My biggest fear is schizophrenia, partly because we know so little about it. But more importantly, because the scariest thing in the entire world is not losing what you have, and not losing other people, but having what you think you have not be real. It doesn’t seem to be correlated to inheritance or any particular environmental factors. It just happens.

Honestly, thinking about diseases like schizophrenia make me think more closely about what our reality actually is. Is such a disease perhaps simply the projection of a very independent mind? Do we all have a little bit of extra-real tendencies? After all, the common phrase “your perception is your reality” speaks to the idea that each person perceives the world slightly differently. In this way, society overall has some sort of average perception of reality, which we all take to be truth. We all deviate from this mean, which causes each person to have a different personality. Some people may fall further than the mean from others, and they get labeled as ‘weird’ or in extreme cases ‘delusional.’

Ultimately, John Nash was crippled by the magnitude of his separation with the average perception of reality that the rest of society had. He was lucky to have such a wife to help him through the worst of his delusions. I hope that I have such a person in my life in the future.