A Conversation with Ellery
On madness, imagination, and The Notebook
Note: This article contains two brief references to suicidal thoughts.
A human being is a bit like a 1965 Volkswagen, according to the American philosopher Christopher Boorse.
A Volkswagen is built from a blueprint. When a car deviates from the plan, we say it’s malfunctioning. A human comes from a blueprint too, albeit a blurrier one. Maybe we don’t know exactly what the ideal human looks like, but we know that humans are supposed to have working organs and live for a long time and have lots of kids. When a person’s body stops following the plan — when their lungs stop working, when they can’t walk the same way as before — they are akin to a malfunctioning vehicle. We call that malfunction a disease, Boorse says.
Does the Volkswagen framework allow for mental illness? Boorse thinks not. That’s because there’s no blueprint for good psychological health. Someone with a substance use disorder might want to use substances, Boorse says, whereas nobody with a lung infection wants to have a lung infection. Boorse writes about Vincent Van Gogh, who suffered deeply yet produced brilliant things. Van Gogh’s depression allowed him to experience life in a rich, intense, complex way. The term “disease” doesn’t fully capture that.
And so, Boorse concludes, a mental illness isn’t really an illness at all.
Now, there are a lot of problems with this argument. For one thing, there isn’t a blueprint for the perfect human body. People disagree about what physical problems qualify as diseases — think about chronic pain, or even tone deafness. For another thing, there are objective-ish psychological goods. Almost everyone wants to feel energetic, to fall asleep easily at night, to be close to other people. And, pragmatically speaking, mental diagnoses can be helpful. At least a modern-day Van Gogh could get a day off work.
Yet I think there’s a glimmer of truth in Boorse’s essay. Mental suffering is different from physical suffering. Our minds are messier and stranger than our bodies. And sometimes psychological diagnosis flattens experience. Grief, hollowness, exhaustion turn into “depression.” Haunting, vivid images become “schizophrenia.” The desire to leave this world behind becomes “suicidal ideation.” What Boorse is getting at, I think, is the danger of allowing diagnostic categories to obscure a more human thing.
Pengkonghe Ellery Cartwright grew up in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, with a Bahamian father and a Chinese mother. He goes by Ellery. When he was 17, he moved to Vancouver Island to attend Pearson College (which is where we met). Ellery now studies Business Analytics and Management at Methodist University in North Carolina. This week, we talked about Christianity, mental illness, and what it means for something to be real. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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What’s the story behind your name?
Pengkonghe is a Chinese name where peng is my Chinese family name, and he is a mythical bird that’s said to give luck.
In the middle, there’s a typo. It’s not supposed to be kong. It’s supposed to be kang. My mother felt very guilty, for a while, because kang is healthy in Chinese and kong means empty. She was like, “Oh, no. I made an empty child.”
So I am lucky and empty, but also healthy at the same time. Except I’m not.
How did you become religious?
It’s always been kinda complicated. When I was a young tot, I didn’t really question religion at all. My family has basically never gone to church, so it was basically my parents saying, “God exists. Believe it.” I was like, “Okay.” And then when I was around 12, I was like, “God doesn’t exist. Only science is real. Dad, Mom, take that.” And they were like, “Okay. Whatever.”
What do you think led to that period of questioning?
I was a very difficult child, I think. I went out of my way to try and be different because I felt like my family was controlling me.
There was definitely some rebellion in there, but also the school I went to at the time was one of the few non-Christian schools. It was a very high-class preppy school. Definitely not the place I belonged, and the kids there were terrible. And I was very impressionable because, at the time, I was always the youngest in my class. So there was a mix between rebellion and having really bad company.
What did you find so off-putting about the school?
I didn’t find the culture off-putting until later. I just picked it up and ran with it. It made me a really bad person for a while. I lied pathologically, constantly, and I was a 12-year-old saying very obscene things. I mean, not that there’s anything inherently wrong with saying obscene things, but it was in a not-great way.
I also didn’t fit in because I’m not high-class. I am middle-class at best. There was a lot of wealth disparity, and the kids never made a deal out of it, but I could tell there was a very strong difference in the way we lived and the way we thought about things. A middle-class child with high-class ideals is never a good mix.
