MANIC EPISODE #1: Age 21
I always had a feeling that I didn’t belong. My mind was working all the time; most of that time dissecting and pulling interaction apart as if I could discover its inner meaning. Everything was about me and none of it good. A therapist once told me that at some point in my life that trait had some adaptive value; it protected or defended me in some way. Now it only served to make me want to escape my own mind. To flee. To dive down into a hole in the dark and not see. Or hear. Or think.
At one time I thought that my recreational drug use had intensified the problem. An acid trip once made me think that the TV and radio were talking to me, that my parents (although I was away at college) were coming to my apartment to “get me”, that my car was being stolen, that I was dying. Sometimes I saw my hands and thought that they were small, that I was small, and that perception made me happy. Sometimes I saw people’s heads as larger than their bodies so they reminded me of babies. These distorted perceptions whispered of the acid’s smoothness, not its jaggedness, and thus didn’t threaten me.
But I couldn’t feel myself. (I could only hear myself. Inside.) And it bothered me to know that I would always hear that voice.
I had been a sterling student, answering every question, diving headfirst into every discussion. Now, in my classes I held my head down. If I spoke, my voice was unfamiliar to me, the looks of my classmates jeers, the comments of my teachers, ridicule.
“Hold your chin up,” my father said. “You don’t really believe people are saying those things about you, do you?” My education teacher said, “In the future, designer drugs will make you think better, perform better. There will be a drug for everything! Look at what Prozac can do now!” There were snickers in the classroom. I had taken Prozac for months and it had done nothing to still the frantic vibration of thoughts in my head.
At 21, I found myself in the hospital. I hadn’t eaten or slept for three days and my constant talking was driving my roommate crazy. The storm of thoughts in my head were thrilling to me, and I knew that my life was about to take off. I was on the brink of a new discovery. I was Jesus Christ.
In the morning, I had walked the two miles to campus, smiling at the roofers on a neighborhood house. Arriving in the psychology building, I read the exam scores, and noticed a very young African American man (probably my age) standing next to me. He was looking at the scores. I thought, “Can he read?”. In my mind, he couldn’t read and I knew I had to be his tutor. Did I speak to him? Would he have known something was wrong with me? A woman in her 40s wearing raspberry lipstick and tight jeans was waiting in the hallway and walked toward me. “A prostitute,” I thought.
When my psychology class was halfway over, I went inside and stood in the back of the huge lecture hall full of students, and began to loudly ask questions. I have no recollection now of what I asked him. My professor answered at first, then grew impatient with my questions, came, and asked me to leave. Without argument, I did. (Could he not–a doctor of psychology–for God’s sake, tell that something was wrong with me? Or did he not care?) I wandered to the student services building, noticing the bees buzzing in the September sun, and thinking they were like me, Devorah, “bee”). When I arrived at Student Services, two women with blue eyes spoke to me kindly. Was one of them my mother? No, her eyes were too blue.
My anthropology class was mixing into her consciousness. I was studying the Dinka–cattleraisers of the Sudan, and to me, the African American girls were cows (traded as dowry with wives?) I had dressed to look as sleek as possible. I wanted to look like a pretty cow, so I wore black jeans (my legs should be one color) and white tennis shoes (my feet should be another). The young man who’d been looking at me earlier was looking at my legs. “Would he buy me?”, I thought. I am a pretty, meaty cow.
When my parents came to commit me to the hospital, I thought my father was planning sex with my gay roommate. My mother extending me an apple (trying to get me to eat something, anything) made me believe my mother was Eve, and I would not eat. I could not eat that apple. My head buzzed around me. That day I had seen an apple on the ground and bees buzzing around it, and I felt warm and golden inside. The policeman who had walked toward me kept licking his lips, and I thought that his lips were salty and he was Lot.
As I wandered on campus, my friends had pulled up in a Jeep and called to me. My friend offered me a banana and I ate. Hours earlier I had gone into a co-op grocery store, ravenous from not having eaten for 48 hours. A young woman had said, “Try one of these snap peas,” broke it open, and handed it to me. It was sweet and crisp in my mouth, and that touch of food was enough to curb her hunger so she could continue to roam the streets.
When my friends brought me back to my house, I sat on the porch swing. I began speaking to my friend, a linguistics major. Suddenly the connections between words became clear. `P’, she began speaking the words of other languages. My roommate came out onto the porch and jumped on the normally untouched mini-trampoline. His red hair flashing, he looked to me like Woody Woodpecker, his head seeming large for his body, his smile and silent laughter smug. Inside, the worst was coming.
When my father tried to put me into the car, I fought him. The car was a hearse and I was going away to die. My mother sat in the back with me, and I said, “Second class citizens, right, Mom?” I tried to speak to my father in sign language, but he couldn’t look at me and drive the car. I got angry and refused to speak more.
In the psychiatrist’s office, I would not speak. “May I speak to your parents?” he asked. “She needs to go to a hospital,” he said.
