being sick
I was talking with a student who recently started taking medication. The medication she takes is used to treat bipolar disorder. She said, “I don’t want to be bipolar.”
Nobody wants to be sick. We might want something we get because we are sick, but deep down, we want to be well. And, deep down, we want others to be well.
There’s this trend I’ve noticed in people writing about their experiences with mental illness. People write about their experiences as though they’re trying to one-up or out-crazy each other. Like, “I cut myself ten million times.” Then the next person is like, “Well I drank Windex with razorblades in it” or some shit. This bothers me. For a long time I couldn’t figure out why. Why would someone want to be crazier than someone else? Which makes it seem like people really do want to be sick.
As I mentioned in “Stigma,” I’ve heard people say that people cut to get attention. Everybody wants attention. Universally, people need acknowledgment and connection. That’s not the only reason, or even the main reason, people hurt themselves. People don’t tend to refuse to read books because the authors–let’s say someone like Joyce Carol Oates who publishes prodigiously–by publishing a book, are trying to get attention. Many people respect authors who are trying to express their truths and have their voices heard. No one seems to respect the person who cuts, or the truths they have to tell. People who hurt themselves are expressing and externalizing a tremendous amount of pain in a dysfunctional way. Ignoring something, especially cutting, does not make it go away.
It’s not that people want to be sick. It’s that people need something, and they believe that being sicker will somehow fill their needs. If you’re crazy, really crazy, crazier than anyone else, maybe you’ll get the attention/admiration of someone because of your suffering. And if a person is operating under that presumption and believes that’s the only truth, getting better is terrifying. How will their needs ever be met if they’re common, if they’re just like everyone else? And they desperately need something.
But trying to outcrazy others leads the uncrazies to conclude it’s all for attention. And sometimes uncrazies react with anger, as though crazy behavior takes away something from them. That upsets me, too.
I have more to say about this, but I’m not sure what it is yet.
stream of consciousness epiphany #2, this for mother’s day
i rock and sing to my son at bedtime. he falls asleep on my lap and i’m consumed with love for him. so sad knowing he’s growing up and by necessity away from me, independent. and i look forward to enjoying spending all his growing up time with him, as i am in love with this moment of rocking him in the dark. the thought of him moving away to college is choking me, and it’s far away, but it seems also like i’ll blink and he’ll be calling me from some far away place. and i won’t get to hold his body on my lap anymore. and i thought of mothers all over the place, next door, in darfur, in iraq, loving their children, and those children growing up, and they are us. everybody is somebody’s baby.
and suddenly the most important thing i know to do is to be kind to people. how can i be afraid of people when everybody is just the baby of someone? how could i be cruel to a baby?
for a couple weeks after this struck me, i was light. i felt buoyant. like i had figured out the meaning of life.
the idea of someone saying something mean to my son, which i know will happen as soon as his peers are constructing sentences, imagining that look of confusion and hurt on his face, crushes me. then i think of the mothers who lose their children in all manner of horrific ways, and then i think of war. and i know this baby will have to register for the selective service. and i think of him going to war. and then i know for sure i must work for peace. i must work for peace. then i think of the mothers whose children are perpetrators of violence, whose sons stalk women, or solicit sex from children, or who make the orders to crash the plane into the building. what of these mothers?
then i think about my mother. i’m her baby. she loves me this much.
then i think about this blog. anonymous, because i am ashamed, still, of the truth of my body, the scars on my arms, hands, legs. what if my mother knew?
then i think about my son. what if he knew? what kind of burden would that be to a person, to know his mother tried to destroy herself? and it is true. it is my story. i wonder if my mother was self-destructive.
then i imagine my son hurting himself on purpose so clearly i reach out to tell him to stop, to love his body, his little perfect body. don’t hurt yourself. i love you.
and i know why all the people were so upset. because when someone you love hurts, you hurt. and that’s why i didn’t tell anyone. i didn’t want to hurt people. but i would want him to tell me if he was hurting. i would want to share it. because i love him.
i try to imagine sharing my hurt with him. when he’s older. and, again, it scares the shit out of me. i don’t want to hurt him. but i don’t want to lie to him or hide from him either. i’m not talking about when he’s five or anything.
