Mental
Page 6
If someone had developed a genetic test (which Dr. John Kelsoe controversially did in 2008 in response to a rash of overdiagnosing children with bipolar disorder that peaked in the early 2000s) to determine if I was bipolar or likely to experience a bipolar episode, I wouldn’t have even been given the test. I had none of the hallmark signs of mental illness. The disorder is thought to affect between 1 and 3 percent of Americans and tends to run in families, although no specific (or single) gene for it has been identified. Even the mental illness that ran through my grandfather’s side of the family was thought to be a somewhat distant connection.
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: ME, DAVID, AND MATT IN YOSEMITE.
My normal childhood evolved into a normal junior high career. I was a gifted student and I argued passionately about politics. I hunted for vintage dresses, I valued overdyed purple jeans, and I made earrings with my friend Hana. I watched intentionally bad movies like Cry-Baby and ate pickles with Miriam. I was a little chubby and went to a teen weight-loss program called KidShape. All of my parents came too and we learned about portion control and that juice is the sugary devil. When I was twelve, my dad and Marilyn had a baby, my little brother David. I changed his diapers and doted on him. I had nothing but unrequited love flowing toward him, but he was the little shit that bisected my already bisected life. I had grown from being a spunky, mismatched spitfire into a fat and anxious twelve-year-old. I was newly awkward—for the bulk of sixth and seventh grade I wore the same T-shirt every day; I also slept in it and I kept my hair pulled back except for three small braids framing the right side of my face. I was no longer cute and I didn’t need to compete with a cute little baby, with a cute little smile, who made cute little noises. I went to a junior high magnet school in South Los Angeles called Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES). We always thought the bloviated name was a misnomer, but we knew the words bloviated and misnomer, so who knows. It was founded in 1977 as the first magnet school in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and was created as part of the district’s voluntary integration program. We were all bussed to school on the site of the former Louis Pasteur junior high school on Eighteenth Street. The teachers offered self-selected elective classes, which meant I could take Gilbert and Sullivan or Japanese or roller skating as part of my curriculum. Leonardo DiCaprio rode my bus occasionally, Ms. Stringos taught aerobics in a G-string leotard and had Elvira hair, and the school cafeteria routinely produced the most delicious underbaked, steaming hot chocolate chip cookies.
I went to LACES from sixth grade until ninth grade. I played Pish-Tush in The Mikado against Rachel’s Pooh-Bah and I never once felt dorky for wearing floral overalls, though I should have. I made close friends at LACES—Hana, Miriam, Sarah J., and Rachel.
One day, on my way to the school bus stop, I saw a man standing in the alley I passed just two blocks from my mom’s apartment. I had seen him before—he was short, Latino, and young, probably not that much older than me. I smiled at him and waved, as I had done on previous days; only this time he gestured for me to come closer to where he was standing. I didn’t know what to do or I thought he had something to tell me, and so I walked toward him. He showed me that he had a knife and held it against my side. He said that my father owed him some money and I explained that Jeff was not my father and that my father lived much farther away and that it seemed impossible for anyone to owe him money and if they did I would get the money for him. He stumbled on his words and continued to press the knife against my waist. I was wearing floral boxers from the Gap and a T-shirt. He pulled down the shorts and started fondling me. I had no feeling. I did not know what was happening. He asked me to spread my legs, and he said, “Let me just kiss it.” He crouched down to kiss my vagina, at which point I screamed for him to stop. The scream was likely not much louder than a spoken word, but it was loud enough that he took his knife and ran up the alley.
