Madness

a bipolar life

marya
hornbacher

Copyright

HarperPress

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harperperennial.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2008

Copyright © Marya Hornbacher 2008, 2009

PS Section copyright © Hannah Harper 2009, except ‘Lives Too Often Kept Dark’ by Marya Hornbacher © Marya Hornbacher 2009

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Marya Hornbacher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007250646

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN 9780007380367

Version: 2015-03-26

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Part I

The Goatman

What They Know

Depression

Prayer

Food

The Booze under the Stove

Meltdown

Escapes

Minneapolis

California

Minneapolis

Washington, D.C.

Full Onset

Part II

The New Life

The Diagnosis

The Break

Unit 47

Tour

Hypomania

Jeremy

Therapy

Losing It

Crazy Sean

Oregon

Day Treatment

Attic, Basement

Valentine’s Day

Coming to Life

Jeff

The Good Life

The Magazine

Part III

The Missing Years

Hospitalization #1

Hospitalization #2

Hospitalization #3

Hospitalization #4

Hospitalization #5

Hospitalization #6

Hospitalization #7

Release

Part IV

Fall 2006

Winter 2006

Spring 2007

Summer 2007

Epilogue

Bipolar Facts

Useful Websites

Useful Contacts

Research Resources

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …

About the Author

Q A with Marya Hornbacher

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Writers of All Time

Top Ten Musical Artists of All Time

About the Book

Lives Too Often Kept Dark

A Writers Life

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This

Find Out More

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
The Cut

November 5, 1994

I am numb. I am in the bathroom of my apartment in Minneapolis, twenty years old, drunk, and out of my mind. I am cutting patterns in my arm, a leaf and a snake. There is one dangling light, a bare bulb with a filthy string that twitches in the breeze coming through the open window. I look out on an alley and the brick buildings next door, all covered with soot. Across the way a woman sits on her sagging flowered couch in her slip and slippers, watching TV, laughing along with the laugh track, and I stop to sop up the blood with a rag. The blood is making a mess on the floor (note to self: mop floor) while a raccoon clangs the lid of a dumpster down below. Time hiccups; it is either later or sooner, I can’t tell which. I study my handiwork. Blood runs down my arm, wrapping around my wrists and dripping off my fingers onto the dirty white tile floor.

I have been cutting for months. It stills the racing thoughts, relieves the pressure of the madness that has been crushing my mind, vise-like, for nearly my entire life, but even more so in the recent days. The past few years have seen me in ever-increasing flights and falls of mood, my mind at first lit up with flashes of color, currents of electric insight, sudden elation, and then flooded with black and bloody thoughts that throw me face-down onto my living room floor, a swelling despair pressing outward from the center of my chest, threatening to shatter my ribs. I have ridden these moods since I was a child, the clatter of the roller coaster roaring in my ears while I clung to the sides of my little car. But now, at the edge of adulthood, the madness has entered me for real. The thing I have feared and railed against all my life—the total loss of control over my mind—has set in, and I have no way to fight it anymore.

I split my artery.

Wait: first there must have been a thought, a decision to do it, a sequence of events, a logic. What was it? I glimpse the bone, and then blood sprays all over the walls. I am sinking; but I didn’t mean to; I was only checking; I’m crawling along the floor in jerks and lurches, balanced on my right elbow, holding out my left arm, the cut one. I slide on my belly toward the phone in my bedroom; time has stopped; time is racing; the cat nudges my nose and paws at me, mewling. I knock the phone off the hook with my right hand and tip my head over to hold my ear to it. The sound of someone’s voice—I am surprised at her urgency—Do you have a towel—wrap it tight—hold it up—someone’s on their way—Suddenly the door breaks in and there is a flurry of men, dark shadows, all around me. I drop the phone and give in to the tide and feel myself begin to drown. Their mouths move underwater, their voices glubbing up, Is there a pulse? and metal doors clang shut and I swim through space, the siren wailing farther and farther away.

I am watching neon lights flash past above my head. I am lying on my back. There is a quick, sharp, repetitive sound somewhere: wheels clicking across a floor. I am in motion. I am being propelled. The lights flash in my eyes like strobe. The place I am in is bright. I cannot move. I am sinking. The bed is swallowing me. Wait, this is not a bed; there are bars. We are racing along. There are people on either side of me, pushing the cage. They’re running. What’s the hurry? My left arm feels funny, heavy. There is a stunning pain shooting through it, like lightning, flashing from my hand to my shoulder. It seems to branch out from there, shooting electricity all through my body. I try to lift my arm but it weighs a thousand pounds. I try to lift my head to look at it, to look around, to see where I am, but I am unable to. My head, too, is heavy as lead. From the corner of my eye, I see people watching me fly by.

I am in shock. I heard them say it when they found me. She’s in shock, one said to the other. Who are they? They broke down the door. Well, are they going to pay for it? I am indignant. I black out.

I come to. I am wearing my new white sweater. I regret that it is stained dark red. What a waste of money. We have stopped moving. There are people standing around, peering down at me. They look like a thicket of trees and I am lying immobile on the forest floor. When did it happen? What did you use? they demand, their voices very far away. I don’t remember—everyone calm down, I’ll just go home—can I go home? I feel a little sick—I vomit into the thing they hold out for me to vomit into. I’m so sorry, I say, it was an accident. Please, I think I’ll go home. Where are my shoes?

Am I saying any of this? No one stops. They bustle. I must be in a hospital; that is what people do in a hospital, they bustle. For hospital people, they are being very loud. There is shouting. The bustling is unusually hurried. What’s the rush, people? My arm is killing me, as it were, yuk yuk, though I can’t really feel it so much, am more just aware that it is there; or perhaps I am merely aware that it was there, and now I am aware only of the arm-shaped heaviness where it used to be. Have they taken my arm? Well, that’s all right. Never liked it anyway, yuk yuk yuk.

No one is getting my jokes.

I realize I am screaming and stop immediately, feeling embarrassed at my behavior. I have to be careful. They will think I am crazy.

I come to and black out. I come to and black out. This lasts forever, or it takes less than a minute, a second, a millisecond; it takes so little time that it does not happen at all; after all, how would I be conscious of losing consciousness? Is that, really, what it means to lose your mind? Well, then, I don’t lose my mind very often after all. My arm hurts like a motherfucker. I object. I turn my head to the person whose face is closest to me to tell him I object, but suddenly he is all hands, and there is an enormous gaping red thing where my arm used to be. It is bloody, it looks like a raw steak, it looks like the word flesh, the word itself, in German fleish, and the Bastard of Hands has one hand wrapped around my forearm, his fingers and thumbs on either side of the gaping red thing, pressing it together, and he is sticking a needle into the inside part of the thing—Quiet down! Someone hold her down, for chrissakes—and he stabs the inside of the thing again and again and I hear someone screaming, possibly me. It does not hurt, per se, but it startles me, the gleaming slender needle sinking into the raw flesh. I realize I am a steak. They are carving me up to serve me. They will serve me on a silver-plated platter. The man’s hands are enormous, and now the hands are sewing the cut flesh, how absurd! Can’t they just glue it together? What a fuss over nothing—Oh, for God’s sake! I yell (perhaps, or maybe only think), now I remember, and I scream (I’m pretty sure I really do), Can you believe I did it? What a fucking idiot! I didn’t mean to! I plead with them to understand this, I was only cutting a little, didn’t mean to do it, sorry to make such a mess, look at the blood! And my sweater! I black out and come to and black out again. You’re in shock. Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Maria? She’s completely out of it, one says to the other. They tower like giants. They can’t pronounce my name. It’s MAR-ya, I say, stressing the first syllable. Yes, dear. It is, I say, it really is. Yes, dear, I know. I’m sure it is. Just rest. Fuming, I rest. How can they save my life if they don’t even know how to say my name? They will save someone else’s life instead! A woman named Maria! Why, I suddenly think, should they have to save my life—oh, for God’s sake! I remember again. I’ve gone and actually done it! Moron! How on earth will I explain this? The pair of hands has sewn the inside flesh together and is beginning another row on top of it. One row won’t do? Stupid, says the Bastard of Hands. I look at him, shaking his head, disgusted, stitching quickly. So damn stupid.