with this blog, i think a lot about the times when i’ve been self-destructive, and times i want to be self-destructive. and i want to treat myself with kindness and gentleness as i would treat my son, as i would want my son to treat himself. and others. and i want others to do the same. my students. my colleagues. my neighbors. the soldiers. women in prison. everybody.
i guess i don’t know what i believe about truth and love.
stream of consciousness epiphany
i don’t know if i should publish this post or not. comments are welcome.
driving, and trying to sit with hurting, without holding it, without letting it go, just being there in it, and it’s a pain of separation, a desperate bubbly pain in my chest, a swallowing hurting, a brick balloon of a pain. i sat with myself and did not turn away, resist, change the subject, shut down, i just felt my feelings. i imagined myself marching into my chest and hugging the hard chalky edges of helplessness compressing my heart and realizing it weighs nothing. but when the heart inflates. jesus. bigger than this fucking body, bigger than i knew. this pain is not my pain. it is human suffering. my heart is full of it. the strength in feeling this deeply is that this enormous hurt springs from enormous love, but i thought i would die. i thought of all the people i will miss when we move across the country and i thought there is no one else like them and i love them i am expansive with my love for them and their love for me, and there are people in washington i will love because a person is all people. and i felt boundless, connected. to me. to everything. and this terror of isolation that lives in me is terror. not fear. not anxiety. jagged, strangling terror. but we are not separate. isolation is an illusion. i can cut myself off from myself, from others, but i am never separate. we’re all constitutionally bound together, matter, energy. you don’t leave me when i move away.
disclaimer
this blog skips around a lot, i know, and i post erratically. i’ll try to post regularly and organize it when school ends.
a poem
here’s a poem i wrote yesterday. it’s by no means a great, finished poem, but it’s my post for today.
I.
Fear plops down on my
heart like my heart is
a parkbench he was meant to
inhabit. But my heart is a balloon,
not a bench. I watch from behind a hedge.
He must weigh a thousand tons.
I can see his crack as he slurps down
a whopper, a milkshake,
grows more comfortable.
I hurdle the hedge, my body
a battleax, and hack into
his flesh, thick as a redwood
with time and rich food. I chop with
wild panic for days, alone,
but Fear does not budge.
I collapse. Face to face with Fear, I see
a trillion year old baby
still waiting
to be loved.
stigma
People like Tom Cruise perpetuate the stigma of mental illness. The idea that there’s no need for psychotropic drugs. His rant on the Today show was caustic. When people spout that train of thought, I feel despairing, like they’d rather me just be dead. These are powerful, mind-altering drugs. Yes. And that happens to be what I need to stay alive. Vitamins and exercise? Check. Not cutting it. Individuals need to decide for themselves what works. No matter how Tom Cruise perceives himself, he is not an expert on what I do or do not need. What he believes in works for him, and I don’t know his life.
Some of the students I teach cut themselves. Thin lacerations glare from their arms and I burn with shame and sadness and rage. And an embarrassing envy. I want to tell them to stop it, to grow up, to talk, to slow down, to breathe, to do something small and nice for someone else and stop obsessing about themselves. That there are other ways to cope. That if you have to hurt, there are other ways: run, squeeze ice cubes, dunk your head in a sink full of ice water.
I am talking to myself.
Several staff members were standing in the office during lunch one day in my second year of teaching, and one teacher said, “Did you notice S’s arms? She’s cutting herself.”
I suddenly felt claustrophobic.
“She’s just doing that for attention,” said an administrator. “It’s not even cuts, it’s like scratches.”
As though self-harm is nothing to worry about unless the harm is severe. Or it’s nothing to worry about if a person does it just to get attention.
I burned with shame and sadness and rage all over again. A lot of people believe the behaviors that are byproducts of illness, such as self-injury, are dramatic ways of getting attention. There’s some sort of weird social contract to ignore the flawed logic of that line of thought: healthy people don’t use such elaborate measures to get their needs met. And truly, if someone needs attention that bad, why would you ignore or dismiss what they’re doing and continue to deny them attention? My recovery has been inhibited by me internalizing society’s views. I’m just as guilty: I still judge myself and others based on misconceptions about mental illness.