I didn’t cry. I pulled up my shorts and walked back to my mom’s apartment. The building was painted yellow and our door was the color of rotten avocado. I put my key in the door and my mom came in the living room and asked why I wasn’t on the bus. I started heaving-sobbing, and explained what had happened. She hugged me and we went to the police station to file a report. I described the guy in as much detail as I could remember for a composite drawing. My mom drove around with a butcher knife in her car for a day or two, in a blind fury. She didn’t know what she was doing but was looking for revenge or justice or something. I missed school and one girl was certain it was because I had gotten my period. I was cold and calculated and measured when I told my friends what happened. Sometimes I was smiling: “I was molested.” I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t understand it. I had the vocabulary but nothing else. My friends didn’t understand or believe me at first, even my closest friends. Why would they? I didn’t know what it meant in the days that followed or even the years that followed. I wouldn’t know for a long time. I still don’t know because there is no alternate version. Nothing to compare it to. I was thirteen. I didn’t get my period until three years after that. Sexuality was not in my worldview no matter how many health classes I took. My dad and Marilyn had been in Chicago and flew home. My dad didn’t know how to talk about it. He bought me a pair of Air Jordans from Nordstrom and we sat in the Westside Pavilion silently, me clutching a shoebox and he desperately trying to make me feel better.
That was when my sessions with Dr. G started. I sat on her pastel plaid overstuffed chair. We mostly talked about the trauma of the divorce and the pressure of perfection, and most sessions I opted to express myself by forming creatures out of Fimo clay. Therapy was always a part of our lives. After the divorce, Matt and I went to a child psychologist, who suggested we work out our anger by pummeling each other with foam bats. My mom religiously listened to Dr. David Viscott on the radio. Analysis—about movies, art, music, self—was paramount. After dealing with the immediate effects of maladies, my mom would ask, What are the psychosomatic symptoms that you’re feeling? What do they represent? A broken wrist was a reaction to my brother’s birth; a cold could mean test anxiety. One of the many benefits to a psychologically mindful mother was that we could declare mental health days whenever we needed a break from school. For me those days involved my favorite video. My mom had recorded the first two thirds of the movie Tootsie, and that was enough. It was an early wormhole to New York—the New York of the 1980s. Cab strikes and desperate creatives living in lofts downtown, being mugged, working in a kitchen before there were foodies, Michael Dorsey’s insistence on perfection in performance. I loved Tootsie and its original score even though it would be better matched to a toothpaste commercial.
By the end of ninth grade, most of my friends at LACES scattered, returning to their home high schools throughout LAUSD. Hana went to Hamilton High; Miriam went to Beverly Hills High; Rachel went to Palisades; Sarah J. went to Venice. And I went to University High in West Los Angeles. I don’t remember having a choice, I was tethered to Matt’s legacy. He did well there. I would too. He was already beloved by the journalism teacher, Monserrat Fontes, and by every other teacher at the school since he was a thorough and diligent student. He was a dork—competed in academic pentathlon in junior high and played the board game Diplomacy with all his dork friends in high school. (Apparently it was a good primer; he’s now a professional diplomat.) I remember fantasizing about a fresh start at a new school with kids who didn’t know me. I thought, if all the young adult books are correct, I will be the popular, unknown outsider who brings super cool to an otherwise deprived campus. The boys will swoon, my overdyed jeans will be heralded as a fashion breakthrough, and I will ace every test in between making out with the most popular boys.
The year I started high school was also the year Matt went to UC Berkeley. My grandmother knitted him a blanket, as she did for all the high school graduates in our family. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted my reaction. Matt and I h
ad one constant—each other. I didn’t have a problem being independent from my parents, but being separated from Matthew felt like a psychic wound. I think Dr. Viscott would have labeled it a regression or a psychotic break or separation anxiety.
The timeline of collapse is simple. My parents split before I was two; in eighth grade I was assaulted; I started to see a therapist. In tenth grade I was undiagnosed but plagued with sleeplessness and agitation. In eleventh grade I held it together earning A’s and B’s and impressive SAT scores, making friends, going to parties, having a normal high school year. I was an All-City doubles tennis player and I won awards for on-the-spot journalism writing and editing. I had friends, crushes, lapses in judgment, and a keen sense for exceeding the bare minimum necessary to get into a University of California college. And I knew that with what I had managed in tenth and eleventh grade, I was probably already guaranteed a place.
So, in twelfth grade I broke. And I broke hard.
