by Leigh Stein
Because there were no psychiatrists who could see me for at least six weeks, I made an appointment with a general practitioner, and Jason and I took the car to the gravelly frontage road near our apartment for my first driving lesson. I hardly ever saw any other vehicles use it, and I wasn’t even sure where it led. Jason claimed that he rode his bike to the end of the road one night while I was sleeping and reached some militarized no-trespassing zone. An armed guard told him to turn around and go back.
To the east rose the Sandias, jagged and rosy.
To the west, overlooking the mountains, sat a school for the blind.
Jason and I walked around the car, switching places so I could take the driver’s seat. A woman in her sixties passed on a scooter, wearing a helmet and a pair of shades. She looked tan and happy.
“I love your scooter!” I shouted.
She waved at us and rode by.
“When we move to LA, we’ll get you a scooter,” Jason promised. Oh good. He still wanted to move to LA with me. Maybe Albuquerque was just an endurance test before our real life could start in Hollywood.
“Really? Is it hard to ride?”
“No,” he said, “it’s really easy.”
Really easy, just like driving his car was supposed to be, once he’d explained the clutch and gearshift. How would I know when to switch gears? You pay attention to the RPM. What’s RPM? I wondered, but didn’t ask because it sounded like something I was already supposed to know. What gear should I put it in when I start the car? You don’t put it in gear; you leave it in neutral.
I started the ignition. So far, so good.
I shifted into first, and we lurched ahead. There was a horrible grating sound. I was doing something wrong. The car stalled. I had to start over again. I couldn’t get the hang of coordinating the clutch, the gas, and the gearshift. By the time I graduated from first to second gear, Jason was too frustrated with me to continue the lesson; I got the sense that driving stick was something you either had a natural talent for or you didn’t, and I did not. He made me get out and sit in the passenger seat. We went home. This lesson would be my first and my last with him, though eventually our neighbor Diane took me to a nearby parking lot and taught me to shift gears in her truck. Jason didn’t want me back in the driver’s seat of his car until I could actually drive.
The first place I drove myself to was the library. To get there, I had to go uphill on Tramway. I got anxious at stoplights because it was hard for me to accelerate uphill without stalling. I took the bus when I went to see the general practitioner about my panic attacks.
“About how many panic attacks are you having?”
“Six or seven a week,” I said.
He didn’t believe me, even when I described the symptoms: it felt like I would never be able to stop crying, it felt like being choked, it felt like some big man was sitting on my heart. He wrote me a prescription for Zoloft and ten Ativans, with the warning that they could be addictive. He asked what had brought me to New Mexico, and this time I didn’t say to write a book, or to have an adventure. I said, “My boyfriend.”
He asked how old my boyfriend was.
“Nineteen,” I told him.
“He’s still young,” he said. “You gotta give him a break.”
Along with the ten Ativans, he recommended we drive north up into the mountains to see the leaves change from green to gold.
The Sylvia Plath Effect
(1998)
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
SYLVIA PLATH, “ELM”
Picture of me at thirteen: dark, naturally curly hair out of nowhere (in a couple of years it will be straight again), broad shoulders, arms like reeds, mouth pursed to hide two rows of crooked teeth. In a Polaroid, I’m sitting on the wooden ladder that goes with the playhouse in our backyard, wearing a teal cotton tank top with a butterfly embroidered near the neckline. I have already started to pluck my eyebrows, so they look under control, but my eyes seem weirdly wide set, and my mouth is puffy. My face is still growing. I’m squinting at the soft light that filters through the maple leaves. It’s spring: suicide weather.
This photo was taken so I would have a picture of myself to send to Daniel, my friend in Las Vegas. We’d met on a message board for Andrew Lloyd Webber fans and talked every day, either online, or by phone, long-distance. I paid for the charges with my babysitting money. Sometimes my dad would eavesdrop on our calls because he was suspicious of Daniel’s baritone, but there was nothing dangerous or inappropriate about our relationship. Daniel was exactly who he said he was—a middle schooler, a Mormon, a fan of Starlight Express and Peanuts cartoons. We had our own AOL screen names but no digital cameras, no scanners. Using Beauty and the Beast stationery from the Disney Store, Daniel mailed me a letter and a photo of what he looked like: tall, lanky, exceptionally tan. I was supposed to send him my picture in return.
But I never sent him my photo, because I was sick that spring. I got headaches frequently, and convinced my parents to let me stay home from school by myself two or three days a week. I slept through the school day, and resented my dad, who called me every few hours from his corporate desk job to see how I was feeling. Bad. Fine. Tired. These calls were routine and always followed the same script; I’d give my answers in monotone and he’d end the conversation by suggesting I go drink some ginger ale.
My mom took me to a chiropractor, who discovered two compressed vertebrae in my cervical spine. (She thinks that they became compressed during birth because she tried for so many hours to deliver me vaginally before she finally agreed to have a C-section.) The X-ray they took of my neck fascinated me. Next to an X-ray of a “normal” spine, it was obvious what was wrong with mine. Where there should have been space, there was none. When I stood on two scales in their office (one foot on each), I weighed fifteen pounds more on one side than the other. I was crooked. If I came for treatment two or three times a week, they said they could fix me.