I want to say again that I didn’t mean it so he will not think I am stupid. I watch blood drip from a bag above my head into a thin tube that leads, I think, to me. I black out. I come to. There is a giant belly in front of me. It touches the edge of the bed. I follow the belly up the body to a very pretty face. Aha! Pregnant! Now I understand. However, why is there a pregnant woman standing next to me? Where is the hand man? Do you think you need to be in the psych ward? God, no! I laugh at the very idea, wanting very badly to seem sane. I prop myself up, forgetting about the arm, and collapse back on it, screaming in pain. Note to self: don’t use left arm. Why don’t you think you need to be in the psych ward? she asks. I didn’t mean to! I cry. It was a total accident, I was making dinner, accidentally the knife slipped, not to worry, I wasn’t attempting (I cannot say the word) (there is a hollow between words, which I fill with) (nicer, safer words). I am incredibly dizzy and I wish she would go away so I could go home—who lets a woman who’s just sliced her arm in half go home? Can you contract for safety? the pregnant psychiatrist asks. Who knew psychiatrists got pregnant? I can, I say, very earnest. You can agree that you will not hurt yourself again if you go home? Absolutely, I say. After all, I joke, I can’t very well cut open the other arm—this one hurts too much! I laugh hysterically, nearly falling off the bed. She doesn’t think this is funny. She has no sense of humor.

She lets me go home. Hospital policy is to impose the least level of restriction possible. If they think you can keep yourself safe, if they can keep one more bed open in the psych ward, they let you go home. And I’m very convincing. I contract for safety, swearing I won’t cut myself up again. I call a cab and climb into it, dizzy, my arm wrapped in thick layers of bandages. I return to a bloody mess, and as dawn fills the room, I tell myself I’ll clean it up in the morning.

I HAVE BEEN in and out of psychiatric institutions and hospitals since I was sixteen. At first the diagnosis was an eating disorder—years spent in a nightmare cycle of starving, bingeing, and purging, a cycle that finally got so bad it nearly killed me—but I’ve been improving for over a year, and it’s all cleared up (brush off hands). They think I’m a little depressed—that’s the assumption they make for anyone with an eating disorder—so they give me Prozac, new on the market now, thought to cure all mental ills, prescribed like candy to any and all. Because I’m not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me utterly manic and numb—one of the reasons I slice my arm open in the first place is that I’m coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.

I am probably in the grip of a mixed episode. During manic episodes or mixed episodes—which are episodes where both the despair of depression and the insane agitation and impulsivity of mania are present at the same time, resulting in a state of rabid, uncontrollable energy coupled with racing, horrible thoughts—people are sometimes led to kill themselves just to still the thoughts. This energy may be absent in the deepest of depressions, whether bipolar or pure depression; the irony is that as people appear to improve, they often have a higher risk of suicide, because now they have the energy to carry out suicide plans. Actually, an alarming number of bipolar suicides are unintentional. Mania triggers wildly impulsive behaviors, powerful urges to push oneself to the utmost, to go to often dangerous extremes—like driving a hundred miles an hour, bingeing on drugs and alcohol, jumping out of windows, cutting, and others. These extreme behaviors lead, often enough, to accidental death.

Who knows, really, what leads to my sudden, uncontrollable desire to cut myself? I don’t know. Is the suicide attempt accidental or deliberate? It certainly isn’t planned. Manic, made further manic by the wrong meds, I simply do it, unaware in the instant that there will be any consequence at all. I watch my right hand put the razor in my left arm. Death is not on my mind.

No one even thinks bipolar—not me, not any of the many doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, and counselors I’ve seen over the years—because no one knows enough. Later, this will seem almost incredible, given what a glaring case of the disorder I actually have and have had nearly all my life. But how could they know back then? With so little knowledge about bipolar disorder, or really about mental illness at all, no one knows what to look for, no one knows what they’re looking at when they’re looking at me. They, and I, and everyone else think I’m just a disaster, a screwup, a mess. On the phone, my grandfather demands, “So, have you got your head screwed on right yet?” Yuk yuk yuk, funny man, raging drunk. But you can’t blame him for the question. It’s the one everyone’s been asking since I was a kid. Surely she’ll grow out of it, they think.

I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

Part I

The Goatman

1978

I will not go to sleep. I won’t. My parents, who are always going to bed, tell me that I can stay up if I want, but for God’s sake, don’t come out of my room. I am four years old and I like to stay up all night. I sing my songs, very quietly. I keep watch. Nothing can get me if I am awake.

I sleep during the day like a bat with the blinds closed, and then they come home. I hear them open the door, and I fling on the lights and gallop through the house shrieking to wake the dead all evening, all night. Let’s have a play! I shout. Let’s have a ballet! A reading! A race! Don’t tell me what to do, get away from me, I hate you, you’re never any fun, you never let me do anything, I want to go to the opera! I want opera glasses! I’m going to be an explorer! I don’t care if I track mud all over the house, let’s get another dog! I want an Irish setter, I want a camel! I want an Easter dress! I’m going ice-skating! Right now, yes! Where are the car keys? Of course I can drive! Fine, go to bed! See if I care!

And I slam into my room, dive onto the bed, kick and scream, get bored, read a book, shouting at the top of my lungs, “I don’t care,” says Pierre! And the lion says, “Then I will eat you, if I may.” “I don’t care, says Pierre!” It is my favorite Maurice Sendak book. I jabber to my imaginary friends Susie and Sackie and Savvy and Cindy, who tell me secrets and stay with me all night while I am keeping watch, while I am guarding the castle, and there are horrible creatures waiting to kill me so I talk to myself all night, writing a play and acting it out with a thousand little porcelain figures that I dust every day, twice a day, I must keep things neat, in their magic positions, or something terrible will happen. The shah of Iran, who is under my bed, will leap out and carry me away under his arm.

I have to get dressed. So what if it’s black as pitch outside. I go to the closet, I take out a jumper and a white shirt, and from the dresser I get white socks and white underwear and a white undershirt, and I get my favorite saddle shoes, and I suit up completely. I must be very quiet or my parents will hear. I tie my shoes in double knots so I won’t fall out of them. I get on my hands and knees and crawl all over the room, smoothing out the carpet. Finally I make myself stop. I lie down in the center of the floor, facing the door in case of emergency. I cross my ankles and fold my hands across my middle. I close my eyes. I fall asleep, or die.

“MOM,” I WHISPER loudly, pushing on her shoulder. It’s dark, I’m in my parents’ bedroom, a ghost in my white nightie. “Mom,” I say again, shaking her. I bounce up and down on my toes and lean over her, my mouth near her ear. “Mom, I have to tell you something.”

“What is it?” she mumbles, opening one eye.

“The goatman,” I whisper, agitated. “He’s in my room. He came while I was sleeping. You have to make him leave. I can’t sleep. Will you read to me?” I hop about, crashing into the nightstand. “Can we make a cake? I want to make a cake, I can’t go to school tomorrow, I’m scared of Teacher Jackie, she yells at us, she doesn’t like me, Mom, the goatman, do you have to go to work tomorrow? Will you read to me?”

“Marya, it’s the middle of the night,” she says, hoisting herself up with her elbow. Next to her, the mountain of my father snores. “Can we read tomorrow?”

“I can’t go back in there!” I shriek, running around in a tiny circle. “The goatman will get me! We could make cookies instead! I want to buy a horse, a gray one! And I want to go to the beach and collect seashells, can’t we go to the beach, I promise I’ll sleep—”

My mother swings her legs off the edge of the bed and holds me by the shoulders. “Honey, can you slow down? Just slow down.”

Out of breath, I stand there, my head spinning.

“What did you want to tell me?” she asks. “One thing. Tell me the most important thing you want to tell me.”

“The goatman,” I say, and burst into tears. “But Mom, I can’t—”

“Shhh,” she says, picking me up. She carries me down the hall. This is how she fixes it. She holds me very tight and things slow down a little. But I’m too upset. I set my chin on her shoulder and sob and babble. Everyone’s going to leave, you’ll forget to come get me, I’ll get lost, I’ll get stuck in the grocery store and they’ll lock me in. What if there are snakes in my bedroom? Why won’t the goatman go away? What if it isn’t perfect? What if it’s scary? What if you and Daddy die? Who will take care of me? What if you give me away? I don’t want you to give me away, I want to be a policeman, why do policemen wear hats—

“Marya, hush. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”

I want to see Grandma, let’s go see Grandma, I want to go outside and play in the yard, why can’t I play in the yard when it’s dark, I want to look at the moon—

We pace up and down the hall. I get more and more agitated, swinging moment by moment from terror to elation to utter despair, until finally I wiggle my way free and start to run. I race around the house, my mother trailing me, until I stumble on my nightgown and sprawl out on the floor, sobbing, beating my fists on the ground. “I’m here,” she says. “Honey, I’m here.”