Physical illness is more quantifiable. No one would say people with diabetes’ inability to control their blood sugar is a lack of self-control that they can overcome with some self-discipline. It’s widely accepted that people with diabetes need their insulin to function. To survive. No one says they’re just trying to get attention. Or to just get over it. After all, if they’re able to function, they’re not in a coma, right?
That mental illness is so stigmatized is problematic on many levels. The individual costs are significant. Guilt and shame often accompany symptoms that are difficult to manage in themselves. People are reticent to talk about it for fear of being dismissed by others, especially after celebrities’ troubled lives–like Brittney Spears and Anne Heche–become subjects of public ridicule. The “public” often fears the “mentally ill” because of media images like Sybil and Hannibal Lecter, et al. Then, when mental illness looks like Girl, Interrupted, then the attitude shifts to “get over yourself,” which, to my knowledge, has never helped anyone’s recovery.
But the problem is also systemic. A lot of people–47 million Americans–don’t have access to health insurance, making preventative mental healthcare–therapy, counseling,medication–financially unviable for them. Many people who do have insurance are allowed 20 or fewer visits per year to therapists and psychiatrists combined. Emergency services exist, but if help had been available along the way, the person might not have ended up in emergency care.
I am lucky enough to work in a place that offers health insurance. Another problem with insurance is the list of available providers. When I was searching for a psychiatrist and called the providers on the list, either they were not taking new patients, or they were not accepting my insurance plan. Even though they were on the list, they said they’d stopped accepting Anthem. Other problems I ran into are that many don’t schedule appointments after 5 pm, which means I would have to miss work for appointments, or that I couldn’t get in to see a doctor until four months from when I was calling. I ended up at the university outpatient hospital, a training ground for new psychiatrists. I know doctors have to train on someone. However, it means that I get a new doctor every year. I’ve seen four different doctors in the past four years. It’s really hard to start a new relationship every year, to go through the painful stuff I’ve already rehashed yet again, and to develop trust that they will help me to stay healthy.
I don’t know what the solution is. More access to mental healthcare, mental health information being available to the masses. But what all people need–the ill, the well, the in-between–rather than a pep-talk, or, worse, bullying, is understanding and compassion. It doesn’t take anything away from you to offer someone else compassion. Please.
snapshots of crazy #2: second year of college
One night in the fall of my second year of college, I was lying in bed half-naked with J listening to Tracy Chapman. The only light was a desk lamp so dim it blurred the edges of reality enough that I could pretend I hadn’t just had sex with a woman. I still wasn’t out as a lesbian, even to myself. I thought I was just attracted to this one woman. It wasn’t like I was in love with her.
We’d met in the break room at Kroger. She worked in the deli and I was a courtesy clerk. She said, “You look tired.”
“I just moved. I am tired.”
That was it.
A few days later she asked if I wanted to come to dinner. She was cooking Thai food with friends. That she was hitting on me did not even cross my mind. “Yeah!” I said. “I love dinner.”
I invited her to dinner a few days later to return the hospitality. She showed up with flowers.
OH. I thought. SHIT.
I commenced to drinking an entire bottle of wine very quickly. We sat in the dark after dinner and she caressed my cheek. It felt good. I hated it. It was all I could do not to scream. I stayed very very still. The next day I told her I wasn’t gay.
The longer we were friends, the more I was attracted to her. Then one night, I got bold and pushed my lips onto hers. I was making out with a girl. And I liked it. I wanted her. My skin wanted her skin. It wasn’t gross or uncomfortable at all, nor did it feel like I was compensating her for being nice to me.
There we were. We could hear her roommates guessing the questions to Jeopardy answers through the wall behind us. I decided to join in. “Why do you live with a married couple?” I asked her.
The story revolved around her roommate A from freshman year. They were best friends and had all these freshman misadventures together. She didn’t use romantic terms to describe it, but it sounded like A flirted with J, then got married to some man, making J jealous. J construed it as anger that A had married a man who was controlling. She hadn’t seen A in over a year.
Neither of us talked for awhile. Then I asked, “Were you in love with her?”
“Why?”
“Well, because, I don’t know. The way you described your friendship, it was intense, like you were in love with her. And maybe it was reciprocal, but she was so frightened of that, she married this man. And you were jealous.” She didn’t respond. “It sounds just like my friendship with N.”
“Are you in love with N?”
