There was nothing random about being flooded with memories of my early childhood. Watching the dog give birth may have triggered it, or perhaps being so utterly isolated sparked the maternal instinct as a means of new companionship, but what matters is that for the first time since Jim died, I could feel the heft of my pregnancy again, and I could pick back up where my mind had left off, at the five-month mark. Yet there was something different this time. What was growing inside of me had a name, a familiar presence, a perfectly defined identity: it was Yoro. And whenever I felt the need to talk to my belly I would use that name, knowing that a fetus’s tiny eardrums are already formed by the fifth month. Thus Yoro could hear what those other than Jim hadn’t cared to listen to—both my heart and me, my voice, H, the mute letter who decided then and there to speak to Jim’s daughter, to mine, to Yoro, who I was sure was listening with her tiny ears, and maybe even sucking her thumb.
Though now I had company thanks to my pregnancy, I was still going through a lot. I stayed outside only long enough for the dog to relieve herself. Whenever I felt dizzy, I would stop and sit on the stairs of some doorway and pretend I was adjusting the dog’s collar or tying a shoe, only to undo it later and tie it again somewhere else. The most important thing was to avoid conversation at all costs; I didn’t trust that I could control the situation and chitchat like normal. But not everything was negative. I knew the fetus could perceive the variations in light through my body at five months, and when the sun shone, it relieved me to know that Yoro was also discovering something beautiful: light filtered through my skin. Once the dog had done her business, I would go back home, stretch out on the sofa alone, and close my eyes for a few minutes, feeling safe, at home, on firm ground, and I’d relax. The walls in my apartment were always straight and the necessity to pretend was over.
Clearly, I’d heard that the support of a psychiatrist or psychologist could be very helpful under these circumstances. But I still couldn’t bring myself to use public transportation or walk more than a few blocks at a stretch; I thought it was best to give myself a little time until I could make an office visit. Meanwhile, I began fantasizing about the figure of a psychologist as a panacea. I recall those days as being happy ones, with the possibility of a cure bringing a new sense of hope. Having seen the sunlight again, even if only for a brief period while walking the dog, I could picture something I failed to believe in until then and had only regarded with utter apathy: my recovery.
Sixth Month:
Lost in My Brain
A few tiny steps led to a few more, and though it proved challenging, I was able to walk for the first time into a psychiatrist’s office, that of Dr. Z, who had come highly recommended. I spent hours thinking about how to properly explain to him my issues, my phobias, and my despair over Jim’s absence. I had a hard time ordering my thoughts, and it was even worse trying to figure an effective way of expressing them to a stranger. But I did my best, trying to make the doctor’s job easier by shaping my story into a useful tool for my recovery. After listening to my litany of symptoms, the doctor looked as if he’d just woken up and asked about my relationship with my father as a young girl, as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said. I couldn’t find the connection, since one of the few things I was sure of is that my situation was owed to a very real concern, the death of a loved one, just as my previous crises were inevitably tied to the very specific circumstances of having to renounce maternity or my sexual identity. But I answered his questions thoughtfully, despite feeling dubious that my relationship with my father in childhood had anything to do with the issue at hand, trusting the word of so many people who had assured me their recovery began right here, within these four walls. Surely they can’t all be mistaken, I told myself.
Well, I learned that it’s possible for everyone but oneself to be mistaken. That gentleman lacked the intelligence to analyze a single thing. He diagnosed the problem I was already perfectly aware of, which is what brought me to his office in the first place—depression—and said I needed proper medication as soon as possible. He referred me to a psychologist for group therapy. I asked if medication was really necessary and wanted to know how he felt it was going to cure me. He said yes, absolutely, in answer to the first question, and our dear Dr. Z had no idea how to respond to the second one; he simply looked at me snarkily, as when someone tries to make up for his lack of knowledge by dismissing your question as ridiculous.