I snuffle and drag a hiccupping breath and heave a sigh. She is here. She is right here. She picks me up. She carries me into the bathroom and turns on the bathtub. While it runs, I squirm on her lap, kicking my legs, shrieking, laughing, crying, I can’t ever go back in my room, the goatman, I want to have a party, when is it Christmas, I want to live in a tree house, what if I fall in the ocean and drown, where do I go when I die—

She pulls my nightgown over my head and sets me in the tub. I am suddenly quiet. Water makes it better. In the water, I am safe. She kneels next to me where I sit, only my head sticking out of the water. She tells me a story. Things are slowing down. I am contained. I bob in the water, warm, enclosed. My limbs float. The noise and racing of my thoughts wind down until they yawn in my head as if they are in slow motion. My head is filled with white cotton, and I hear a low humming, and my skull is heavy. I am aware only of the water and my mother’s voice.

Back in bed, she wraps me tight in my quilt, my arms and legs and feet and hands all covered, kept in so they won’t fly off. The goatman has gone away for the night. She sits on the edge of my bed, smoothing my hair. I am wrapped up like a package. I am a caterpillar in my cocoon. I am an egg.

She stays with me until, near dawn, I fall asleep.

What They Know

1979

They know I am different. They say that I live in my head. They are just being kind. I’m crazy. The other kids say it, twirl their fingers next to their heads, Cuckoo! Cuckoo! they say, and I laugh with them, and roll my eyes to imitate a crazy person, and fling my arms and legs around to show them that I get the joke, I’m in on it, I’m not really crazy at all. They do it after one of my outbursts at school or in daycare, when I’ve been running around like a maniac, laughing like crazy, or while I get lost in my words, my mouth running off ahead of me, spilling the wild, lit-up stories that race through my head, or when I burst out in raging fits that end with me sobbing hysterically and beating my fists on my head or my desk or my knees. Then I look up suddenly, and everyone’s staring. And I brighten up, laugh my happiest laugh, to show them I was just kidding, I’m really not like that, and everyone laughs along.

I AM LYING on the bed. I am listening to my parents scream at each other in the other room. That’s what they do. They scream or throw things or both. You son of a bitch! [crash]. You’re trying to ruin my life! [crash, shatter, crash]. When they are not screaming, we are all cozy and happy and laughing, the little bear family, we love each other, we have the all-a-buddy hug. It’s hard to tell which is going to come next. Between the screaming and the crazies, it is very loud in my head.

And so I am feeling numb. It’s a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

I am inside my skull. It is a little cave, and I curl up inside it. Below it, my body hovers, unattached. I have that feeling of falling, and I imagine my soul is being pulled upward, and I close my eyes and let go.

My feet are flying. I hate it when my feet are flying. I sit up and grab them with both hands. It’s dark, and I stare at the little line of light that sneaks in under the door.

The light begins to move. It begins to pulse and blur. I try to make it stop. I scowl and stare at it. My heart beats faster. I am frozen in my bed, gripping my feet. The light has crawled across the floor. It’s headed for the bed. I want it to hold still, so I press my brain against it, expecting it to stop, but it doesn’t. The line crosses the purple carpet. I want to scream. I open my mouth and hear myself say something, but I don’t know what it is or who said it. The little man in my mind said it, I decide, suddenly aware that there is a little man in my mind.

The line is crawling up the side of the bed. I tell it to go away. Holding my feet, I scootch back toward the wall. My brain is feeling the pressure. I let go of my feet and cover my ears, pressing in to calm my mind. The line crests the edge of the bed and starts across the flowered quilt. I throw myself off the bed. I watch the line turn toward me, slide off the bed, follow me into the corner of my room.

I want to go under the bed but I know it will follow me. I jump up on the bed, jump down, run into the closet and out again, the humming in my head is excruciatingly loud. The light is going to hurt me. I can’t escape it. It catches up with me, wraps around me, grips my body. I am paralyzed, I can’t scream. So I close my eyes and feel it come up my spine and creep into my brain. I watch it explode like the sun.

I drift off into my head. I have visions of the goatman, with his horrible hooves. He comes to kill me every night. They say it is a nightmare. But he is real. When he comes, I feel his fur.

I don’t come out of my room for days. I tell them I’m sick, and pull the blinds against the light. Even the glow of the moon is too piercing. The world outside presses in at the walls, trying to reach me, trying to eat me alive. I must stay here in bed, in the hollow of my sheets, trying to block the racing, maniac thoughts.

I turn over and burrow into the bed headfirst.

I HAVE THESE crazy spells sometimes. Often. More and more. But I never tell. I laugh and pretend I am a real girl, not a fake one, a figment of my own imagination, a mistake. I never let on, or they will know that I am crazy for sure, and they will send me away.

This being the 1970s, the idea of a child with bipolar is unheard of, and it’s still controversial today. No psychiatrist would have diagnosed it then—they didn’t know it was possible. And so children with bipolar were seen as wild, troubled, out of control—but not in the grips of a serious illness.

My father is having one of his rages. He screams and sobs, lurching after me, trying to grab me and pick me up, keep me from going away with my mother, but I make myself small and hide behind her legs. We are trying to leave for my grandmother’s house. We are taking a train. I have a small plaid suitcase. I come around and stand suspended between my parents, looking back and forth at each one. My mother is calm and mean. The calmer she gets, the more I know she is angry and hates him. She hisses, Jay, for Christ’s sake, stop it. Stop it. You’re crazy, stop screaming, calm down, we’re leaving, you can’t stop us. My father is out of control, yelling, coming at my mother, grabbing at her clothes as she tries to move away from him. Don’t leave me, he cries out as if he’s being tortured, choking on his words, don’t leave me, I can’t live without you, you are the reason I even bother to stay alive, without you I’m nothing. His face is twisted and red and wet from tears. He throws himself on the floor and curls up and cries and screams. I go over to him and pat him on the head. He grabs me and clutches me in his arms and I get scared and try to push away from him but I’m not strong enough. I finally get free and he stands up again, and I stand between them, my head at hip level, trying to push them apart. He kneels and grabs my arms, Baby, I love you, do you love me? Say you love me—and I pat his wet cheeks and say I love him, wanting to get away from him and his rages and black sadness and his lying-on-the-couch-crying days when I get home from preschool, and his sucking need, and I close my eyes and scream at the top of my lungs and tell them both to stop it.

My father calms down and takes us to the train station, but halfway there he starts up again and we nearly crash the car. We leave him standing on the platform, sobbing.

“Why does he get like that?” I ask my mother. I sit in the window seat swinging my legs, watching the trees go by, listening to the clatter of the wheels. I look at my mother. She stares straight ahead.

“I don’t know,” she says. I picture my father back at home, walking through the empty house to the couch, lying down on his side, staring out the window like he does some afternoons, even though I tell him over and over I love him. Over and over, I tell him I love him and that everything will be okay. He never believes me. I can never make him well.

CRAZY IS NOTHING out of the ordinary in my family. It’s what we are, part of the family identity, sort of a running joke—the crazy things somebody did, the great-grandfather who took off with the circus from time to time, the uncle who painted the horse, Uncle Frank in general, my father, me. In the 1970s, psychiatry knows very little about bipolar disorder. It wasn’t even called that until the 1980s, and the term didn’t catch on for another several years. Most people with bipolar were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1970s (in the 1990s, most bipolar people were misdiagnosed with unipolar depression). We didn’t talk about “mental illness.” The adults knew Uncle Joe had manic depression, but they didn’t mind or worry about it—just one more funny thing about us all, a little bit of crazy, fodder for a good story.

This is my favorite one: Uncle Joe used to spend a fair amount of time in the loony bin. My family wasn’t bothered by his regular trips to and from “the facility”—they’d shrug and say, There goes Joe, and they’d put him in the car and take him in. One day Uncle Frank (who everybody knows is crazy—my cousins and I hide from him under the bed at Christmas) was driving Uncle Joe to the crazy place. When they got there, Joe asked Frank to drop him off at the door while Frank went and parked the car. Frank didn’t think much of it, and dropped him off.

