Like Mother, Like Daughter

by Marin Sardy

I am addicted to my sunglasses. I keep them with me constantly, popping them on the instant I step into the sun—or even on cloudy days, if the cover is thin. “I’m sensitive to light,” I tell people, and watch them roll their eyes.

I wear sunglasses inside sometimes at the grocery store in Manhattan. Without shades I can have a little trouble working my way through the store to buy food. The intense track lights in the produce section are so bright that I sometimes have to pause and close my eyes for a moment before moving on. Whenever I’m in there I feel like someone spotlighted on a stage. But apparently I’m the only one who has this problem. The first few times I went there, I would look around to see how other people were handling the bright light, but nobody else seemed to mind it. Eventually one day after buying salad with my boyfriend Will, I asked him if the lights bothered him. “No, not at all,” he said. I explained that I could barely tolerate them. “I’ve never noticed it,” he said.

What is going on with me? I never thought much about it until I began learning more about schizophrenia, and I discovered that heightened sensitivity to stimuli is a significant component of the illness. Now it brings up a very basic question that has always plagued me: Am I normal? I have certainly not felt normal since my mother became seriously ill with some form of schizophrenia when I was ten years old. As her daughter, I felt that her strangeness was mine too; that it seeped into me. And I could see that the problems I had at home turned me into a different kind of kid—solitary, untrusting. I know now that the isolationist tendencies of my youth were typical, often useful coping responses to untenable circumstances. But what about my dependence on sunglasses?

In this case too, I may be more “normal” than you’d expect. Schizophrenia originates in hundreds of genes, each of which has a small influence on the brain, and since half of my DNA comes from my mother, there’s a high probability that a number of her abnormal genes have shaped me. Shedding some light on this are studies showing that a range of brain differences typical in people with schizophrenia are also common in close relatives like me. If we look at sensory sensitivity, I find that my mother was renowned in our family for her extremely acute hearing and sense of smell long before her psychotic break. My father still tells stories of her almost superhuman detection of noises at the other end of the house. As for her vision, she has worn a visor for decades—a shield, I recently realized, from all the bright light.

According to a number of studies, even the way I think is shaped by some key traits that first-degree relatives tend to share with schizophrenic loved ones. It is likely, for example, that my mother and I both have an overactive “default system.” This is the network of neurons that turns on when you’re dreaming or daydreaming, allowing your mind to wander and imagine. Usually it shuts off when you need to focus on a task at hand. A slightly overactive default system is associated with high creativity, and as a writer, creativity is a trait on which I pride myself. The key difference between my mom and me is that I can turn off my default system when I need to. My mother can’t. She lives inside the waking dream of her psychosis.

My mother and I also share the trait of low “latent inhibition”—a weakness in the brain’s gating system that results in difficulty screening out irrelevant stimuli. This means I’m easily distracted. If I’m surfing the Internet and I land on a web page with an ad that shakes, flashes, changes colors, or scoots across the screen, I am rendered helpless. My brain is unable to ignore the movement, so I can’t concentrate on what I’m trying to read. When this happens I either flee the site or, if I’m dying to read what it says, I move the whole browser window so far to the edge of my screen that the ad disappears off the side of my monitor. Then I can focus.

I actually don’t think of this trait as a liability, however, at least to the minor degree I deal with it. Low latent inhibition also facilitates creative thought by alerting me to connections between disparate ideas and enabling me to think outside the box in this way. I honestly cringe at the thought of having a strong gating system. A mind on rails! How limiting! But when a person’s latent inhibition is too low, as in my mother, utterly unrelated ideas and events can seem strongly linked. The result is paranoia.

Even in unexpected places, I find traits I have in common with my mother. Many people with schizophrenia, including her, show a remarkably high tolerance for pain. The same is true of about 20 percent of close relatives. I recognize myself here. For all my sensitivity, I’ve always seemed to be oddly tougher than most when it comes to injuries and pain. As a former gymnast, I’ve run on sprained ankles a few times, and in general, the knee, back, wrist, ankle, and shin problems that came with all that pounding never bothered me much.

As a teenager I would have been horrified if someone had told me I was like my mother. As a rule, I turned away from everything fantastical or emotionally ambiguous. I wanted clear, rational answers for everything, and I tried to fashion myself into someone whose choices always made sense. I would have thought that to be like my mother meant there was something wrong with me, that I was crazy—and to be crazy was to be all wrong, completely wrong. The taint of madness was so thick I thought that even a drop of it would wreck a person.

But when I was still denying everything about me that resembled her, I denied myself the freedom to be fully human—to participate in an imperfect emotional life, and to appreciate myself as I am. When I stopped resisting our similarities, I began to understand that creativity and madness are not the same thing. To be “ill” involves being incapacitated and disconnected from life. Yet only by embracing my difference could I step fully into mine.