Esmé Weijun Wang

Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer.

Quotes

• I have been taking these photographs as I am dead, and then I look back at these photographs to re-experience what it was like, as someone who experienced themselves as a dead person. And they’re the same. It’s very much the same experience, just one is visual and one is more verbal. Both are ways to get through a very difficult experience, and they’re also ways to remember it.
  • On using various mediums to highlight an experience in “Schizophrenia Terrifies: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang” in The Paris Review (2019 Feb 4)

• I often say that medicine seems great if you have a broken arm, but if you end up with some more mysterious ailment, or a confusing autoimmune disorder, then you will become obsessed with the color of the coconut water you drink. The more lost I became in terms of my own health, my own mental illness and chronic illness, whether that was named late-stage Lyme disease or dysautonomia, or whether that was named “the mysterious autoimmune disorder that nobody could figure out,” the more I was searching…
  • On feeling certainty of safety when young in “Schizophrenia Terrifies: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang” in The Paris Review (2019 Feb 4)

• I do want to be careful not to glamorise mental illness when it comes to creativity because more often than not it actually tends to inhibit creativity…
  • On avoiding perpetuating stereotypes about mental illness in “Esmé Weijun Wang: ‘I don’t want to glamorise mental illness… it inhibits creativity’” in The Guardian (2019 Jun29)

• I believe, behind what’s called “narrative therapy,” which uses storytelling to distance a person from their experiences in order to tell a different story about their lives. Because we often are the life stories that we tell ourselves about who we are; we create the scaffolding that we hang our narratives upon. Is this a treatment? I think so…
  • On people creating their own narratives in “Reaping the Blooms: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang” in Columbia Journal (2019 Mar 5)