“I never thought of it until just now while you were talking about A. It sounded so familiar. I guess I am. I’m in love with N.”
More silence. I guess that’s not the thing to say when you’re lying in bed with a woman who’s not N.
“But she’s straight,” I said. “So it doesn’t matter.”
Except I couldn’t let it go. It mattered more than anything. I was consumed by this realization.
I biked home. We dated sporadically for a year, and I never did spend an entire night with her. Subconsciously, I think I believed that if I spent the night, there was no going back. I was holding on to the hope that I wasn’t gay, I just liked this one girl. Now, I knew I was in love with N. That’s two girls, so I must really be gay. How could I be gay? How could I live with myself for 19 years, being gay, and not know it? That’s a huge thing to not know about myself. It didn’t seem possible. I dated guys. One, in high school, for a whole year. Three in college so far. I wasn’t in love with them either, nor, I realized had I been attracted to them. I’d dreaded the ends of dates when there was the potential for physical intimacy. I hated the way they smelled, and their hair, and the weight of them. Those hideous genitals. I managed to avoid having actual intercourse with any of them. But, they were nice. I figured sexual contact was like a payment to them for being nice to me. I believed that all women must feel that way about sex with men. Even then, didn’t occur to me. . . hello. . .
Regardless, here I was, gay. I wanted to have sex with J. She was soft and gentle and smelled good. She was in love with me, and for the first time in a romantic relationship, I felt like she was in love with me, not just desirous of my body. But I was not in love with her. I desired her body. I hated myself for wanting her. I hated that no matter how far I ran, I could never get away from myselfishself.
I would sit on the hood of my car and stare at the moon. The moon kept coming back. The moon didn’t care who was gay or dead or dreaming of standing on it. Ever. People all over could see the same moon. And the moon had been there long before me and would continue to be there whether I was or wasn’t.
I would drive to the grocery store at three or four in the morning and walk around for an hour filling grocery carts with themed items (say, things that started with p: pineapple, pancake mix, pantyhose, party favors, pork n beans, pretzels, prophylactics) and leaving them around the store. But ultimately, I had to go back home. And ultimately, there I was.
When I couldn’t sit any longer with the discomfort of being unable to escape my body, I prowled the kitchen for sharp things. I cut my hands and my face. I was afraid to sleep, afraid I would wake up and discover some new huge disturbing thing about myself, like maybe I was also a Fundamentalist Christian or a Nazi or something, and I didn’t think I could handle any more surprises.
I distrusted everything about myself now. Everything except that I was in love with a straight girl who’d been dating the same guy off and on since sophomore year of high school.
snapshots of crazy #1: being 14
I sat in a desk in the back of the classroom next to the door. I sat in the same spot in every class. Just in case. Ms. Z, my religion teacher, was telling us that we needed to make a mobile for the next nine weeks, one ornament/image thing to symbolize each week. The girl next to me tapped my arm and asked me a question. I stared back at her. The girl looked at me expectantly, then turned and repeated her question to the girl in front of her. I didn’t talk in school that year because I had vowed not to make friends in high school. After four years they would be gone. I couldn’t risk emotional investment. The pros couldn’t possibly outweigh the cons. What would I make for this stupid project? Knives was all I could think. Knives. I hated everybody.
I’d been friends with M, this girl down the street, since I was six, most of my life, and suddenly, she got this loser boyfriend and dropped me. I would ask her to go places and she would be like, “I’m waiting for C to call.” I was jealous and couldn’t explain why. I was crushed because she wouldn’t spend time with me. I was in love with her but didn’t recognize that in myself. I couldn’t be gay. I mean, I didn’t know any gay people, and gay people felt weird inside. I didn’t feel weird inside. Of course, I wished the boys I dated were more like my friends who were girls, and I once asked M to make out with me. (She refused.) Still didn’t register with me that I might be gay. She could have dug my heart out of my chest with a spoon and it would have felt soothing compared to how I felt about being cut off from her. I couldn’t talk about it with anyone because I knew everyone would dismiss me as an angsty teen. (Which I was. Notebooksfull of angsty poetry to prove it.) Plus, if I talked to someone, I might like them, then they would eventually betray me and I would have this pain all over again. Cutting myself, oddly, relieved that pain.