After six months of treatment I knew exactly what kind of method the doctor was using: trial and error. A perfectly unscientific method. He changed my medication according to the secondary effects the different pills had on me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the brochures and appreciate that each medication was geared specifically to treat different types of problems. But all he was doing was looking for one that would just shut me up and was free of side effects. So I went through periods when I lost my appetite entirely and periods of binge eating. In six months I went from weighing 110 pounds to 155, and from 155 to 104. Apparently, they couldn’t find the right medication, the drug that would sedate the sorrow away with minimal collateral damage; a sorrow that eventually would have gone away.
A friend recommended that I see another specialist. There was a caveat, though: it took an hour by train to get to the specialist’s office, and for me the action of walking to the subway, riding the subway, then walking from the subway to the office was the equivalent of drenching myself in cow’s blood and jumping into a shark-infested sea. But prey to the magical thinking one tends to embrace in times of weakness, I decided that because he was so far away, he was a better psychologist, similar to the notion that the best sorcerer is the one who requires the greatest effort to reach, with challenges and tests to realize along the way. That’s how I became part of Dr. O’s practice. The O could also be thought of as a 0, as in Dr. Zero. What should have been an hour’s commute was actually three, thanks to all the times I had to exit the subway, with intense panic attacks and vomiting. Certainly the experience heightened my sense of sacrifice, making me believe it meant something special, that by overcoming so many obstacles I was activating a kind of positive reinforcement. Dr. Zero’s diagnosis for the same set of symptoms was entirely different, a variant species of bipolar disorder that also required medication, in this case a mood stabilizer. It didn’t take me as long this time to refuse more medication. I changed doctors once again.
Over the next three months I was diagnosed with as many different illnesses as doctors consulted: three, Drs. E, W, and B, respectively. Just imagine that for a bellyache, one doctor diagnoses liver cancer and the second appendicitis, and the third assures you it’s only gas, and each wants to treat you immediately with a liver transplant, an operation to remove your appendix, or a few simple pills. Well, that’s psychiatry for you. Of the three, Drs. W and B caused me the most distress.
Since Dr. W had no idea what sort of diagnosis to make, he tried to work backward, first choosing an illness and then offering up a tray full of symptoms. Over the four months I visited his practice, Dr. W would habitually ask me if I heard voices. Dr. W had chosen schizophrenia as my disorder and was simply waiting for me to manifest the major symptoms in order to send me to a psychiatrist who would share the pharmaceutical company’s profits by way of the insurance company. Since I never heard voices, my answer was always no, but the doctor asked so many times it made me feel as though the specialist had already come up with his diagnosis and the absence of voices was all that stood in the way of verification. He was so insistent about the supposed hallucinations that in one way or another, he held me responsible for screwing up the treatment. So pretty soon I started to question myself, doubting whether the voices I actually heard, the same ones that everyone else heard, were real, and worried that they were just figments of my imagination. So when a cashier’s voice came over the loudspeakers in a supermarket, I would go to pieces thinking it was one of the voices the doctor was waiting for, and so I would timorously ask someone to
repeat what the voice had said. And sure enough, the other people could parrot back the voice’s announcement. Exactly what I had heard myself. Unquestionably the voices I heard were real and meant for everyone, not just me, but I had to suffer weeks of second-guessing myself and dread before I finally told the doctor I was never coming back to his practice again.
