Sandy’s voices within

By Kath Gannaway
SHE has lived with schizophrenia for more than 30 years – the twin voices she calls tweedledee and tweedledum first invading her mind as a young woman, just out of high school, and shaping her life ever since.
Labelling them so disrespectfully, Sandy says, diminishes their power.
The other voice, the voice which has provided salvation from a life she neither planned for, nor wants, is poetry.
Sandy Jeffs is a poet.
Reading on Sunday before an audience at a fund-raiser for a proposed mental health facility in Yarra Glen she cajoles “I wish I had a guitar to hide behind … it’s just me and my words.”
As the published author of five poetry books and a recently published biography “Flying with Paper Wings – Reflections on living with madness” her words are all that is needed.
She has said they are her salvation, but they are also powerful tools to be grasped by others looking for insights and hoping for some understanding of the world which comes under the broad brush of ‘mental illness’.
Her poetry is both dark and comical – sometimes in the same poem.
She says poetry has given her the means to recreate an identity shattered by mental illness.
“I call myself mad and write about my madness as a way of reinventing my life,” she said.
Not constrained by political correctness, saying she is not afraid to claim her madness … and to share it.
The book is a journey from a ’50s childhood and teenage years marked by a violent home life and social isolation, through deep and disturbing psychotic episodes, hospitalisation in mental institutions, loss and despair at unfulfilled life expectations, to the profound effect of friendship and support, acceptance in her own community, and ultimately the life-line she has found to living a self-sustaining life through her poetry and her work as a public speaker.
Compelling, heartbreaking and uplifting, Flying with Paper Wings offers an opportunity to walk in Sandy’s shoes.
It offers insights into the personal life of a family, the mental health system – for better and worse, and the social stigma which comes with the tag “mentally ill”.
In 2008 Sandy told her story to Andrew Denton on a documentary on mental health called Angels and Demons.
In his foreword he says “Despite the horrors of her journey, there is no self-pity in this book. Rather, there is a sense of wonder that a woman who entered her forties with no future, identity or self-esteem, finds herself, a decade later, a published author, sought-after speaker and a human being with hope.”
“She knows better than anyone than anyone that there is nothing romantic about madness and she doesn’t gild the lily here,” he said.
When Sandy said at the Community Healthfulness event on Sunday “I wouldn’t wish mental illness on Satan,” you know she has been to hell and back … and that the journey is not necessarily over.
It’s not a journey anyone would choose, but it is one, told through Sandy Jeff’s eyes, that is ultimately a privilege.
Flying with Paper Wings is printed by The Vulgar Press and is available at book stores, or on-line at www.sane.org