~
The thing is, you can’t know peace until you decide that you’re not going to do the shit you hate anymore. You can’t know joy or freedom until you ignore an event invite and instead opt to microwave a hot dog you’re going to eat over the sink.
Bliss is boundaries. It is the admission of dislike, and the embrace of limitations and flaws. To me, my life looks better for saying hell no.
So no, I’m not fun if your definition of fun is doing any of the aforementioned. But I’ll tell you what always will be a good time: telling you guys all about it, so that you will never again invite me to a music festival you have to camp at.
The Least Interesting Thing
I spent a long time trying to be interesting. I wanted to be complicated, I wanted to have “overcome” an obstacle that made me seem brave and worth listening to. In high school, I over-romanticized Girl, Interrupted and longed to be as complex as Winona Ryder’s or Angelina Jolie’s characters (so I dutifully typed their monologues into my ICQ away messages and awaited questions about my well-being to roll in). In my early twenties, I gauged my worth with Facebook shares and Twitter likes: to rack up a shit-ton of either meant that I was special and deep and innately profound. My sensationalized self-realizations magnified by digital platforms would help me finally feel special in some capacity (or at least up my follower count). While some people were very good at articulating their mental health realities on the internet, I was . . . not.
Not that I cared. By 25, I was so desperate for discerning qualities that I’d bring up anything even remotely “wrong.” I pitched a memoir about my brush with disordered eating as a teen: I’d spent most of my younger years yo-yoing between sizes 00 and 10, but got too scared when I finally lost my period to keep starving myself. (The pitch was politely declined because that was basically the entire story.) I’d revel in how I’d spent most of my life chasing not-so-nice guys as if I was the only one in the world who had. Having semi-noted my addictive personality, I toyed with officially announcing that I had a Drinking Problem, but dismissed the notion when I realized that going public with that would mean I’d have to stop drinking. (I was a few years out from being ready for that.)
I wanted to be complicated, and my vanilla life wasn’t giving me any material. Instead, it felt like a blueprint in bad decision-making cradled by the safety of family and friends: no matter how much I failed, I still knew I had someplace to stay and a support system of pals ready and willing to meet me for drinks. Real creatives struggled. They suffered. They walked that long, hard road by themselves. What every other person would see as privilege, I saw as tragic, the reason my life lacked intrigue.
But I began to see the similarities between my dad and me as an extension of that. He articulated his worries about my largely pro bono writing career by raising his voice during conversations about my finances. I responded with mean one-liners instead of explaining how I planned to eventually make a living. On our best days, both of us are loud, quick to flare, and prone to mask genuine concern by getting angry. So, one morning after a particularly cutting back-and-forth, I woke up and decided to move. I’d use a recently approved line of credit to pay my $800/month rent, since I only earned about $200. I fueled my irrationality with the belief that my dad and mom didn’t “get” me.
After my dad left for work the next morning, I loudly explained to my mom how important it was that I “escape” our family home, brushing off her concerns about how I’d survive when the line of credit maxed out, or how I’d pay off my maxed-out Visa. Which only frustrated me more. She didn’t understand that I was an artist; that to live in an authentic way, I’d need to be free of their kindness and worries and repeated reminders that writing essays for $10 wasn’t going to provide enough to live on. They didn’t get that I was doing precious, important, and extraordinary work. They didn’t see what I was capable of. So, fuck them.
High on mania-lite, I put out a call for an apartment on Twitter, booked a viewing that night, and landed my first grown-up apartment within about 12 hours, reinforcing the belief I had in myself and my potential. Everybody was wrong but me: I was a genius who had the guts to go after what I wanted, and anyone who dared challenge me was clearly out to see me fail. I held on to this feeling for days, lording it over my dad and mom, and using it as “look who’s successful now” currency at Christmas. In February 2011, I moved out of my parents’ house in Cambridge and into an apartment in Toronto that I couldn’t afford.
I spent the first half of my downtown life trying to resurrect the same conviction I’d had in December. Now forced to confront my financial reality, I accepted any and all work I could get before days of rationality would give way to high-highs and paralyzing lows. One afternoon, I paid a Visa bill using rolled coins before spending the last of my credit line on a candle I believed would change my life. (It did not.) Another day, I up and decided it was time to stop working as a music journalist — my destiny now lay in writing TV. (Something I’d never tried before.) Sometimes, I’d stay in bed until I forced myself up, sluggishly making my way to the kitchen where I’d make the first of many pots of coffee, unable to do anything until well into the evening, when a few glasses of wine would convince me I could write again.
I wrote lists and comedy pieces for free and abandoned most of my existing editors, which meant that just shy of a year after moving downtown, I was finally living the dream of earning approximately $250/month (maybe). But, determined to eclipse my financial reality with my oft-manic persona, I leaned into my overconfidence and self-importance and descended on my hometown for the holidays, acting high and mighty and treating everyone I saw like garbage if I felt they’d never acknowledged how awesome I was.