As for Dr. B, he suggested a method that triggered a considerable problem for me. I told him how I got up several times in the night to make sure the eggs were stored properly because if I forget to put them in the refrigerator and subsequently died, someone worried about me might come into the apartment with the firemen or the police several days later, and I was afraid they might mistake the stench of rotten eggs for that of my body. I also explained my obsession with eggs was tied to the pain I felt over not being able to have children and to a comment I once heard a vegan make that when you eat an egg you are eating a hen’s period, which served only to remind me that I’d never had regular periods in my life. Of course by now I was savvy enough to know better than to speak about my phantom pregnancy. Dr. B ordered me to write down twenty times on a piece of paper exactly what I’d told him about this obsession and close with a sentence: The eggs we eat are not hens’ periods. I couldn’t understand the therapeutic advantages of this method, but did it anyway. Instead of getting out of bed each time the compulsion struck, I wrote The eggs we eat are not hens’ periods over and over again. After writing this hundreds of times, I went from being obsessed about eggs at night to thinking about them at all hours of the day. The repetitive writing had only bolstered my fear. Months later, when the obsession subsided thanks to the therapeutic effects of the passage of time, I sent a note to the doctor that consisted of a single phrase: Your eggs are nothing but a hen’s period.
Something had intrigued me since I started looking for psychological help, and I wondered how it was possible that methods created for Western brains were used to analyze brains like mine, which are shaped in a society with entirely different moral, aesthetic, civil, and legal codes. I was relieved to find I wasn’t the only person to consider the issue. A small group of psychologists and sociologists with a bit of common sense criticized the phenomenon, employing the English term weird, an acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, to call attention to the fact that the studies were produced—and still are—based exclusively on people from Western societies who could be categorized as cultivated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. So the word weird called into question the legitimacy of studies applying pseudoscientific methods and, more dangerously, medications, in which 96 percent of the cases were drawn from a group that represented only 12 percent of the world population. The supposed mass therapeutic method was based on the study of this minority (weird for how scarce they were, not for the symptom indicators), a group to which I definitely did not belong.
Not a single one of the doctors I saw helped me get any better, and I was continually amazed by the audacity with which they tried to tell me how I felt. They actually used sentences like “You’re much better” or “You’ve had a relapse this week.” Even while everything was collapsing around me, the sidewalks and streetlamps and sky curling round my head, how could I be persuaded that anybody else knew how I was feeling except me? And yet there they were, all those diplomas on the wall, charging me a fortune to tell me what I, and nobody better than I, could possibly know. It was the last straw for me, this pretense that they could intuit other people’s feelings. I remember feeling truly shaken once by a case. During the hours I spent in Dr. B’s office, I had time to get to know and grow fond of other patients in the waiting room. One young man was elegant, well read, and lonely. He told me how at certain critical times during his illness he heard voices that according to others existed only for him. He admitted this symptom had to be controlled in some patients, but in his case it wasn’t necessary, he said. The voices others heard were often insulting or frightening, while in his case they only said nice things and in many ways they were his only company. Months later, I heard he’d committed suicide. They’d taken away the only voices that spoke to him. The medication had taken effect.
As a result, above and beyond my normal fears, what now flourished was my phobia of psychiatric or psychological practices. It would have been silly to go to a psychologist to be treated for a phobia against psychologists, though according to them, this is entirely possible. They would employ, if I’m not mistaken, implosive therapy, a behavior therapy that exposes a patient to the feared stimulus (“anxiety-arousing situations,” I think is the phrase they use, with those fake airs of erudition) without an escape route. As things stand right now, and for the good of the therapist, may I never find myself locked in a room with one of them.
Regardless, I didn’t make the final decision to leave off therapy and medication. I didn’t have the willpower to give anything up. Though I had to hear as many diagnoses as therapists I visited, they all concurred on the date when I could finally consider myself cured. I remember it perfectly; it was April 7, the day my medical insurance expired. I was still a little woozy at the time, but realized I’d finally put an end to an ongoing process of ignorant speculation that’d had nothing to do with science, and for months I’d been incapacitated for thinking and for physical exercise, since the medications left me feeling lethargic and floppy.