During my last few days in the ward, clutching the decorations that had lined the wall next to my bed, I wondered if I was ready. I was trying to make sense of this involuntary commitment. Was I cured by the diagnosis? What was lithium and would it work? Would there be side effects? Would the lithium be toxic later in life? Would I be able to have children? Would my kidneys and thyroid and brain survive? I survived a squirrel apocalypse, a personal holocaust, real abuse, imagined abuse, isolation, noxious gases, hallucinations of pop stars and serial killers, winding mazelike tunnels, spending sprees, war, killer teevees, gangs of evil nurses, and solitary confinement. Most importantly, I survived mandatory volleyball.
CHAPTER 8
“IT’S TIME TO START LIVIN’!”
I SAID GOOD-BYE to my eating-disorder friends and TeeVee Dude; I thanked the nurses and Dr. DeAntonio. I did not feel helpless, I did not feel different. I packed my symptoms in my duffel bag along with my moccasins, a colorful vase, my fauvist paintings, and concert T-shirts. I still believed what I experienced. It was, after all, real to me. People ask me if I remember, or if manic episodes exist in something like a blackout state. I do remember, and that feeling never fully dissipates. There’s always a small question that persists: Maybe I was right about everything? Maybe I wasn’t so far off? Maybe there is a germ of rational in what otherwise seems so far afield? It was like Nellie Bly’s experience—I wasn’t stuck for life on an island for the insane; I didn’t have to plead my sanity, I didn’t have to steal a set of keys to unlock the bars on the window or break down a door or trick nurses into a catastrophic mistake or enact my MacGyver fantasy tuck-and-rolls. I was crazy, I got a diagnosis, I got better. And now I was fine. Fine enough to go home. But I changed; the episode itself was traumatic. I no longer had a baseline for reality or even a way to fully trust myself. Two things shifted when I was discharged. One was that the psychiatric team at NPI felt that I should live in one house. So, my child-of-divorce schedule ended. I would stay primarily at my mom’s house. The other shift was that my continued therapy would be handled by Dr. DeAntonio and I would attend an adolescent group therapy led by Dr. Arthur Sorosky across from a mini mall in Encino. My parents collectively felt that Dr. G had missed my diagnosis. My treatment with her ended when I left the hospital, and it felt like I had lost a parental figure.
I packed my bag and backpack and we drove back to our apartment. The same place where—just a month earlier—my mom had developed a nightly ritual in response to my psychosis. She would collect all of our kitchen knives, wrap them in a dish towel, and hide them in the back of a drawer beneath her bed. She didn’t really fear for my safety or hers—but she didn’t exactly know what to expect and she wasn’t sure. Now, I was medicated. Now, it was safe to leave the knives unsheathed. My room was the same but neater. Paranoid poems I had written were neatly stacked in my closet. Diagrams I had written on my chalkboard wall were erased. My twin bed was made, army corners tucked in, and all my clothes were folded neatly and put away in drawers. The orange tree outside my window was just barely showing fruit. I put on my Clean Needles shirt and unpacked my vase, my moccasins, and my drawings.
We filled my prescription of lithium and I didn’t recognize depression setting in. I was slow. I had gained weight and was thicker. It was hard to understand the difference between depression and not being manic, especially in the come-down of an episode. This is partly because my experience of bipolar disorder swings manic. My depressive periods are almost always in the wake of mania and almost never independent. I have plenty of anxiety, but I’ve never been deeply, clinically depressed unless it’s in response to having been manic—in which case the depression runs deep. Most people who identify bipolar tend to experience much more extreme bouts of depression. Dr. DeAntonio described mania as similar to a cocaine high. Mania is overwhelming and intense; an enormous feeling of omnipotence coated in a glossy sheen of euphoria and sex. Everything is attractive, on fire, covered in rainbows and unicorns and deluded perfection. I have to take drugs to not feel this way.
