Before Ntozake Shange revolutionized theater, before she was even Ntozake, she was Paulette, the only Black girl in her class, and the only one who saw things others couldn't see.

Since childhood, she could reach areas of her unconscious that were inaccessible to most adults. She had visions; she saw “historical figures, artists, people I didn’t know dancing with me, taking me to salons in Paris or roadhouses in Alabama.” They felt no less real than her actual experiences, so she didn’t distinguish between them. She didn’t even consider them daydreams. They were as real as anything that happened in her waking world: as real as her classroom, the faces of her parents, her classmates who looked nothing like her, the paper she drew on, the countryside.

If you only experienced something in your dreams, did it actually happen? She was the only person in her life who seemed to think yes, it did. Yet, she began to realize that without proof, she couldn’t argue this sort of “truth” because it was simply hers alone, and not a collectively recognized reality.

Why, she wondered, did something have to be witnessed by others, to be considered real?

The only place anyone understood this distinction was in her psychiatrist's office.

Her parents were doctors. Her father was a surgeon and he excised what was malignant and out of tune with the body. Her mother helped people get in alignment with society, to make living “work for them instead of against them,” without, Shange noted with scorn, “necessarily challenging the world as we know it.”

Both of these approaches left her wanting.

What if what was wrong couldn’t be seen or couldn’t be excised? She wondered. What if life as some soul knew it wasn’t worth living without some violent catharsis?

In the 2000 anthology, Tales from the Couch: Writers on Talk Therapy, edited by Jason Shinder, Shange reflects on these questions, through her experience in therapy.

The range of contributors is wide. George Plimpton's essay runs three breezy pages: charming, whimsical, the account of a man for whom the couch was more curiosity than lifeline. Shange's essay “The Dark Room” is something else entirely. It's the record of someone who spent decades asking not what is wrong with me but: who decided what counts as real? Who decided what language to take seriously and what to dismiss? Who decides which frameworks are palatable enough to create from?

These are the questions I have also spent my life inside too, and they’re largely what this newsletter is about. The questions that interest me most are the ones that flip the narrative—off the person being pathologized and onto the pathologizers. Who has the power to decide who another person is? Who decided there is a right way to be human, and a wrong one?

What's easy to miss when we talk about Shange, about her illness, her visions, her dissociation, is that she was never confused about her interior life. She knew exactly what was happening inside her. Her mental illness, if we want to call it that, was never invisible to Shange. It was invisible to everyone else.

But how do you live like this? What do you do when you’re alone with all you see?