In the parking lot of the hospital, I tried to run away. It was dark, I was a deer, they were wolves. My dad caught me and carried me in, and they strapped me to a gurney. When I reached a room, they put a needle in my arm and I strained not to feel it. I was my Grandma Rose now, and they were testing my strength, but I wouldn’t die this time.
Some days later, I looked out the window and saw dirt and machines digging. I couldn’t get out, and there was no place to go. It was the future, and the world outside was grim. My underarm hair was growing and I wanted it to grow long. I would shave my head. They put a shower cap on me and took me into a sterile room with a tunnel in it. I laid down in the tunnel, becoming once again, my Grandma Rose. I would not die. I would not cry. I would not give them the satisfaction.
The next day, I rode in a van across the street where I was unloaded and escorted to a waiting room. My parents were with me, but I was watching the kicking, screaming man being dragged into isolation. I went to my room. They woke me at night to take medicine. They weighed me every day. I talked to the people who talked to me. I ate salad and bananas. I drank apple juice that came out of a giant steel machine. I saw my family.
They looked worried about me. They talked. I answered. Day turned to night. “I want to go home,” I said.
Back to school in time for finals. I had to explain to my teachers that I’d been ill. Would they let me make up my work? In my linguistics class–a small group seminar–I had begun a discussion of incest before my sudden exit to the hospital. The class had become a free-for-all of discussion of sexual topics, and more people approached me after class to talk that day than I had spoken to all year. Did they remember?
When I failed my psychology test and talked to my professor about it, he told me that I couldn’t retake his multiple choice exam. “You did fine on your other finals,” he said. “But they were essay questions,” I said. “Did you think I was on drugs or something? Did you know what was wrong with me?”, I asked him. “I knew you weren’t on drugs,” he said. “I knew there was something wrong with you.”
MANIC EPISODE #2: Age 21
I was on lithium. I began to eat. And eat. And eat. I put on thirty pounds in three months. I didn’t accept my need for the medication, so I stopped taking it and began to lose weight. (This battle with appetite and medication would become an ongoing problem). A sharp feeling began to enter my head. I stopped feeling hungry. I stopped eating. People’s speech turned automatically into an interior language that was hostile and disparaging. I mad the decision to leave my boyfriend one day. I left him the next. I moved into a house full of girls, knowing none of them, and began walking to class, riding on the back of a young man’s motorcycle, and at night sitting on my porch talking to strangers walking by.
I was writing a paper and planned to move to Mexico to learn Spanish. I talked to an academy in Cuernavaca and to one of its former students. I would graduate soon and I would go. One morning, my sister (who would later become a doctor) came into my room. “We’re packing your clothes,” she said. “What do you want to take?” Running past her, down the stairs, onto the porch where stood my best friend and two men, I remembered that I’d stopped taking my medication. A woman police officer came up the steps. “Hi there,” she said. I tried to run past the uniformed woman, who grabbed me, handcuffed me, and told me I had to get in the car or be forced into it. In the car, my hands behind my back made my robe fall open. My sister tried to cover me up.
At the hospital I stood outside the elevators and I was a deer. My brother-in-law was looking at me as a hunter looks at its prey. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I yelled. In an examining room, I stepped on the scale. My friend said, “Please don’t hate me for this,” and cried. I stared at my crying friend and I wasn’t sure who she was.
I had made my boyfriend swear he wouldn’t put me into the hospital. He had done so with ease, and my friend would tell me later that he did that because he didn’t care about her–he wasn’t willing to accept responsibility for her. But she felt no resentment. I only felt resentment for those who had taken away my power.
My father would later say, “If it weren’t for us, you’d be institutionalized–you know that?”
Fighting my way back to health after leaving the hospital the second time went slowly. I sat on the back patio of my parents’ house and chain-smoked. The anti-psychotic I was on (Haldol) made my tongue feel thick and immobile. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork, yet everyone wanted me to commit to taking classes in the fall. Daily I wanted to die.
The doctor I was seeing tried many different medications, but none of them worked. “Bringing someone up from depression is a lot harder than bringing someone down from mania,” he said. Welcome back to lithium.
When I later became “stabilized,” functioning properly again, I moved back to my college town and finished my degree. I began to work again and began to eat. And eat. And eat. Three sizes later, I called my doctor. “My appetite is out of control,” I said. “Being fat is making me depressed.” “The lithium isn’t putting the food in your mouth,” the doctor said from his car. “We tried you on all of the other possible drugs.”
“There has to be another school of thought,” I said. “Yeah? Well, you go find it,” he said. I hung up the phone.
Even after finding a doctor whom I trusted and who listened to what I said about my state, I struggled with what I called “twinges” of paranoia, thoughts of death and the desire for it.
“I know how you feel,” my friends would say. “I was really in a funk a few weeks ago.” I smiled and wondered, “Am I really making too much of my problems?” I came to believe that there are people who are born without the capacity for happiness. A family friend’s son, who had been depressed for years, committed suicide, and my belief was confirmed. (This same boy’s father also killed himself years later).
A casual boyfriend said, “I can make you happy”, and later, “You have to work to be happy”, and then “You won’t let yourself be happy.” Were any of these ideas true?