I returned to civilian life armed with an explanation: I was bipolar. That didn’t seem to mean much in high school. Or high school didn’t seem to mean that much to me. I was told that other people who were bipolar changed the course of human history: people like Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Pablo Picasso, Honoré de Balzac, George Frideric Handel, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Patty Duke, and Carrie Fisher. I was among the greats. It didn’t feel like it. Even though Kurt Cobain was publicly teetering on the edge, courting the end, writing poetry about the very drug I was taking before bed every night. My pills felt limiting. I felt stunted and repressed. I was compliant, though. I carried a small pill box of pink pills. My mom, always a Girl Scout, wanted me prepared for any scenario including a stranding or—ironically—an apocalyptic event. I had enough lithium for four nights at all times.
I missed about a month of school and was behind in all my classes, including science and math. I dropped out of AP Physics and AP Calculus because I couldn’t keep up with the homework in the hospital. (I wasn’t bad at math; I only missed one math question on the SAT.) My schedule was light—nothing would be stressful, there would be no triggers. Before I was on the gifted AP and honors track, with homework assignments that took up many hours of every week night. Now I was hybrid, almost vocational. Out of all my classes—journalism, ceramics, photography, AP English, AP Government, and tennis—only two out of six actually required attendance. (Mr. Takagaki, the AP Government teacher believed that we—as nearly graduated students—could determine on our own whether we attended his class or not. He told us he was a staunch communist and imbued a sense of consequence and responsibility in his students. The consensus? No one went to AP Government or even took the final exam or the AP exam. We were too young for self-determination.)
For about a month, I rejoined my friends on the lawn and went to high school parties and gossiped about high school things. I had gained weight from the lithium and was feeling a little lethargic. I made an effort, I really tried. But every conversation was vacuous. I did not give a shit about high school—I could not fake interest in alcohol and make-out sessions and adolescent angst of mere mortals. I wanted to. I tried to. But with every conversation of crushes came the same realization—I was bipolar, I hallucinated Muppets, I imagined a fiery apocalyptic end and that I came back from the dead. I was taking lithium and acting normal but this high school shit was boring; I could not will myself to be interested.
I turned to invisibility.
I was calm, subdued, uncharacteristically compliant. When I wasn’t feeling compliant, I ditched. My schedule allowed me to come and go as I pleased—and it did not take long for me to figure out how to go to school and leave by eleven a.m. without anyone noticing. Almost every day, at lunch, I walked out the front door of the administrative building, past the on-campus cop, the principal, teachers. No one
questioned me—I was a good student, I was white, and I walked with a swagger that defied my actual purpose. On days when I was feeling less cocky, I’d sneak out the back fence. It wasn’t hard—the continuation school for Uni, Indian Springs, was full of resourceful students who cut holes in the chain-link fence with dutiful regularity. I disappeared when it didn’t matter, and it mostly didn’t matter. It was high school.
My car became my home. I ate Subway sandwiches in my silver ’81 Honda Accord; mustard and shredded lettuce dripped into the crevices of the automatic shift. Changes of clothes littered the backseat and empty fountain soda cups rolled around under the seats. The car was given to me by Matt, given to him by Opa. The brakes barely worked and the engine overheated so often, I kept a gallon of water in the backseat. The front hood would steam and hiss angrily, and I would pull over, water her down, and wait. Then get back on the road. When I wasn’t at school, I would drive in one of two directions: east to the mall for movies or west to the beach for calming waves. I went to so many movies that the dude who worked at the frozen yogurt shop asked me which store I worked at, assuming I was on break. I’d see two movies a day and time it so that I’d get back to my mom’s house on schedule as if I had gone to class. She worked at home as a script reader for Warner Brothers. Movies weren’t a bad way to learn about the world. Romcoms in all their impossibility taught hope and love; fantasy taught wonder; thrillers taught caution; and all genres taught me critical thinking. It was a haven, yet I hated most movies and would go into excruciating detail about the plot flaws, the narrative arcs that never happened, the illogical character decisions, the stereotypes that rang untrue. I was a nightmare, a deeply unfun moviegoer. But, at the time, it was my way of interacting with the world, by feeling safe in the strobe—a finely curated ward of my own choosing.