“Trust” (post 2) by Hernan Diaz: Helen has mental breakdown in which she fears that her “future self” won’t be able to recognize her own handwriting

In 1929, when Helen goes out for a walk in Manhattan, where she and her husband live, she feels people are staring at her, because most people are suffering from the stock market crash, but she and her husband, due to his shrewd investments, have become fantastically wealthy.

Helen gets progressively more withdrawn, at times paranoid, manic, or incoherent. Both she and her husband fear she is getting crazy like her father, who had been psychiatrically hospitalized. Indeed, Helen asks to be hospitalized in Switzerland like her now missing father.

“Because she felt increasingly lost in the new tyrannical architecture of her brain, and because she no longer trusted her thoughts or her memory, she started relying on her journals, which she kept with daily rigor. She hoped her future self, the one reading her diaries, would be able to use those writings as a measure of how far into her delirium she had gone. Would she see herself on the page? She addressed herself constantly in her entries, asking herself to believe that it was, in fact, she who had written those words in the past—even if her future self refused to believe it; even if, as she read, she were unable to recognize her own handwriting” (1, p. 83).

Comment: In multiple personality, different alternate personalities may have different handwritings and refuse to acknowledge each other. Such things are not seen in schizophrenia or anything else.

Added 5:22 p.m.: I emailed Hernan Diaz about the above.

He replied: "I simply imagined that...Amazed to hear it has a correlation in reality."

1. Hernan Diaz. Trust. Riverhead Books. 2022.