Joe went inside, smiled at the nurse, and said, “Hi. I’m Frank Hornbacher. I’m here to drop off Joe. He likes to park the car, so I let him do that. He’ll be right in.” The nurse nodded knowingly. The real Frank walked in. The nurse took his arm and guided him away, murmuring the way nurses always do, while Frank hollered in protest, insisting that he was Frank, not Joe. Joe, quite pleased with himself, gave Frank a wave and left.

Depression

1981

Maybe it begins when I am seven. I’m in bed. It’s too sunny outside, I can’t go out. The blinds are drawn and yet they let in a little light, and the little light pierces my eyes. I turn my face into my pillow. It’s cool and safe in my sheets. My father comes in.

Time to get up, kiddo.

(Silence.)

Kiddo.

(I pull the pillow over my head to block the incessant light.)

Kiddo, are you getting up?

No.

Why not?

I’m skipping today.

What’s the matter with today?

I sigh. I despair of ever getting up again. I cannot move. I will not move. Everything is horrible. I want to go to sleep forever.

I can’t go to school, I say.

Why not?

I bang my head on the mattress and let out a shriek. I sigh and flop onto my back and shade my eyes.

There’s an art project. I burst into tears.

Oh, my father says, unsurprised. Is it complicated?

It’s very complicated, I wail. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. So I’m sick. I wipe my nose and let the tears fall into my ears.

Okay, my father says.

I’m staying home.

Okay.

Okay. Okay. Now I will be okay. No crowded classroom, no scissors, no paste, no other kids, no cafeteria lunch, no recess, no wide sky and too much sun.

The world outside swells and presses in at the walls, trying to reach me, trying to eat me alive. I must stay here in the pocket of my sheets, with my blanket and my book. I will not face the world, with its lights and noise, its confusion, the way I lose myself in its crowds. The way I disappear. I am the invisible girl. I am make-believe. I am not really there.

I don’t come out of my room for days. Days bleed into weeks. I lie in bed in the dark.

Prayer

1983

On my knees. Praying. Pleading. The basement floor is cold beneath my knees. I come here to hide, to hide my prayers. My mother would mock me. God is merely a weakness for people who need to believe. She wouldn’t understand that I am chosen to speak for all the sorrows of the world.

I’m not crazy. God has called me and I have no choice but to answer, or I will be sent to hell. It all depends on me. And so I pray myself to sleep, and pray the second I wake, and pray all day, terrified that God will catch me slacking off and punish me severely.

My knees grow sore and my heart beats a million miles an hour. I panic. I practically pant. My mind spins with the things I am forgetting to pray for, things I have done, there is a light flashing in my brain, like the headlight of a train in the dark, the dark is my mind, which teems with sins, which torment me with their noise. I can hear the sins whisper; are they inside my head or outside my ears? Are they in the basement? Coming from the water heater, the washing machine? God answers at last. You may get up, I hear him say. His voice reverberates against the concrete walls.

Halfway up the stairs, I hear God call me to prayer again. I kneel and pray. He calls me in the kitchen. Calls me in my bedroom. Calls me at school. I raise my hand, hurry into the restroom, kneel on the floor of the stall, the restroom empty and echoing with my rapid breath, echoing with the shrieking, pounding in my head. I pray in class. I pray in the car, after dinner, all night long—hours after silence has settled around the house, my mouth moves with manic prayers.

God watches me, sees my every mistake, every sin. God’s voice booms in my head, now praising me, his chosen one, now spitting at me, sending the snake into my mind. It curls itself around itself, its body pressed against the walls of my skull. I lie in bed, rocking, my head in my hands, the snake flicking its tongue at the backs of my eyeballs. It sinks its teeth into the gray, wet brain. I press my open mouth to the mattress and scream.

Food

1984

God has left. My mind is spinning. I’m out of control, unable to contain myself. I am propelled forward, toward something drastic. I’m going to hurl myself into anything that will stop the thoughts. Suddenly I find a focus. It’s incredibly intense. I must, I must fill myself to bursting, then rid myself of that fullness. Food. It’s all about food.

My body disgusts me. I stand naked in my bedroom in front of the mirror. I pinch the flesh, the needy, hungry, horrible flesh, the softness that buries the perfect clean bones. I pinch hard; red welts appear on my skin. The body revolts me, its tricks, its betrayals, its lies. I starve and starve, and then it happens—the black hole in my chest yawns open, and suddenly I’m in the kitchen, standing at the counter, stuffing food into my mouth, anything I can find, anything that will fill me up. Food covers my face, my cheeks bulge with it, but I still can’t stop, my hands move back and forth from food to mouth. I hate myself for it. I want to be thin, I want to be bones, I want to eliminate hunger, softness, need.

Every day I come home from fourth grade and try to avoid the kitchen. I sit in my bedroom, clutching the seat of my chair. The empty house echoes its silence around me. I sit, gritting my teeth, and then the hum of compulsion drives me into the kitchen. I eat. Leftovers, frozen dinners, whatever I can stuff in my mouth.

I lean over the toilet with my fingers down my throat. I throw up, body heaving, until I’m spitting up blood. I straighten up. I am empty. Clean. I run my hands over the flat of my stomach, play the xylophone of my ribs. Satisfied, absolved, I open the door, walk calmly down the hall to the kitchen, and do it again.

It’s my secret and my savior. It’s reliable. It saves me from the unpredictable mind, where the thoughts are a cesspool, swirling, eddying with rip tide. When I starve, the sinking, pressing black sadness lifts off me, and I feel weightless, empty, light. No racing thoughts, no need to move, move, move, no reason to hide in the dark. When I throw up, I purge all the fears, the paranoia, the thoughts. The eating disorder gives me comfort. I couldn’t let it go if I tried.

It is what I need so badly, a homemade replacement for what a psychiatrist would prescribe for me if he knew: a mood stabilizer. My eating disorder is the first thing I’ve found that works. It becomes indispensable as soon as it begins. I am calm in starvation, all my apprehensions focused. No need to control my mind—I control my body, so my moods level out. I live in single-minded pursuit of something very specific: thinness, death. I act with intention, discipline. I am free.

My parents wonder where all the food is going. I say I’m a growing girl.

The Booze under the Stove

1985

Nothing is going fast enough. At school, the teachers are talking as if their mouths are full of molasses. Their limbs move in slow motion. Pointing to call on someone, the teacher lifts her arm as if it is filled with wet sand. I swear to God I think I am going insane, it is so slow, while my thoughts whistle past like the wind, so fast I can barely keep up. I turn my mind inward to watch them. They move in electric currents, crackling, spitting, sending out red sparks.

The other students are slow, stupid, asleep. In the hallways, they move like a herd of slugs, wet and shapeless, inching toward the door. I explode out of school, dancing as fast as I can across the playground, whipping in circles around the tetherball pole, dashing off across the yard, trying to shake off this incredible energy, this amazing energy. I’m ten years old and I might as well be on speed.

My parents are on their way out the door. Eat dinner! they call, but I am too fast for them, their voices recede in the distance as I race through the house, bouncing off the walls. I’ve been pleading with them to let me stay home by myself, and so they do, heading off to their meetings or dinners or places unknown. Maybe not a great idea to let a ten-year-old stay home alone, but I’ve twisted their arms, and they’re immersed in work and in their own nightmare marriage, avoiding each other, avoiding the fights, thinking up reasons to be gone. They work compulsively, and when they’re not working they see friends, putting on the face of the happy couple. Everything’s fine. We’re the perfect little family. People tell us that all the time.

And I am home alone with a raw steak on the counter, hopping up and down, my mind jetting about. Time for homework! I reach into my bag and throw my books and papers up in the air, ha ha! Watch this, ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Marya! Look at her go! Can you believe the incredible speed? My homework covers the kitchen floor, and I crawl around picking it up, talking to myself: Hip-hop, my friends, never liked rabbits, must get a tiger, it will sleep in my bed, take it for walks, I need new shoes, fabulous shoes, I will show all of them, hark the herald angels sing! Christmas is smashing! Love it, people, just love it—I hop up, slap my hand to my chest, salute the refrigerator, click my heels, make a sharp turn, and walk stiffly over to the kitchen table, where I whip through the papers, laying them out perfectly in a complex system, the most efficient system, each corner of each page touching the corner, exactly, of the next. Having arranged the papers, I gallop up and down the hallway, slide into the kitchen as if I’m sliding into third, yank open the refrigerator, pull out some mushrooms, chop them up, my knife a blur, toss them into the frying pan, sauté them—but they need a little something. A little zing. I pull open the cupboard beneath the sink, pull out the brandy, splash it in the pan. But now that I think of it, what are all those bottles?