But the ache in my head was more than just a symptom of a misaligned spine. I heard voices. They’d begun when I was about four, and that spring when I was thirteen, they reached a climactic pitch. The voices were louder and came more frequently than ever before. I wasn’t afraid of them, but their arrival was always physically uncomfortable and mentally exhausting. First I’d feel a distinctive pulling sensation, like one part of my brain detaching from the other. Then there’d be cotton in my ears, silencing the sounds outside my head, so that I could hear what was inside: a chorus of voices, adult men and women, telling me how bad I was. I sat still and listened, paralyzed, until they went away on their own and I could fall back asleep.
Since I was in the habit of sleeping all day, I was up all night, wracked with sadness. Sometimes I couldn’t stop crying and other times I couldn’t start. I copied Sylvia Plath poems, by hand, into a notebook. There was a lot in her poems I didn’t understand, but when I read the lines quietly to myself, I heard the voice of someone whose head was under siege in the same way mine was. I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. I looked up malignity in the dictionary. It meant wishing evil to others. My depression, my headaches, my voices—these were all malignant. I was their victim, but I didn’t know how to fight back because I never could tell if the evil was inside or outside of me. In the small hours of the morning, I sometimes took scissors and either sawed or snipped flaps of skin from the top of my thighs, high enough so that when I put on my shorts for PE class, the cuts wouldn’t show. If they were deep enough to draw blood, I covered them with Band-Aids.
As the weeks went by, I missed more and more school. If a girl at my lunch table or a teacher asked why I was out sick so often, I gave them a line I’d come up with: I told them I had “a low tolerance for pain.”
That self-diagnosis was a way to explain why I hurt all the time, even though it seemed I was living the same life as every other thirteen-year-old girl I knew. The more days of school I missed, the more I fell behind, and the harder it was to go back.
My only incentive for going to class at all was that if I went, my parents allowed me to go online in the evenings. I’d sign into AOL and compose e-mails addressed to no one, choosing different background colors and font sizes for the perfect suicide note. From the library I’d checked out Sylvia Plath’s journals, An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski (I was playing Violet in our drama club’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and the London cast recording of Les Misérables. I spent one Saturday afternoon listening to “On My Own” on repeat for seven hours, trying to decide which lyrics to quote in my suicide e-mail to Daniel.
It was May 1998. As my depression worsened, my suicide plan crystallized. My plan was my anchor in the storm. Thinking about how I would do it made me feel calm and in control, even smug; without anyone’s help (not that anyone was offering any), I’d figured out the solution to my own problem.
I wanted to say good-bye to Daniel because he was the person I talked to more than anyone, my closest friend. Instead of just sending an e-mail, I told him over IM that on Thursday I was going to stay home from school and take all the prescription medication I’d collected around the house and saved in a Ziploc bag. Though I didn’t know what any of the medication was for, I didn’t think it mattered. He tried to talk me out of it, but I would not be dissuaded. I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I just wanted to say good-bye. I had already been to the If you are thinking of suicide, read this first website more than once, and it had lost its persuasive effect.
But because there were no digital cameras, no Facebook profiles, because he’d had to mail that photograph of himself in a real envelope, Daniel knew my home address.
He called the police in my town.
The police called my school.
My school called my parents.
It was a real telephone tree. When my mom called me downstairs from my bedroom to tell me what she knew, I was furious at Daniel, and embarrassed that I would have to someday speak to him again, after all that time I’d spent planning the perfect good-bye. But I looked forward to what I thought would happen next: hospitalization.
I’ve spent almost two decades trying to understand what happened to my brain in a dark flash that spring, and so often I come back to the weather. You might think that suicides happen during fall and winter, when there’s less sunlight and more people suffering from seasonal depression. But researchers have found that suicides peak around June in the northern hemisphere and December in the southern. In other words, suicide weather is warm and sunny.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a professor named Edwin G. Dexter gathered data from five years of New York City coroner’s reports (twenty-eight thousand death certificates), found 1,962 suicides, and calculated the number of suicides for each of the 1,862 days of those years. Then he looked at police records to find out how many unsuccessful attempts there were, noting that “this record is quite complete, since in the eyes of the law one attempting suicide is a criminal, and must be so branded on the books.” The total number of New Yorkers whose wish to die was recorded during those five years: 2,946.
Next, Dexter looked at meteorological records and correlated suicide occurrence with factors such as temperature, humidity, “character of day” (cloudy or clear), precipitation, and windiness. His findings showed the most attempts (successful and unsuccessful) occurring in April, May, and August, and concluded that “suicide is excessive under those conditions of weather which are generally considered most exhilarating and delightful—that is, the later spring months and upon clear, dry days.”
The day before Emma Bovary’s suicide is “one of those March days, clear and sharp, when the sun shines in a perfectly white sky.”
Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into a nearby river on March 28, 1941. Her body was finally found on April 18.
A lot of famous people choose April, or April chooses them: Kurt Cobain, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Eva Braun. It took Eva three times to get it right (cyanide). The first (August 1932, pistol shot to the jugular) and second (May 1935, sleeping pill overdose) attempts were not fatal. Her biographer Angela Lambert writes that Eva’s suicide attempts were motivated by a wish for Hitler to pay more attention to her; paradoxically, she had to be serious in their execution, but also manage to survive, or else she would miss the resulting attention. “Hard to believe that Hitler might not have been a sensitive boyfriend,” a friend joked when I told him about Eva’s attempts.
August is for poets and actresses: Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath (first attempt), Jean Seberg, Marina Tsvetaeva.
Why do I still keep this collection today—these names and dates and circumstances? Is it adolescent morbidity? Idolatry? Or am I playing at detective, collecting clues? Perhaps it was just pubescent hormones that scrambled my brain, or a genetic predisposition to depression made suddenly apparent at the age of thirteen, like a fairy-tale curse. Then I revisit the month of May and think maybe I was the victim of clear, dry days, most exhilarating and delightful. Charles Dudley Warner, a friend of Mark Twain’s, famously quipped, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Is it the poet in me who’s so drawn to the idea of suicide weather, the paradox of the bright clear day that says die?
Sylvia Plath’s successful second attempt was in February 1963. The doctor treating her in London couldn’t get a bed for her at the hospital, and on February 4, he prescribed the antidepressant tranylcypromine, while they waited for space to become available. On February 10, Sylvia left bread and milk for her two sleeping children and then laid her head on a cloth inside the oven with the gas turned on. She was thirty years old. Her mother and her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, both would blame the tranylcypromine for her death, arguing that her American doctors would have known she was allergic to it, and that the drug must have embellished the suicidal thoughts it was supposed to wipe away.
The hard truth: easier to blame a drug than to blame yourself for not doing more to save a life. My own hard truth: easier to collect my weather data than to tell you I was a ghost in my own house, suffering invisibly through the night while my therapist mother slept in the next room. Harder still: I idolized Sylvia because she gave me the words for my experience, but I’ve come to realize I was more like Eva Braun, wanting to be taken seriously, yet also survive.
As a young woman, my grandmother heard voices coming from the toilet and was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. The voices were more likely symptomatic of her first manic episode; eventually, the doctors got it right and put her on lithium. My mom, having spent her adolescence helping to care for her three younger siblings while her mother was in and out of hospitals, went on to get her PhD in clinical psychology. The one time I told her about my voices as a child, she said I must have a fever and sent me to my room.
From the age of fifty onward, my grandmother lived in a nursing home, except when she became psychotic and they transferred her to the hospital. The antipsychotic drugs she’d been prescribed (to treat the schizophrenia she never had) had led her to develop tardive dyskinesia, a movement disorder that made her twitch, noticeably and uncontrollably, for the rest of her life. It was almost impossible to understand anything she said when she spoke.
By the time I was thirteen, I had also visited my paternal grandfather in the psychiatric ward, after he got laid off from a long career with Cadillac, and had a nervous breakdown.
On my visits to these hospitals, I saw what happens when you become too sick to care for yourself: your family brings you milk shakes; they pat you on the hand; they give you their undivided attention and don’t ask for anything in return.
But my mom refused to have me h
ospitalized because she thought it would be more traumatic than therapeutic at my age. I took this as a sign that I hadn’t tried hard enough. If I’d really attempted, then I’d already be admitted, in my nightgown. The only person who treated me like I was as sick as I felt was Daniel, who knew me only as a faceless voice.
On a Saturday morning, while my mom was seeing her own patients, my dad took me to my first psychiatrist appointment. My five-year-old sister, Hattie, was with us.
The waiting room was gray, sterile, nondescript. A fish tank stood against one wall, and the soft sucking sound of the water filter was the only noise in the room. I knew that seeing a therapist was a private thing to do, because sometimes my mom treated patients in her basement office at our house and I had to stay out of the way, unseen and quiet. Patients even used a separate entrance. But when it was my turn to see the psychiatrist, he brought us all into his office.
The doctor, a big man, was wedged into a leather armchair across from my seat on the couch. With his beard and huge, square-framed glasses, he instantly reminded me of my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Grumbles (not a nickname), who always had food stuck in his beard after lunch.
Did he expect me to reveal all the reasons I wanted to die in front of my dad and sister? They were on the floor at my feet, quietly reading picture books, and playing with blocks. I thought maybe we could pretend that, like the audience of a play, they weren’t there.
But the psychiatrist didn’t even look at me. He asked my dad how I’d been sleeping.
My dad turned to me. “He wants to know how you’ve been sleeping,” he said.
“A lot,” I said.
“She says she’s been sleeping a lot,” he told the doctor.
“How much is a lot?”
“He says how much have you been sleeping,” my dad translated.