma. It’s diabolical. I’m sick of the slobbery pleasure of the “what if” crew.

What if an illegal immigrant came into my home and hurt my daughter? (Sure, but what about her basketball coach or her freshman year boyfriend or your friend Greg? What about them?)

What if a woman got pregnant and had an abortion every time JUST to try to trap and then ultimately hurt her ex boyfriends? (What a not-good knock off Blumhouse “culturally relevant” horror pitch. I’ll pass.)

What if a trans woman became a WNBA star and broke all the records? (Do you… watch the WNBA? What if the cis women in the WNBA had equivalent salaries to the MNBA? Oh, suddenly we don’t care?)

What if my white child has to go to a “worse” school? What if my white child has to see a homeless person pee on a bush because no places have public bathrooms anymore? What if the elote man is a human trafficker and he wants to traffic my white child?

Stop defending the system. The system doesn’t fucking work. I can’t stand opening CNN and seeing “vote-a-rama!” as the headline for the Senate vote on Trump’s fascist bill that qualifies as domestic terrorism. Vote-A-Rama?! I’d ask if this is a game to you people, but I already know that it is.

Late at night, I Google flights to Geel. “What is there to do in Geel?” “Can anyone visit Geel?” “Belgium citizenship hard to get?” It’s difficult to know what are symptoms of my increasing neurological problems and what is genuine anxious dread.

In the last few weeks, I’ve:

1. Made an entire breakfast, grabbed my backpack and left for work, with the meal on the counter.

2. Forgotten the words for almost everything, the most interesting of which was calling a grocery cart a “food stroller” in a moment of frustration.

3. Looked at my phone and found text messages I don’t remember sending.

And on and on and on. And that’s been the least frustrating part.

At my first physical therapy appointment through Cedars-Sinai, the therapist was confused as to why I was there. There’s only a couple things I can do to help you, he said after looking over the referral from my (bad) neurologist. You have some hip tightness but that’ll be three sessions tops. What does your doctor think I can do? I said I was worried about numbness in my lower extremities. He seemed to think PT wasn’t the cure.

“Has anyone checked your reflexes?” No. He checks them.

Huh, he says, has anyone said to you that you have brisk reflexes?

What the fuck are brisk reflexes?

It’s called “hyperreflexia.” That’s what it says on my chart.

It apparently means there’s some malfunctioning between my brain, my spinal cord, and my reflexes.

Again, I feel so silly and hysterical. I’m being a big baby. I’m gonna get all these tests done, and see all these specialists, and learn nothing in the end and then feel even worse about myself. They don’t communicate with each other. No one knows the puzzle, just piece by piece as it goes. Plenty of people forget words. Plenty of people forget what they were just doing. Don’t recognize pages and pages of Google searches they must have done because how else would they be there? Have arms that don’t work, can’t open anything, can’t hold anything, twitch wildly at random times. Drop phones, drop cups. Never feel rested.

Maybe for some form of comfort, along with saints, I’ve started reading about angels. When I was a kid, my bedroom walls had angel border spools along the middle of the wallpaper. I had a shelf with some angel figurines. People got them for me because of my name. (Female version.) When I tell customers I am “Gabriel” at the shop where I work, a lot of times they reply, “Like the angel.” Yes, yes. Like the angel. I feel a weird pride in that now and it is actually comforting. I Google art of my eponymous angel, and in all of them he looks stunning. Glowing skin, flowing curls, soft features. He’s a twink, but one with a good heart, you know? Like Wilgefortis. Or Jesus. Or me.