I turn off the burner, bouncing up and down, and open the cupboard again.

Booze.

I pull out a jug of Gallo, stagger underneath its weight. A little wine with dinner, the very thing, don’t you think? I pour it into a giant plastic Minnesota Twins cup and collapse with my mushrooms and tankard of wine at the dining room table.

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

I lope up and down the hallway, singing Simon and Garfunkel songs, juggling oranges. I do my homework in a flurry of brilliance, total efficiency, the electric grid of my mind snapping and flashing with light. I am in the zone, the perfect balance between manic and drunk, I am mellow, I’m cool, cool as cats. I’ve found the answer, the thing that takes the edge off, smoothes out the madness, sends me sailing, lifts me up and lets me fly.

It’s alchemy, the booze and my brain, another homemade mood stabilizer, and it stabilizes me in a heavenly mood. I am in love with the world, gregarious, full of joy and generosity toward my fellow man. My thoughts fly, but not up and down—they soar forward in a thrilling flight of ideas, heightened sensations, a creative rush, each thought tumbling into the next. It’s even more perfect than eating and throwing up.

My future with alcohol is long and disastrous. But at first, it works wonders for me. No longer low, not yet too high. Just on a roll, energetic, inspired. I truly believe the booze is helping. I’ll believe this, despite all evidence, for years.

Eventually I stagger into bed and, for once, fall asleep.

Meltdown

1988

My moods start to swing up and down almost minute to minute. I take uppers to get even higher and downers to bring myself down. Cocaine, white crosses, Valium, Percocet—I get them from the boys who skulk around the suburban malls hunting jailbait. I’m an easy target, in the market for their drugs and willing to do what they want to get them for free. The boys themselves are a high. They have something I want. They are to be used and discarded. The trick is to catch them and make them want the girl I am pretending to be. Then twist them up with wanting me, watch them squirm like worms on a hook, and throw them away.

I find myself on piles of pillows in their basements, pressed down under their bodies, their lurching breath in my ear. They are heavy, damp, hurried, young, still mostly dressed. I don’t know how I’ve wound up here, and I want it to end, and I repeat to the rhythm of their bodies, You’re a slut, you’re a whore, and I want a bath, want to scrub them off, why does this keep happening? Why don’t I ever say no? There’s a rush when they want me, and they always do, they’re boys, that’s what they want, and once they’ve got me half lying on the couch, each basement, each boy, each time, my brain shuts off, the rush is over, I’m numb, I want to go home. The impulsive tumble into the corner, the racing pressure in my head always ends like this: I hate them, and I hate myself, and I swear I won’t do it again. But I do. And I do. And I do.

And then I am home in my bedroom, blue-flowered wallpaper and stuffed animals on the bed, stashing my baggies of powders and pills. If I hit the perfect balance of drugs, I can trigger the energy that keeps me up all night writing and lets me stay marginally afloat in junior high, accentuating the persona I’ve created as a wild child, a melodramatic rebel—black eyeliner and dyed black hair, torn clothes, a clown and a delinquent, sulking, talking back. In class, I fool everyone into thinking I’m real.

But then I come home after school to the empty, hollow house, wrap into a ball in the corner of the couch, a horrible, clutching, sinking feeling in my chest. Nothing matters, and nothing will ever be all right again. I go into rages at the slightest thing, pitching things around the house, running away in the middle of the night, my feet crunching across the frozen lake. I cling to the cold chainlink fence of the bridge across the freeway and watch the late-night cars flash by, my breath billowing out into the dark in white gusts.

DAY YAWNS OPEN like a cavern in my chest. I lie in the dimness of my room, the blinds shut tight and blankets draped over them. I weigh a million pounds. I can feel my body, its heavy bones, its excess flesh, pressing into the mattress. I’m certain that it sags beneath me, nearly touching the floor. My father bangs on the door again. Breakfast! he calls.

I crawl out of bed and slide out the drawer from the bed stand, turn it over, and untape the baggie of cocaine underneath. Kneeling, I tap lines out onto the stand, lean over, and snort them up with the piece of straw I keep in the bag. I sit back on my knees and close my eyes. There it is: the feeling of glass shards in the brain. I picture the drug shattering, slicing the gray matter into neat chunks. My heart leaps to life as if I’ve been shocked. I open my eyes, lick my fingers and the straw, and put the baggie away, replacing the drawer. I lift off, the roller coaster swinging up, clattering on its tracks, me flying upside down.

Humming, I take a shower and dance into my clothes—a ridiculously short skirt with a hole that exposes even more thigh, black tights, a ripped-up shirt. I pack up my book bag, pull out another baggie, pills this time, from the far corner of the desk drawer. I select a few and put them in my pockets, then spring into the day, a gorgeous day, a good day to be alive. Good morning! I call, sitting down at the table, bouncing my knee at the speed of light.

You’re in a good mood this morning.

I am! I am indeed. I watch my father scramble eggs, and then panic: what am I thinking? I can’t eat that. I leap to my feet. Gotta go! Can’t stay to eat! I punch my father on the arm as I run out the door.

But you need to eat! he calls after me. Get back here! You can’t leave dressed like that!

Bye, I call, setting off down the street, my book bag banging against my leg. The trees are in bloom. The sun is pulsing. I can feel it touching my skin. My skin is alive, crawling. Suddenly I stop. My skin is on fire. I drop my book bag, start rubbing my skin. Get it off! I am dancing around in the middle of the road. There are bugs on my arms, crawling up my neck, crawling on my face and into my hair, Get them off me! Where the hell are they coming from? I fall onto the grass at the side of the road, rolling, trying to get them off. My hair tangles and dirt grinds into my clothes. Finally the bugs are gone. I stand up, smooth my hair, and, much better now, skip down the road to school. It’s so annoying when that happens. But I’m not about to give up the cocaine.

No one knows about the powders, the pills, the water bottle filled with vodka that I keep in my bag. My friends are good girls. I am a tramp. I don’t know why they bother with me. I slouch in my seat in the back of the room, my arms folded, hiding behind my hair. The teachers are idiots. I hate their clothes, their thick, whining Minnesota accents, the small-town smell that clings to them: dust and tuna casserole. This whole town is a bunch of suburban clones, blond, blue-eyed, dressed in tidy matching clothes. Everyone looks the same. Everyone will wind up married, living in a mini-mansion with a sprawling, manicured lawn. There’ll be cute little identical children, and the men will golf and drink and slap each other on the back, old chum, and the women will lunch at the country club and listen to lectures about the deserving poor, the homeless children downtown. They’ll shake their heads with concern and volunteer for the PTA and at the Lutheran church, collect bad art and vote Republican, and hate people like me.

I have to get out of this town.

After lunch, I lean over the toilet in the bathroom stall and throw up. I wipe my mouth, scrub my hands, sniffing them to make sure they don’t smell, wash them again, wipe them dry, look in the mirror, reapply my lipstick, study my face. I brighten my eyes, paste on a smile, and go back out, where the kids teem down the hall.

These are supposed to be the best years of my life.

I fail home economics. I refuse to sew the stuffed flamingo. I question the necessity of learning to make a Jell-O parfait. I blow up an oven—I forget to put the nutmeg in a baked pancake, and when it’s already in the oven, I toss in a handful as an afterthought, setting the entire thing on fire.

I persecute the art teacher. I sit in detention until dark, day after day. When I’m not in detention, I’m running around the newspaper room, putting together what I’m sure is an incendiary tract that’s designed to infuriate everyone who reads it. I am ducking under my desk every half-hour, sucking up the vodka in the water bottle. I am in the library, snorting cocaine off Dante, back in the stacks.

I gallop down the hall at school in a state of absolute glee, dodging in and out between the other kids, shouting, “Hi!” to the people I know as I pass. They laugh. I am hilarious! “You’re crazy!” they call. I am crazy! I’m marvelous! I’m fantastic! The day is fantastic, the world!

“Slow down!” a teacher shouts after me. “No running in the halls!”