What were some of the differences in how you thought about things?
Well, money, obviously. I didn’t keep a wallet on me until I went to Pearson. I didn’t have a phone until I went to Pearson. So them being, like, driven to school in fancy cars or in golf carts. And the way they viewed money, and how they had new stuff every week. And not being able to go to hangouts and everything, because I either didn’t have money or they had no way to contact me because, again, the phone.
I wasn’t getting bullied, but it was kind of off on both sides. They’d never met a kid like me, and I was starting to get sick of them.
How did you come back to Christianity?
Almost all the schools in the Bahamas are Christian schools. So eventually, when I was older, I moved to a Christian school. And I was like, “Maybe I should give this stuff a try.”
I became extremely Christian between the years of 13 and 15. Like, on-my-knees-praying-every-night, Christian.
It was pretty stereotypical, really. Troubled youth enters stage left, and he’s saying obscene things, and he’s making gestures at teachers and whatever. And then someone sits him down and is like, “Hey. God loves you, man.”
And I was like, “Me? Even though I’m so flawed and useless, but also, really, really cool?” He’s like, “Yeah. Even you.”
Was that an actual conversation you had with someone at the school?
Every morning, we had an assembly, and that was basically the message every single time. So it never happened to me personally, in a one-on-one conversation, but it was a message displayed constantly.
The curriculum was a whole homeschooling curriculum. If you search up ACE curriculum — American Christian Education — it’s a series of homeschooling books with strong Christian messaging. Every book has a scripture that you have to write down several times.
I know that strong Christian messaging, in some eyes, is brainwashing, especially when you’re that young. But honestly, I thought it was a lot more balanced than traditional schooling. Every subject was taught individually. So a kid could have eleventh-grade English and ninth-grade science at the same time because they were effectively teaching themselves, instead of having to struggle with doing the same thing as everyone else.
Would you say that there were positive things you took away from religious schooling?
It helped me get my act together, in a way. But I feel like the big influence in not being a snotty-nosed rat at 15 was not Christianity, but that the people at the school were like me: for lack of a better word, they were weirdos. Kids had individual cubicles with wooden dividers in between them, but you could remove the divider and just sit with someone the entire time and talk and do work. It was one of the first places I really felt like I belonged.
Christianity itself was enlightening. Though I can’t say it had a lot of effects on my emotional state, except for the kind of stability that comes with having a belief — any belief. I feel like people who have a faith of any kind are generally more persevering. They’ve got a sense of calm to them, because a lot of different faiths come with the belief that if you do good, everything’s gonna be alright.
You mentioned earlier on that you became “extremely Christian.” What did this look like for you?
Memorizing scripture, reading the Bible for leisure. I never did go to church, but I had delusions of having abilities — Christian superpowers — in a weird way.
Christian superpowers?
I don’t know if you’ve heard of eighth-grade syndrome. It’s apparently when a person of adolescent to early adult age believes that they have secret abilities. Not to the point where they go out and become a vigilante, but it’s a very strictly held notion. It’s like when people think they can talk to rats. For me, I thought I could sense the energies of the world and manipulate them.
Were there ever things that happened to you that felt supernatural?
Yeah. I’ve never been a clumsy person, but when I was younger, things would just break around me. I remember one particular time, when I was still in the really bad prep school, before I became a Christian addict. I was talking with a friend of mine, and I said, “Stuff just breaks around me.” And she said, “That’s weird. That’s devilry and whatever.” And I said, “Watch this, I’m gonna turn the power off.”
And I sat there, and I closed my eyes really hard. The way I would go about it was, I would try and trace where the energy was going. From this light bulb, into the roof, along these walls, to the main breaker, and I just sat there thinking as hard as I could: “Break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break.”
And then it happened. We had a power outage. We got sent home early.
In an earlier conversation, you mentioned that your supernatural experiences came back during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you want to walk through what happened?
A small bit of backstory: When I was three or four, I would stare at the ceiling for hours and just think about what would happen after death. I’d get a really bad feeling in my stomach that I later learned was abject fear, and I wouldn’t be able to imagine an afterlife. My brain didn’t imagine any sunflowers and roses, or even bad stuff — poking sticks, or whatever. It was just nothing.