The second situation was that I had attended a K-8 grammar school from kindergarten through 8th grade. Graduating was hard because that place was a second home. I fit in there. But I didn’t want to admit that I was sad, because to be sad about that was to be weak. I guarded that secret, crying every night in bed. What kind of lame kid was I who was that attached to school?
Then there was religion class. I hated religion. I was convinced religion teachers in Catholic schools were all Satan’s minions, working to turn people away from the church. It worked on me. The hypocrisy infuriated me. Here are the rules of the Bible. Here are the rules of the Pope. Except, you don’t have to follow the archaic ones you don’t believe in. Like, use birth control if you want to. Get divorced if you need to. But for Christ’s sake, don’t be gay. And too bad if you’re a woman. When it finally occurred to me that god might just be made up, I was utterly resentful that all these people I trusted had told me god was absolute, that the rules of Catholicism were The Rules. It was an elaborate lie. I had to take religion all four years of high school and sit through classes based on a socially acceptable psychosis? And now I had to make a goddamned mobile? Jesus fucking Christ.
What else had they lied to me about? Oh my god. I felt like I was dangling from nothing, like there was no place to stand. I couldn’t trust anyone. Not even myself. What if everything I “knew” was a lie?
I stopped sleeping for awhile because I didn’t want to wake up and go to school. I stayed up late to watch Silk Stalkings, a show that was like Baywatch meets Law & Order. It was vapid, but my dad and I watched it every night. It was a way to connect with my dad without having to talk. I didn’t want morning to come. I didn’t want to wake up and go to school. Everyone there thought I was a freak because I never talked or changed my facial expression, and I wasn’t rich like the other girls, and I didn’t care about who was fucking whom, or purses, or make up, or hating my parents, or curfews, or drinking. When my dad would come into my bedroom in the morning to wake me, I would kick him or swing at him. After a few weeks of that, he got me an alarm clock.
Not sleeping didn’t make things any easier.
Then, I decided that I should get a boyfriend. So I talked enough to get one. I wore make up and short shorts. I wrote a dirty letter. He was a gross little boy who I wished was M. The dirty letter was found by my parents who then lost all respect for and trust in me. They wouldn’t let me out of the house. That was the end. I had no human connections. I bought a pair of 10-eye Doc Marten’s and started taking four and five hour long walks by myself. I always stopped by the lake at some point in the walk. There was an overpass I would sit under and let the thunder of the cars above me vibrate in my chest. The boots bit through my heels. My socks would be bloody when I took them off.
Finally, my parents took me to a psychologist. She was an ex-nun who wore appliqued sweaters, thick pantyhose, and a grim look. She sat with her feet propped on a footstool. I stared at her ’70s thin-strapped, chunkheeled sandals through three sessions. I guess my parents were worried about me, but what they told me was that they were having my IQ tested. I was scared. I knew they thought something was wrong with me, that I was crazy.
I took the IQ test at a psychiatric hospital. The short wrinkley woman who administered the test left me with this pearl of wisdom: It’s hard being a teenager.
This is a summary of what the psychologist told me: You’re smart. Top 2% of the population. You are creative. You use your intelligence and creativity to manipulate people. You’re power-seeking, attention-seeking, indirect, and passive aggressive.
Then she was like, “Do you think you need to come back?”
No, thank you. Asshole.
Initially, I was livid. Slowly, I decided she was right. I was all those terrible things. I was smart, but I used my powers for evil. I didn’t deserve to feel good. My parents didn’t trust me, they thought I was crazy enough to take me to a psychologist, the psychologist diagnosed me a jerk, my friend liked a dumbass dropout druggie better than she liked me, everyone was a hypocrite, there was no god, my whole life was a lie.
What was the point of being alive? I had never asked to be born in the first place.
I decorated my skin.
how did i get here?
November of my first year of teaching. I was cutting myself again. I started cutting when I was fourteen, and, if you read the first post, you know I was never treated. At that point, I was in my mid-twenties.
I would come home from work despondent. My students’ lives were a hot mess–poverty, sexual abuse, addictions, legal trouble–and I couldn’t fix it. They didn’t do homework. They didn’t do class work. They didn’t read. They wouldn’t write. They were failing by the roomful and didn’t seem (to me) to care. Or even to understand the correlation between turning in assignments and their grades. A student once asked me, “Could I get an A?” And when I said, “No, you haven’t done any work,” she asked, “Well could I at least get a D?”