I turn and gallop back to him. “Not running!” I shout joyfully. “Galloping, as you can plainly see!” I gallop off.

At the end of the hall, I crash into the wall and bounce back into the circle of my friends who are clustered around my locker. “Isn’t it wonderful?” I cry, flinging my arms wide, picking them up in the air.

“Now what?” Sarah laughs.

“Everything! Absolutely everything! You, today, all of it, wonderful! Amazing! Isn’t it grand to be alive?”

“Weren’t you, like, all freaky and twitchy this morning?” asks Sandra. I pound down the stairs, my legs are faster than speed itself! Tremendous! Spectacular speed, splendid speed, splendiferous speed! I reach the bottom of the stairs and go skidding across the hall. My friends are laughing. I make them happy. I make them forget their horrible homes. I love them, I love them hugely, they are absolutely essential, I would absolutely die without them.

“No!” I shout, “I wasn’t freaky! Well, if I was, I’m certainly not anymore, obviously!” I skip backward ahead of them as we go to lunch. I grab an ice cream sandwich and a greasy mini-pizza. I will be throwing these things up after lunch, obviously, wonderful! I laugh with delight, pleased with myself. “Aha!” I shout, and the people in the line ahead of me crane their necks to look. “Hello, all of you!” I shout, waving, “it’s a beautiful day!” Someone mutters, “She’s crazy,” and I don’t even care, everyone’s entitled to his opinion! That’s the way of the world! We are a world of many opinions, many beliefs! To each his own!

My friends and I move in an amoeba-like cluster over to an open table near the windows and sit down. We munch away on our lunches, chatting, and I chatter like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and all of us laugh, and then I start crying, but right myself quickly. “Enough of that!” I say, wiping my nose, making a grand gesture, “all’s well!” And everyone is relieved, and I have a brilliant idea! I pick up my personal pizza and whip it across the room like a Frisbee! And it lands perfectly in front of Leah Pederson, whom I hate! “Yes!” I shout, triumphant, and the entire lunchroom is laughing, and it’s time to go back to class. I gather my books and my friends and walk calmly down the hall and fling myself into my chair with an enormous sigh.

This time I will be good, I promise myself. This time I won’t make a scene. My heart pounds and I feel another round of hysterical laughter welling up in my chest. I press my face between my hands. I will hold it in. I won’t get detention. I won’t get kicked out of class. I won’t punch Jeff Carver. I won’t turn over any desks, or throw any chairs. I sit up in my chair, open my notebook, click my pen. I stare straight ahead at the teacher who is shuffling papers and handing them out. I will be good. I will, I will, I will.

I SIT IN THE OFFICE of my mother’s shrink. The air circulates slowly in the room. I turn in circles in my swivel chair. To my right, through the window, two floors down, is the parking lot and the sunny, empty afternoon. A small man with square black glasses and gray hair sits kicked back in his leather office chair, watching me.

“What would you like to talk about today?” he asks.

I keep turning in circles. I shrug. “What do you want me to say?”

“What would you like to say?”

I look out the window, count the red cars in the parking lot, then the blue. “I don’t have anything to say.”

We sit in silence. The minutes tick by.

“What are you thinking right now?” he asks.

“Nothing particular.” I turn to face him. He scribbles something on his yellow notepad.

“What are you writing?” I ask.

He gazes at me. “What do you think I’m writing?” he asks.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I say.

He scribbles some more.

“Are you supposed to be helping me?” I ask.

“Do you think you need help?”

I turn to face the window again. “I don’t know.” From the corner of my eye, I see him write something down.

“You seem very upset,” he says thoughtfully.

Startled, I look at him. “I’m not.”

He tilts his head to the side. “You’re very angry, aren’t you?” he says.

I laugh. “You’re very perceptive, aren’t you?” I say. He writes it down.

Seven red cars, six blue. The day is still. The branches of the trees don’t move. We sit in silence. I turn circles in my chair.

HE’S A FREUDIAN therapist. When he speaks, he asks me about my mother, about my dreams. I wait for him to tell me what’s wrong with me, why I snap into sudden, violent rages, and shut myself in my room with the dresser backed up against the door for days, and disappear in the middle of the night, and stay in constant trouble at school. Why is it that my moods are all over the goddamn map? How come I’m terrified all the time? He sits silently, watching me, saying nothing, fixing nothing. I give up.

He isn’t looking for eating disorders or drinking or drug use. He isn’t looking for mental illness. In truth, he isn’t looking for much at all. One day he slaps his notebook shut. What’s wrong with me? I ask. Am I crazy? I don’t ask that. I think I know.

His wise and considered opinion is that I’m a very angry little girl.

WORD GETS OUT at school that I’m seeing a psychiatrist. My friends avoid the subject. But other kids whisper about it when I come into the room, kids I don’t like and who don’t like me, the rich kids and the snobs. One of them, egged on by the others—Go on, ask her—comes up to me: Is it true you’re, like, crazy?

No, I say, looking down at my desk.

Then why are you seeing, like, a psychiatrist? Isn’t that for crazy people? Isn’t it? Come on, admit it!

I don’t answer. I scribble so hard in my notebook that my ballpoint tears the page. They laugh. I’m a freak, and everyone knows it, including me.

Then suddenly it hits, a massive, crippling headache. My migraines are coming on nearly every day. I stagger into the nurse’s office and collapse on a cot, curled up in a ball with a pillow over my face. The nurse calls my parents. Back home, I lie in the dark, blinds drawn, rabid thoughts and images zipping through my brain, flashes of blinding color and light. I lie there, shivering and sweating as the pain clenches my skull, nearly paralyzed with fear at the fierce throbbing behind my eyes.

My father opens the door slowly, shuts it quietly behind him. I wince at the deafening noise. The bed sags and he leans over me.

“Here,” he says softly. He lays a wet washcloth over my eyes. “How is it?” he asks.

“Horrible,” I whisper.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He lays a hand on my shoulder. “It will go away soon.”

The bed squeaks as he gets up. The door thunders shut behind him. I press my hands to my head.

They take me to doctor after doctor. No one knows what’s wrong. They give me medication, try biofeedback, tell my parents they don’t know. My parents tiptoe through the house, confused, scared. They don’t know what this onset of violent headaches means. Neither do the doctors. Neither do I.

DEATH WOULD BE SO quiet. I hide in the bathroom with an X-Acto knife, making tiny cuts, crosshatch patterns in my thighs. Nothing deep. It helps relieve the pressure, focus the thoughts. I take a sharp breath and breathe out slow. The blood beads along the cuts. I sop it up with Kleenex, the red spreading out over the tissue. I bleed. I’m alive.

AND THEN it’s dinner and my father’s screaming, and my mother’s cold and icy and cruel, and they’re yelling at me and I’m yelling at them—the crazies rise up in my chest and I run away from the table, the rage welled up so far it presses at the back of my throat. I can taste it. My father chases me, hollering. I shriek and run away. We stand face to face, screaming, his face is twisted and I can feel that my face is twisted and I hate him and his craziness and I hate myself for mine, and my mother gets up, walks down the hall, and slams the bedroom door.

My father and I scream each other down until we are exhausted, completely spent. We stand there panting.

“Say,” my father says brightly, perking up. “Want to play Yahtzee?”

“Sure!” I say. And we sit down to play, laughing and having a wonderful time.

AFTER SCHOOL, I open our front door and step inside. The first thing I see is my father, lying on his side on the couch. Light streams in through the long windows, and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust.

I drop my book bag. “What’s wrong?” I say to him from across the room. I don’t want to know what’s wrong. I’m tired of this. You never know which father is going to show up.

He curls up and wraps his arms around his knees.

“I don’t know, Marya,” he says, and starts to cry. “I really don’t know.”

I stare at him flatly. I want to run over there and kick him and pound him until he gets up. When he gets like this, I feel like I am drowning. The hands of his sadness close around my throat and I can’t breathe. I have run out of the enormous love he needs to be all right.

“You know those afternoons,” he asks, drawing a shaking breath, “where you’re just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?” He sighs and slowly pushes himself up so he’s sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. “That’s all,” he says. “It’s just one of those afternoons.”

We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch.

I should say I love him. I should say it will all be all right. But it won’t.

I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I lie down on my side and stare at the wall, the blue-flowered wallpaper next to my nose. Despite my best efforts, I start to cry.

I know those afternoons.