I embarked on a quest to make everybody I’d ever met aware that I’d “made it”; that I’d fled our old stomping grounds and graduated to greatness, unlike those who still lived and worked and existed within walking distance of our high school. They didn’t need know about my diet of macaroni and butter (sauce is expensive), or the fact that I’d recently Googled “dinner recipes for stale bread.” They’d see exactly what I demanded they see: a mysterious, interesting, and beautifully complicated young woman who’d live to see them rue the day they counted her out. (Which was never actually a thing they’d done — but that’s the power of self-mythologizing.) I was Anne T. Donahue, a writer who was forced to use a middle initial to prevent being mistaken for the creator of CSI, who had absolutely nothing going terribly wrong in her life, who had it all figured out. And there was nothing like making everybody feel terrible about themselves by calling their lives “cute” to help hide the fact that mine was a lie.
And that’s when the emotional gong show truly began. When I got back to Toronto a few days later, I realized the holidays had delayed the mail and, with it, my paychecks. Which meant that I couldn’t afford January’s rent and was officially fucked: my line of credit was tapped out, my Visa was maxed, and any rolled coins I’d managed to save had gone towards Christmas gifts I’d insisted on buying (for myself). I called my parents and begged them for rent money, using the one-time-only lifeline loan they’d offered me when I’d left home. I swore to pay them back as soon as I could. They agreed to send the money, but they used my moment of vulnerability to stage a surprise attack: why not just move home and save? Why not pay down what I’d racked up, then move back out when I could afford to turn on my heat?
Because I’d rather die, I reminded them. How dare they attempt to coerce me into moving backwards. Hadn’t my living downtown proven to them how successful I was, how capable of independence? I shut down their suggestion by promising that they’d get every penny of their loan back in weeks, and that this was just a little blip on my flawless financial history — a mistake at the hands of the postal service — and I wished they’d recognize that. I couldn’t believe they failed to see that I was making good money on a reliable schedule and it was fine. (TOTALLY FINE!!!)
> Interest payments and phone and electricity bills had made my living situation impossible. Even if my checks all came at once and were for hundreds more than I had invoiced, I’d still only have about $20 to last until February. I’d already sold all my records to spring for a few cans of Chef Boyardee, and my license had been suspended for unpaid parking tickets. Still, I maintained my delusional narrative. When I got sick with the flu, it wasn’t because I hadn’t seen a fresh vegetable in weeks (popcorn is a vegetable!), but because I was just one of those people who got sick a lot.
I called home a few days after my rent request to ask my mom what I should do to avoid dying from what I assumed to be tuberculosis. And at some point between cough syrup recommendations and reminders to rest up and watch Mary Tyler Moore, she gently suggested I move back home. Again.
“You can’t afford to live there, sweetie.”
“But I’m fine!” I said between coughing fits. I rushed to find proof of why I should continue to live the way I had been. I looked out my window at the brick wall of the adjacent Victorian home. “I’ll never be able to find an apartment this great again!”
My apartment was a glorified bachelor on the second floor of a very old house. It was what could be called cozy, but with paper-thin walls and mice and several colonies of spiders I’d begun killing with a Swiffer broom wrapped in paper towel. I could hear the guy who lived above me pee or roll around in his bed, and I prayed every night that he would never have a sex guest because his bed was right above my own. Which is all to say, thousands of people have found and lived in apartments like mine. You might even be living in one right now. This apartment was not Meg Ryan’s in You’ve Got Mail (the Taj Mahal of apartments), but the most ordinary apartment in the world.
My mom sat quietly on the other end of the call, and then said that my childhood room would be waiting if I wanted it. I loudly objected as I began reenacting Fantine’s death scene from Les Misérables.
~
The thing about stress is that it will kill you. Most of us know this because we’re human adults with a basic understanding of how health works. But during the winter of 2012, I believed that I was immune to stress; that whatever was happening to me was some kind of endurance test that I’d obviously ace — despite having no real plan or income or access to vitamins. Within a week of recovering from my first flu, I got hit with another one. Feeling sorry for myself, I caved and went home for soup and sustenance and hangs with my cat, and when I started to feel better, I transplanted myself to a local Starbucks to see my best friend, Erica.
I’ve known Erica since we were seven. We bonded over Practical Magic (Jimmy Angelov is as hot as he is problematic), and we’ve fought over me acting like a dick (a running theme for much of our teen years). When Erica sat down and told me she wanted to move to the country, I knew I could be honest with her, and with myself. I told her that I needed to move home. And, in typical Erica fashion, she congratulated me on my overdue revelation and told me she was psyched that we’d get to live so close to each other again. No harm, no foul, no shame. I sat beaming like an idiot because it felt like I could breathe for the first time in a long time. And just like that, I had it all figured out again.
Unlike the me of mere days ago who’d sat drinking warm wine in her cold apartment, I had evolved into a self-aware woman of action. I came home, announced my new life plan to my parents, and immediately began thinking about all the things I could buy with the money I normally would’ve spent on rent. Debt payments didn’t matter; the Visa people would understand. I’d never be sad again, and I would always feel exactly as powerful as I felt in the moment of my big revelation. I was the living incarnation of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her beret in the air.