That happened again later on, when I was 15 or 16. It’s during quarantine, it’s nighttime, I’m trying to sleep, and my brain spontaneously says, “What do you think happens after death?” And I became so incredibly afeard that I couldn’t sleep. I prayed as hard as I could, but wasn’t released from the shackles of my fear.
I thought it would go away, but it didn’t. The same thing happened the next night. They weren’t really nightmares because I didn’t have bad dreams. It was more that while I was still awake, I was incredibly afraid because I thought what was waiting for me at the end of my life was an eternity in nothingness. Fading to black and then blackness forever, completely alone, just kind of floating there. And that thought was like, “Oh my god. Please no.”
I would just stay up until I passed out. I started going to sleep at about four in the morning and waking up with the sunrise at six or seven. And then it started happening during the day. I couldn’t be in darkness. It got so bad that I couldn’t blink for too long because my eyes were closed for too long.
And eventually, I thought I was hearing noises on my roof and outside my window. I thought those were demons waiting for me. I thought that if they noticed that I noticed them, that bad stuff was going to happen. I started seeing stuff on the walls — shadow demons.
What does hallucination feel like, in the moment? How real do the images seem?
At first, it was a lot of disbelief. But when it happens night after night, for three months, you get very immersed. I definitely thought the images were real. I don’t think I thought for a second that these were just figments of my imagination.
Did you ever view the demons as being a kind of divine punishment?
Initially, I thought they had come because I had salacious thoughts — that I was of unclean mind, that my soul was tainted by sin. I don’t know how much sinning you can get up to when you’re locked in your house for three months, so I don’t think that was it. Later on, it became more akin to a curse — like, this is just what’s happening to me.
Do you see any connection between the pandemic or lockdown and what was happening to you?
The only real connection was the fact that I wasn’t doing anything. It was kind of akin to being locked in a padded room. You know? Even if you're a normal person — I don’t know if I would call myself normal — being isolated in a place for a long time with nothing to do will start making you think some pretty weird stuff.
Were you able to talk to other people about what was going on?
Well, close to the end of quarantine, I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house. One of us was a big horror movie buff. So they were like, “Scary movies. Let’s do it.”
The first one we were supposed to watch was one called The Babysitter. And within the first couple minutes, this kid ends up with two knives sunk into his head. I think I’m known for having a pretty punky personality. But when my friends looked at me, I was probably pale in the face and shaking, and I said, “Can we watch anything else, please?” in the smallest voice possible. They immediately acquiesced because they could tell something was wrong.
I think we watched The Notebook afterwards, and I fell asleep. Put this on record: The Notebook, not a good movie.
What’s wrong with The Notebook?
Too long. Pacing, absolute garbage. I’m not the kind of person that needs the plot delivered to me immediately by trebuchet. But The Notebook is three hours long, and it’s a series of flashbacks about some old guy’s life. I don’t think he even gets the girl, in the end.
Wait — he does get the girl.
Yeah, I wouldn’t know how it ends because I fell asleep.
Anyways, after The Notebook, we’re all tired. It’s 2AM. Almost all my friends were girls. I got my own room, and I could not sleep for fear of the shadow demons. I eventually knocked on their door, and they were still awake. And I confessed, “I haven’t been able to get to sleep. I think demons are out to get me, and I am afraid all the time. It’s been going on for months now. I don’t know what to do.” I just kind of broke down and started crying.
I remember one of them was very religious. And she prayed for me. At that point, I was like, “There’s no way this helps.”
But I just felt so thankful that someone spared the thought of, “How can I help him in this moment?” You know? I’d been prayed at — not fun — but I don’t think I’d ever been prayed for until that moment. And that was really, really, heartwarming. I fell asleep in their room.
How did your family respond to the situation?
I told my parents I was having really, really horrible nightmares. I told them I wanted to see a therapist, that I wanted to get help because I didn’t feel like this was something I could deal with on my own. And they said that I should stop playing so many video games.
I didn’t bring it up again. It didn’t seem worth it.
How did you stop seeing the demons?
It was when the quarantine stopped and I started to leave the house a little more. I could sleep, just because the day was long and I was tired. I also had other stuff on my mind, besides the end of all things.