Escapes

Michigan, 1989

I’m sitting in the study lounge, it’s five A.M., and I have no idea how many nights or days have gone by since I last slept. I’m starving, I’m writing, I can’t stop, don’t want to stop, don’t want to eat, I am possessed by words. I’m at boarding school, an art school where students not yet eighteen spend ten hours a day, six days a week, training, practicing, studying harder than even seems possible, possessed by a desire to make it, to succeed, and I’m surrounded by open books on the study lounge table, my typewriter pouring out a short story, a paper, another, another. I am no longer a fuckup, I’m going to make it, I’m going to ace my classes, I’m going to stay awake forever if I have to, just so long as I write this, whatever it is.

Through the window that looks out over the snowy campus, the light is coming up. The snow is lit a violet-blue, the horizon’s a red-orange line. I sit back in my chair, my body buzzing, this heavenly hum in my head. Paper in stacks on the table. I’m ready for workshop, a fistful of stories in my hand. I’ve read everything for class that I was supposed to and then some. Physics thrills me, math confounds me, the German teacher despairs, but the English teacher, the writer-in-residence, the staff writers who pound us with work, they pull me aside and say: Read it, write it, don’t stop, you’ve got it, you’re going to make it. The magic words, the promise. The hope.

I just give up sleep. I’ve noticed by now that maybe my moods get a little crazier with sleep deprivation. Never mind. The deprivation unleashes a chemical reaction that feeds on itself, so that the less I sleep at night, the less I can sleep the next night, and the next. Night and day reverse themselves—but I’m not going to sleep during the day either. My body clock is no longer keeping time.

I don’t care. The future is unfurling ahead of me. I’m going to be a writer if it kills me. I will kill myself trying, I will get there, I’ve got to learn it, train for it, write it until the writing is perfect, until I get it, until I make it, I’m going to be real. This time I won’t fuck it up. I won’t fail.

The sun crests the horizon halfway, a winter sun, a blinding white. I stagger from the study lounge, carrying my piles of papers and books, and stumble down the stairs and into my room. My roommate is still asleep, the room still in shadow. As she mumbles in her sleep, I pull on my running shoes, go out into the cold, head across campus to the classroom building with the half-mile-long hall.

I run. Time stops. Thoughts stop. The never-ending pounding of my blood, the energy that surges through me all the time these days, it never runs out, I feel as if I will explode with it, I run. Up and down the long hall, compulsively touching the cold metal door on each end, must touch it or it doesn’t count, one mile, five miles, ten miles, chanting thinner, thinner, thinner, I am killing myself with the running, the starving, but I am alive, I run in the morning, between classes, during lunch, after school, during dinner, after workshops, before bed, and when I stop, I panic, afraid that until I run again, the flesh will creep back on my body. I’ve got to burn it off, get down to bones, a running, writing, starving skeleton, I eat only carrots and mustard, drink gallons of coffee, chatter with my friends, who tell me to stop, who worry, but they don’t understand, the flesh is always encroaching, trying to drown me, I will be thin, clean bones.

Minneapolis

1990

I am caught. I pace up and down the hospital halls, the eating disorders ward back home, refusing to believe I’m half dead. These doctors are fools, my parents’ terror unfounded. Let me out! I holler. Leave me alone! I scream as the nurses chase me with Dixie cups of Ensure, the evil drink, all calories and fat. They’re trying to make up for what I’m burning while pacing, pacing, pacing the halls, panicked, hyper, locked in. I beat on the doors, crying, yell at my parents, stare at the food they put in front of me six times a day, Get it away, I won’t eat it, you can’t make me.

The doctor tells my parents I’m depressed. I know I’m not. Something else entirely is wrong. But doctors always say people with eating disorders are depressed. His diagnosis ignores my agitation, the fact that I sail up and crash down minute by minute. I guess he has his reasons: the extremity of my anorexia and bulimia is, to say the least, distracting. I have a life-threatening condition. No one—not my parents, not the therapists, and certainly not the doctors—has time to focus on the mayhem of my moods. Their primary goal is keeping me alive. But they’re missing the forest for the trees. (That happens to this day to patients with eating disorders. Doctors zoom in on the havoc that starving, bingeing, and purging wreaks on the body; and while it’s certainly true that some people with eating disorders have depression, the doctors assume that all of them do. So in people with eating disorders but without depression, the symptom is treated, but not the cause, and the physicians end up ignoring the mood disorders that the patients may actually have. The real underlying mental illness runs wild, advancing steadily, irreparably damaging the mind.)

Fuck this! I shout at my parents. I stand up from my chair and say again, Fuck this!

Marya, sit down.

No! I shout. I pace in circles around the room. The other patients and their families watch me from the corners of their eyes. My brain is burning. I stand over my parents, waving my arms. You can’t just keep me here! I scream. What about my civil rights?

You have no civil rights, my mother points out. Not until you’re eighteen.

I’m moving to California, I say.

What are you talking about?

I’ll live with Anne (she’s my father’s first wife), and I’ll go to school and everything.

They stare at me.

It will be totally good for me, I say, honing my argument—this plan has just occurred to me in the last three minutes, but now it is essential, imperative, that I go. It is the most important thing ever in my whole life.

I perk up, suddenly loving and cheerful. It will be totally healing for me, I say. I will totally get better. You won’t have to worry about me. I’ll totally take in the sea air. It’s very centering out there.

California will be perfect. No one will watch me.

I’ll totally take long walks on the beach, I say. I’ll walk in the sunshine and celebrate the rain. I’ll get back in my body. I’ll do yoga. I’ll totally blossom. You see? It’s perfect. It’s just the thing.

My parents look at each other.

A few weeks later, they let me out of lockup, and I’m sitting on a plane.

California

1990

Here I am, healing. Centering. By now I’m convinced that my eating disorder is entirely sensible, necessary, that I’m completely sane and everybody else is nuts. Obviously I had to get out of there.

I rattle through the salt-air night in the back of a pickup truck, heading for Bodega Bay. The bottles of booze, the baggies of pot, the friends from school. We trudge through the dunes, lie on our backs, stare up at the ocean of sky. I am in heaven. This is my hideaway. Here, I can starve without anyone stopping me. I can drink myself high, smoke myself into a steady drifting down. Here, I can write all night. If I can just make it through high school, I can escape to college in some city far away. I’ll be a writer and show them all that I am not a fuckup, I can make it, I am real.

The moods are steady, sky-high. My mind is racing ahead and I chase it, writing as fast as I can, failing heart stuttering, body disappearing. I can do anything. Nothing can stop me.

I’m a flurry of motion, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, arms flying, shuffling papers into piles, brain racing, reading snippets of writing, hopping up to get something on my desk, making rapid little red-pen marks on the pages, cutting and pasting, short of breath, pulse pounding, I am back in my element, where I can do a thousand things at once, fueled by the rabid energy triggered by the booze, no food, no sleep, I stand up and compulsively do three hundred leg lifts, balancing on the back of the chair—and I leap onto the chair and pierce my nose with a safety pin—and I climb out my window onto the roof, flinging my head back to look at the glorious blanket of stars and their halo, and the round-bellied moon—and I spin around in circles, arms out, teetering near the edge, dizzily gazing out over the dark, thick woods that surround the house—and I hop back in the window, grab my jacket, and dash down the stairs and out the door.

I walk down the long driveway onto the winding dark road that runs nearby, the Spanish moss hanging in heavy swags from the cypress and eucalyptus trees. I walk down to the strip mall in town, the neon signs fizzling in the night. I am violently alive. Every snap and spit of the neon pierces my eyes. A few cars go by, the whoosh of their tires making a hollow echo in my ears. This is my secret life, these nights I prowl and hide in shadows in the dark, walk the roads near their guardrails, the hills dropping sharply from the road to the valley below. Eventually, the lights, the noise, become too much, and the frenzied intensity begins to fray, tearing at my brain, slicing through my body like razor blades, and I walk down the road to my boyfriend’s house. He is older, stupid, stoned, and he passes me the joint and I take a deep drag and pass it to his sister and get up to get myself a drink. I flop belly-down on the carpet, watch the interior of my mind as it empties of thoughts. The agitation begins to subside, and I slide into a rocking, gentle nothingness. We watch idiotic reruns on TV. I am starving, and the hunger pinches at my gut. My head lolls. I lay face down on the carpet, the laugh track on the television rolling over me. I fall asleep.