I couldn’t talk about my day. No day. I hated my imperfection. I was terrified to expose what a failure I was as a teacher. I didn’t inspire them. I gave them things irrelevant things to read. My assignments were meaningless. I talked too much. I talked over their heads. I couldn’t keep doing this job; I couldn’t quit. There were no other meaningful jobs I could do. The drive home had the potential, every day, to be my out. The concrete overpass supports, so big and still, waiting indifferently for me to make up my fucking mind and either wreck into them or not. I couldn’t make up my fucking mind. And if I did decide to drive real fast and wreck my car into the overpass, what if I didn’t die? What was I so fucking upset about anyway when I was practically wallowing in privilege compared to many students? What kind of asshole was I?
Then, somehow, I would be home. I would look at one of my thirty page to do lists and feel trapped. I couldn’t do it all. I couldn’t do any of it. There wasn’t enough time. There wasn’t enough me. The items on the list would march into my chest and spiral like electrons, humming the tune of what wasn’t getting done so loud I couldn’t focus on getting them done. I got sucked into the center of their spiral until the edges of me seemed so far away from the hole I was in I thought I’d never be able to surface and, say, have a conversation with someone. And I would hate myself for my impotence. Why couldn’t I do one goddamned thing? Why was I so fucking shitty?
I stood in the spare bedroom I used as an office (and spare it was) shaking, my skin getting tighter and tighter as the list grew and grew. I kept sharp things on my desk. A serrated knife. A pair of scissors. An exacto knife. And I cut myself. To interrupt the noise. To let in some light. To loosen the skin. To relieve the pressure of the unreasonable expectations I was drowning myself in. To prevent myself from doing something much more final.
My arms bled. Finally, quiet. I could breathe. I rolled down my sleeves and moved on.
I didn’t tell anyone.
Then, one night, my partner N and our friends X & Y, another lesbian couple, were hanging out. I was usually very careful not to expose my arms, but their house was warm. I pulled off my long sleeve shirt. As I was folding it, X grabbed my wrist.
What’s this? She pointed at three parallel slashes on my forearm.
Busted.
I shrugged. I don’t know.
She dropped my arm.
I didn’t expect an answer. I’m letting you know I noticed.
We have to leave, said N.
We left. N was hysterical. I felt like the lowest, most disappointing asshole fuck-up. I had been harboring a secret for over ten years. Now everybody knew the truth about me. I don’t remember what was said, but the conversations that followed that night tended to be like, Why didn’t you tell me, Why would you do this, How long have you been doing this, Why aren’t you talking to me?
Why didn’t I tell you?
Because I am ashamed. Because I am in my mid-twenties, and should be beyond this. Should should should be able to cope. Should be able to do the job I was trained to do. How can I tell you how I am failing? The state has issued me a professional license and entrusted me with the responsibility to teach the children to read; I’m making them stupider.
Why would I do this?
It feels like I am saving my life. If I don’t, all I imagine is a thousand ways to die. I can’t breathe. I am paralyzed, I can’t possibly finish all the work I have to do, I can’t give a fraction of what my students need. All the time, it feels like they are stabbing me when they talk to me, like they are taking something away from me, draining me of something I need to survive.
How long have I been doing this?
Since I was fourteen.
Why am I not talking to you?
Because if I talk, if this comes out of me, it will obliterate me. It will swallow me. I will disappear. There will be nothing left.
We went to bed.
Fuck. On top of not being able to do my job, all the people close to me now hate me. How can I get them to like me again? If only I could die.
I spent the night awake, as I did most nights, obsessing over the last part of the evening. I took my shirt off. Why did I take my shirt off? X held my arm. Three red lines. If only I could die. I took my shirt off. Three red lines. I took my shirt off. What’s this? I took my shirt off. We have to leave. If only I could die. On a loop. All night. If only I could die.
X emailed she wanted to help in any way she could. Would I see a therapist?
No. No professional help. It’s not that big a deal.
am i crazy?