IMAGINE BEING LUCID ENOUGH during an episode of madness to know the thoughts gripping you are the product of your neurosis and not what is commonly accepted as reality. It’s a hard thing to accomplish, but imagine, if only for a second, reaching the level of awareness that allows you to figure out that your head is playing tricks on you by using the rationality of that very same head. But this kind of lucidity—an advantage I’ve been lucky to have—isn’t enough. The second step is inevitable, which is to ask for help. And that’s just what I did. I asked for help. And since the psychologists offered none, I turned to friends. But there was a problem with that. When I picked up the telephone, desperate, begging frantically for someone to come and fetch me, to embrace me, to relieve me if only with the bullet I wasn’t resolute enough to use on my own; when I called someone to scream for help and that person was willing, saying, “Yes, I’m on my way. Calm down, everything is going to be all right. Just let me know where you are and I’ll be right there,” I could never say where I was. Of course I don’t mean literally; I knew my address—what city I was in, the name of my street, the number of my apartment—but I didn’t know where I was in my own head, where it was that I had gotten lost.
Later I was astounded to find a book that dealt with exactly what I’m trying to explain. The title is My Stroke of Insight, and the author gives a personal testimony of having survived a stroke. In some languages the title was translated in a more revealing way, something like A Rush of Illumination. There’s a reason this book is particularly exceptional, and it’s that the author, Jill Bolte Taylor, is a neuroanatomist and impassioned brain researcher who specialized in strokes, so she was able to experience (from the section of her brain that remained unscathed) the stroke as it happened in real time, even with evident fascination, since she was now able to understand from the inside the reaction of her brain, this organ to which she’d devoted so many years of research, projects, and dreams. What was the likelihood that a person who had sacrificed so much to comprehend the nature of a stroke, a bona fide expert, would herself succumb to that specific condition? So there she was, dying, while experimenting on an organ that neither she nor her colleagues had ever been able to experiment on before: not a monkey’s brain or a dead person’s brain, but a live brain, and not any old live brain, but her own.
One of the things that fascinated me the most was how Bolte Taylor discussed certain thoughts she’d had at the exact moment the stroke took place. She was home alone and needed to ask for help. So she had to call someone—I don’t remember who, maybe her mother or someone at the hospital—and she had to get the phone number from the list of c
ontacts in her cell phone. It was the single most important phone number she’d ever call, because her life depended on it. Yet she couldn’t recognize the letters in the contact list; if I remember correctly, she couldn’t recognize either letters or numbers as signs. Here’s what impressed me so much. At one point she knew that all the information she’d accumulated since her childhood (including the phone number) was there in hundreds of little drawers in her brain, and she was aware that it was all misplaced now. Everything she’d registered throughout her life was someplace, but how could she know which one of those numerous drawers held the precise information she needed just then, the information that would allow her to ask for help? That’s how I felt, only in my case I wasn’t looking for a telephone number. I was looking for the spot where I had gotten lost. Which one of the drawers, of those hundreds of drawers surrounding me in the labyrinth of passageways, could I open to find myself huddled inside, cheerfully surprised that I had actually found myself? Desperate, furious, and hopeful at times, I spent a long time opening and closing drawers—one day, then another, and another, and every one of the nights. Eventually I pooped out, was completely spent trying to locate myself. And I knew that nobody could help me because I wasn’t able to say in which of those drawers I could be found.
That’s when I hit rock bottom, sir, because once I’d realized that my brain was playing tricks on me, figuring it out by way of that same trickster brain, and after accepting that I needed help, and after selecting the friend who would push me the hardest, who could pluck me out of wherever I was, I was astonished to find myself confronting the worst fear of all: not knowing where I was. This is what happened. Picture the long, winding furrows that make up our brain’s gray matter—I think they’re called cerebral convolutions—as if they composed a skein of organic wool. Well, that’s where I was, inside the skein, asking for help, it’s true, but not very resourcefully. I was still in the grips of agoraphobia, cowed by even the smallest tasks, like walking down the street. I dressed and went outside expecting to get my due for the mere act of walking down the street: death. I honestly believed that death was waiting for me outside. I didn’t even think about the dog or the tree. My only option was to walk and to die. So that’s what I did. I went outside.
The Story of H Page 16