My landlords, Vinnie and Reggie, were a very sweet elderly Italian couple who didn’t communicate in English very well, but took an active interest in their tenants’ lives when they were weren’t screaming at their grandchildren or strange adult son. They asked me regularly if I had a boyfriend, or why I didn’t live with my parents, so I figured my plans to vacate would bring us all merriment, or at least some closure. Vinnie sweetly said that a girl like me belonged with her parents, wished me the best, and confirmed I’d be gone by the end of the month. In the wake of this clean, mature, and newfound closure, I felt zero merriment. Nothing like Mary Tyler Moore. I emotionally crashed and shattered my brain.
I went upstairs, sat on my bed, and looked around the apartment I’d made a home despite knowing I had no real business having one of my own. I thought about how I’d once felt so grown-up here. Just a few weeks earlier, my friends had come over to celebrate my first anniversary of downtown living, and I’d been so proud. I looked out my windows at my stunning view of the bricks and my neighbor’s living room and realized I would never see sights like this ever again. I thought about losing my independent space to share with my parents, who cared about me, in a neighborhood I knew way too well — how gross familiarity was. I thought about how much money I didn’t have and how I was a failure and a hack and a fraud, and, and, and. How sick I was, how tired, how helpless. I opened a bottle of wine and drank from it and started to cry, and I didn’t stop until the wine and the Gravol and the cold medicine put me to sleep. It felt like something had broken, and I couldn’t put my finger on what. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had, and even talking about it almost a decade later makes me feel sad and terrible.
~
On a bright morning the following October, I sat in my doctor’s office, waiting for him to bring me a mental health questionnaire. Two nights earlier, I’d finally told my mom I thought something was wrong because I couldn’t control my moods. Since moving home (under the cloak of darkness — I was so embarrassed to leave Toronto that I drove my stuff home in my car over several nights), I’d become too sad, too low, and too ready to cry when I wasn’t busy being too ready to yell. Or I was too up, too happy, too excitable, too much. I’d believe I could conquer the world (like a dictator, not like Elle Woods) but then have to drink myself to sleep to get out of the nightmare in my head. I flip-flopped between cripplingly anxious and recklessly self-destructive, and I’d only gotten deeper in debt. I had no self-control — from how much alcohol I drank to how much money I spent. I split my time being convinced I was either the worst writer or the best one, and while I might have a day or two of reprieve or balance, the highs and lows began striking more frequently and with more drama than an episode of The Bachelor. In a word: woof.
I’d been an emotional kid, but the older I got, the more outsized my feelings became. At 21, I once got so incensed about my parents’ plans to repaint the house that I burst into angry tears and counted the pictures hanging on the walls in an attempt to prove how much they were inconveniencing me. (There were seven pictures in the room we were in, and I will never not laugh at the memory of screaming “SEVEN PICTURES!” as though it were a viable point.)
A couple of months later, I had to pull the car over because I was berating my mom for losing a map to the point that I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. The next summer, I spent most evenings in tears at the cash registers of my retail job, convinced I’d never escape the industry or get rid of the stress-induced IBS I’d given myself. But 2012 was next level.
Before talking to my mom about how out of control I felt, I’d spent the night crying alone in the park I grew up going to, chain smoking, because the guy that I liked hadn’t texted me back. And even amidst my tears and Camels and repeated utterings of “I’m going to die alone,” I knew I was acting out of my mind. I knew I looked fucking crazy. I knew if the guy could see me reacting this way, he’d block my number. But I still couldn’t stop, and that’s what scared me.
My emotions had become all-encompassing. Like the night I’d given my landlord notice, I couldn’t see or feel anything other than the most extreme version of the worst-case scenario. Because here’s the thing: in those polarizing moments of ups or downs, w
hat you’re feeling in that moment can’t be reasoned with or told to slow down, let alone stop. I looked across the park at the swings my friends and I used to hang out on and wondered what the fuck was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I feel the way I used to, once upon a time? I wanted to feel invincible the way I sometimes did — or better yet, I wanted no feeling at all.
So there I sat in my doctor’s office, filling out that questionnaire. He was kind and thorough and made sure not to jump to conclusions. He asked if anybody in my family was or had been bipolar, and when I told him about my great aunt, he nodded understandingly. I told him I knew that how I was feeling wasn’t normal, and I joked about relating too much to Carrie from Homeland. He sympathetically smiled the way a lot of people do when I make jokes about bipolar disorder now.
I’m lucky because my doctor is one of the friendliest and most genuine people I know. He told me he’d like to start me on a low dose of lithium and very slowly work our way up until my body was at a treatable level. He told me I’d need to meet with a psychiatrist before we could officially confirm a diagnosis, but to him it seemed pretty textbook: I was likely bipolar II (there were still some ceilings to my highs and lows). Because I’d brought myself in to see him at this pretty early stage, I’d probably be able to keep it in check with a relatively low dose of meds. (He was right.) And then he asked me if anything had happened: while I’d likely been on the spectrum my whole life, an event had probably acted as the catalyst to make my brain go from zero to 100. I told him about the night in my apartment when I felt like I’d broken; the night I couldn’t stop crying and had felt such an all-encompassing sadness, that nothing in the world had ever seemed as big.
“Ah!” He smiled. “That was probably it, then. But we’re going to get this under control.”
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