The day I met a psychiatrist for the first time, I was terrified. I knew I had to reveal all the things I had been thinking and doing, things I was embarrassed about and ashamed of (and hadn’t ever told anyone) to a person I’d never met before. I’d never gone to a psychiatrist. I hadn’t wanted to see a psychiatrist at all, but the people who love me convinced me that my life depended on it. I knew the doctor would confirm one of two fears: a) I was broken, irreparably; or, b) I was making it all up.
I was a first year teacher. Most days on the drive home from work, I wanted to drive my car very fast into something very still. And most days, what stopped me was the fear that I might live. When I got home, I did work–planned, read student work, averaged grades–and there was never enough time to get everything done. I was failing. I didn’t sleep. I felt trapped, and like I had no skin. Every time anyone talked to me, it felt like they were literally stabbing me. Robbing me of something. After these exchanges, the conversations would bang around my skull for hours, frantic pinballs, as I revised my parts, hating myself, knowing that the other person in the conversation hated me or thought I was stupid, or a liar, or fake, or just ridiculous. I invented a thousand ways to get people who didn’t like me to like me–gifts tangible and not–to make them like me again. Except they already liked me.
Having conversations and doing a job are pretty basic things. I expected myself to be able to do them. And I loathed myself for my ineptitude. The feverish narrator in my head ranted. What the fuck is wrong with you? Just suck it up and do your work. You’re a fucking asshole who can’t do anything. You suck at your job. You suck at life. You hate you, with good reason, and so does everyone else. Why don’t you just stop wasting everyone’s time and energy and die?
Had I not sought help when I did, I’d be dead now.
I needed the psychiatrist to help me. In order for him (he was a him) to help, I had to tell him my insides. I didn’t have a language for my insides, which turned out to be a big part of my problem. But if the psychiatrist could help me, that meant I was crazy. Mentally ill. Too weak to just suck it up. Too whiny. Or, what if it turned out I was like Hannibal Lecter crazy? What if I had to live in a psych ward with people who drooled and shouted and weren’t allowed to wear belts?
How could I convey myself to him, precisely? What if I said the wrong words?
His office was an old Victorian house that had been converted. Iron steps led to a small stoop. A sign instructed patients to ring the doorbell. I pushed the doorbell and a voice demanded my name. After a moment, the door clicked. I entered waiting room was small. Worn green carpet, washed out watercolors of empty landscapes, somber people. Sour breath. Sadness. The air leaden with waiting. I checked in. Without looking up from her computer monitor, the receptionist said flatly, New patient. She handed me a clipboard.
Fill that out and bring it back with your insurance card. Doctor A– will be with you soon.
I sat down. As I filled out the required information, I filled up with dread.
Symptoms.
I had to write it down? Writing it down made it indelible. Undeniable. Unrevisable. Known. The doctor’s idea would be shaped by what I wrote. The insurance company would file it away. My name, flagged.
Symptoms. I cut myself.
I finished the form and returned it to the desk. Soon after, Dr A– appeared at the top of a staircase. L–, he called. Pins of panic shot out of my heart and lodged themselves under my skin. Shh. Don’t say my name. Oh, god. Don’t say my name. Everybody can hear you. I wanted to slam my hand over his mouth. Instead, I followed him down the stairs. His office was in the basement, flanking a dreary conference room. He waited at the door to usher me in, then shut the door behind me and introduced himself.
I’m Dr A–.
L–, I said.
His office was spare and revealed nothing about him except that his taste in lamps was as questionable as his taste in framed decor. The watercolor on the wall opposite me was a sailboat next to a fence on a beach. A beached sailboat, like a metaphor for impotence.
Tell me why you’re here, he said.
He was about 900 years old, a white-haired white guy in a suit, an archetype of a psychiatrist. The only thing missing was a beard. I started jiggling my leg so furiously that he became blurry. I told him everything I could think of. He must have asked me some questions, but I don’t remember them, with the exception of:
You’ve never been in treatment before? Never? How old are you?
That settled it. The loose skin of his face puckered up into itself with incredulity. His eyebrows hung like question marks punctuating his questions. I panicked. I was crazy.
And the slightest bit relieved I hadn’t made it all up.
No, I said. I’m 25.
Silence.
He reached forward to shake my hand and I ducked.
It was nice to meet you, he said.
I sat there feeling crazy.
Finally he said, Come back in two weeks.
I left. Now what?
dispatches from crazyville 