(And death kind of is the end of all things. You perceive reality through the self, and you can’t really prove that anything else is real besides yourself. So, when you die, in a way, it’s like the death of all things because you’re not around to perceive anything else.)
The thing that lasted after the hallucinations stopped was that my personality kind of fractured. I had more voices than one. There should only ever be one voice, really.
I can’t really pin down exactly when different voices appeared, but they definitely did. I’d have full-blown conversations with myself. And not in a normal way. It was more that I struggled with making friends, and I thought, “What if the friends can just be in my head?”
Would you say the voices had stable personalities, like in Inside Out, or that they were less consistent?
For me, they were very stable archetypes. The main ones were anger, fear, and a sense of conscience. It ended up getting more varied — there was lust, hunger, and so on.
I gave them names, and I could see them. I went back to high school, and I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t talk to anybody. So I would sit at empty lunch tables, and I would look around and have conversations around the lunch table with the different voices.
What did it feel like when the voices disappeared?
It felt like focusing a camera lens. When things are out of focus, they’re hazy, and you can’t really tell what one thing is and what another thing is. And then you twist a little bit, and you can clearly see that this is a tree, or something like that. I think it came from the realization that I could pin a part of me to each of these voices.
Did you ever end up seeing a therapist on your own?
No. Not even a little bit. I do think this whole thing would have been a lot quicker if I had gotten a good therapist.
The most I ever did was take a psychology class. I learned that what happened sounds very similar to an early expression of schizophrenia, which means there’s a chance it comes back later in my life. So I have that to look forward to. Maybe you can interview me again if it ever happens — see the before and after.
Do you worry about it coming back?
I don’t worry about it. I think the chances of it happening are the same as the chances of anything else happening. And even if it is going to happen, there’s not really a way for me to stop it.
When you look back, do you think your experience affected your view of mental illness?
It changed the way I thought about being “crazy,” for sure. For all intents and purposes, I was sane beforehand, and this just kind of happened to me.
So when I see people in the street with mental issues, I’ve stopped thinking “Oh, they were born that way,” or, “Oh, it’s because they’re on crack or whatever.” Stuff can just fall out of the sky and happen to people. Therapy is expensive, and even then, it doesn’t always fix the problem.
So, really, it could happen to any of us. It happened to me, and I never really forgot that it happened to me.
Are there any fictional depictions of mental illness that you resonate with?
I think the Joker movies do a really good job of depicting madness. The Joker isn’t inherently insane. He’s got a condition, but it’s not really a mental condition. He just laughs. The condition isn’t that he finds things funny. The condition is that he laughs uncontrollably.
It’s easy to point the finger and say, “This guy is insane, and I think he killed five people or something.” I’m not advocating for the killing of people. But boiling it down to craziness doesn’t help anybody. Maybe he’s not doing so well mentally right now, but at some point, he was fine. I think it’s important to work backwards to a point when someone was more stable, instead of working under the assumption that they’ve been secretly crazy this entire time.
How do you relate to people who experience “madness” in real life?
When I was going around Victoria or Vancouver, homeless people or mad people would come up to me and strike conversation. We would talk for half an hour.
The one that sticks in my mind was next to the bus stop, by the parking garage. There was a guy that came up to me, and he was like, “Should I end it all today?” And I was like, “No. I don't think so.” He asks why, and I say, “Well, it’s the first clear day we’ve had in two weeks. Clear blue sky and everything. I’m enjoying today. Are you having a good time?” He says, “Yeah. That’s good. Then I won’t.”
We end up talking about his views on the world and whatnot. I think the main thing that sticks with me is that, to these people, what they’re saying is very real. And to try to dissuade them and say, “Hey. That’s not real,” is kind of meaningless.
Because if someone had told me throughout my entire experience that I was crazy and I was imagining the whole thing, I would have been pretty offended. How could you? A strong sense of betrayal from my human peers.
That’s the kind of feeling I don’t wanna give to these people — to my people. It feels like they’re imagining it, but that’s because we’re not imagining it with them. We can write it off as imagination, but imagination in and of itself is a very potent thing.
I think that’s a good place to end. Ellery, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for having me.