I am lost, a satellite orbiting the world. The energy is turning dark, the sunshine of the early months here in California fading. The starving and the drinking and the disembodied sex—all my methods for stilling my thoughts are starting to fail me. I tell myself it’s not happening. I tell myself I’m all right. I can stay here. I can stand this. Surely, this will stop.

But a part of me knows I’m going to die, and doesn’t care. In fact, I wish like hell I would. I’m seventeen, and I’ve had enough.

Minneapolis

1991

Caught again. Yellow-eyed, skeletal, bitchy, I am hauled back to Minnesota by my parents. Hospital, take two. Organs failing, deathly low weight, sick as a dog, but I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I sit on the floor, head nodding, nothing but static in my brain, my mother trying to get me to talk, speak, show some signs of life, my father making desperate jokes, trying to make me laugh. He cries and my mother cries, and through my fog I hate that they cry, and hate myself for making them cry, and, trying to form words, I tell them they don’t need to worry, I’m fine, please just leave me alone. Desert Storm plays a weird soundtrack to my days, fiery explosions on the TV screen, tanks barreling over entire towns, screaming people, that world far away—and I am far away too, lost in my own mind. The other patients hang limply over the arms of the couches and chairs, or stand in corners pretending to look at something, pacing in tiny, rapid circles, bouncing up and down, trying to burn off the calories that are keeping them alive. I lie awake at night, the bed bruising my bones, and listen to the wild, endless chatter of voices in my head.

Hospital, take three. Then the doctor’s had enough, tells my parents to put me in a state institution and leave me there. Instead, they find the last resort, a locked institution for kids as crazy as me. My last chance.

I am standing outside a square, two-story brick building. It’s ten degrees below zero, no flesh to keep me warm, and my mother grips me tight until the staff of this new place pulls me away. I look over my shoulder at my parents, they cry, I hate myself, I look forward, go away. Three triple-locked doors close one by one behind me as I follow the staff person inside, up the stairs, down the hall.

We are all crazy, under eighteen, the dregs of the system, the failures, the rejects of families, foster care, juvenile hall, we have been removed from society, a danger, a blight. We are a twelve-year-old car thief, a rapist, a sociopath, two cutters, a violent mute. We careen from pitching chairs and tables, to throwing our own bodies against the walls, to moments of calm that still the mayhem for a little while. We are in here for years, the shrieking girl, the roaring, crashing boys, the suicide attempts, the abused, the tortured, the troubled, the insane. I am here, wrapped in my coat, curled up in a ball, silent, afraid, disoriented, skinny, sick. I scream at mealtimes, pitch my food across the room, refuse to eat, they weigh me, I hate them, I swallow their fucking pills.

They are trying to kill me. Make me stupid, make me fat. They take my books, the only things I need to survive. If I can have my books, they’ll disappear, I’ll be safe, but they lock my books away, I scream and swear and cry and pound the walls, collapse on the floor, they say, Marya, you have a time-out, I go to my room and lie face-down on my bed, they come in with my treatment plan, you are assigned to play, you will play one hour a day, you will eat what you are told, you will not scream, you will make your bed, you will go to therapy, you will engage with other people, look me in the eye, you will not be allowed to push us away with your books. We spend our days in therapy groups, Marya, how are you feeling right now? I chew my nails until they’re bloody stumps, I stare at the floor, I have no books, I cannot starve, they’re pumping me full of pills, their kindness encroaches, surrounds me, suffocates me, Marya, it’s all right to feel, you will not die of feelings, why don’t you color your feelings on a piece of paper? Stop pushing them away, get out of your head, it’s safe out here. It is not. I am trapped.

We shuffle through our screaming, crying, silent, laughing days, frightened, angry little kids cared for inside of and made safe by these thick walls. The bedroom doors don’t close. The windows are three-paned Plexiglas, unbreakable, we cannot cut ourselves on them, or escape. I am sitting in the bathroom sink with scissors, chopping my long hair off, it falls around me, I’m cutting it so close it nicks the skin. I am bald as a baby. I lose control, fight, I lie in bed all day, staring at the ceiling, until they haul me out and make me talk and feel my fucking feelings, eat my fucking food, take the Prozac—you’re depressed!—that’s making me more insane. But gradually, despite myself, I really start to try to get better. The pressing kindness and care of the people here gets to me, and after a few months, I’m trying to get well, I really am. I talk, I play, I work out my issues, I participate, I give hugs, I make the effort, take responsibility, share the love.

But it’s not enough. I’m still so sucked into the eating disorder, and so racked by the wild, roaring moods that no one can explain, that no amount of trying is going to work. As tempting as this health thing is, the idea of going back to my familiar obsessions is more so. I want out. I want my bones and my books back. I become the star patient. I talk them into letting me go to college, and they finally agree. I want to be rid of who I am, go back to the place where I wasn’t a fuckup, where I was good at something, instead of a place where all I do is talk about how fucked up I am. I’ve got to get out.

I AM SHIVERING at the bus stop. They let me out each morning to go to the university across town. I am on fire with the classes, writing like mad, hunched over my desk, my underused, overanalyzed brain coming to life again, who cares if I’m an institutionalized freak? All I can think about is when I will get a job writing. I have to make up for this hideous failure. I’ll never tell anyone. This will disappear in my past. I’ll be a new person, soon, soon. When class lets out I avoid the other students, Come have coffee! they call after me, I liked your paper, let’s talk! Can’t, I mutter, hurrying off, can’t very well tell you I have to get back to the loony bin before they give me a time-out.

Washington, D.C.

1992

Sophomore year. I’ve won a scholarship and am completely nuts. I’m at the office, editing for a wire service, racing through the pages, assigning, working, I’m finally a success, I’m taking five classes and getting all A’s, now I can be up all night again, this starvation is better than speed, I’m nearly dead and don’t believe it for a minute, I’m on my sixth pot of coffee, my fingers are blue, my hair is falling out, I’m winning awards, people stare at me with disgust, I couldn’t care less, I sit at my desk all night, how many nights now? The nights become days become nights and I am working, working, working, starving myself to death.

I am nineteen years old. I am lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to a tangle of IVs. My heart monitor barely moves. I weigh fifty-two pounds. I am almost perfect. I lift my arms and admire them, bones covered in gray, dry skin. My fingers run their course over my body: the thin ridge of my collarbone, neck and chest sunken far beneath; the hollow of my cheeks, the way I can run my fingertips along the teeth underneath; the cavern in the center of my body, the way the cage of my ribs curves around the hollow, and my hipbones jut up, the way I can feel my internal organs through the skin. I wrap a fist around each thighbone. My thighs are no longer round. They are just right. They don’t exist. I’ve done it. I’ve erased myself. I’ve won.

I pass out.

THE FIRST CLEAR thought in years: I refuse to die.

1993

The feeling of health, as I slowly gain the sixty pounds I need to keep me alive, is foreign, weird. My body morphs as I stare at it in the mirror. I am going to stay alive. Finally I have grasped that I cannot feed my mind and starve my body to death. Finally, from somewhere, comes this visceral urge to survive. And so here I am, living. I’m working again—I’m going to school, and getting grants, and I get a job teaching undergrad classes, and I make friends, and stay up with them all night talking about books, and I’m going to parties, and learning to eat, and I suddenly have a life. A normal life. I walk tentatively through my days, afraid of breaking the spell, afraid I’ll fuck it up, I’ll fail.

Afraid I’ll go mad again, and lose it all.

1994

I am writing a poem. I am only vaguely aware of myself: the point is the poem. To the effort I contribute the mechanism of my mind: the cogs and wheels groan and begin to chug along. They move faster, sending out a conveyor belt of neatly packaged words. A story, a poem begins to take shape. Pages pile up. I scribble and gnaw on my fingers, getting blood and spit on the paper. The pages are a product of my body. I can touch them. I can eat them if I want. I worry their edges, rip at their corners, throw them to my right as I finish each one, the letters running up to the edge and spilling off onto the desk until I get another piece of paper and continue recording the automatic generation of language from my mind. As the sky outside my window turns from black to midnight blue, as thin clouds stretch across the indigo sky like someone lying on her side, I hurry: morning is almost here. I race to get down the last of the words. The light comes up. I push myself away from the desk, unclench the fist that held the pen, stagger off to bed, fall into a thick, drunken sleep.

I wake up an hour, a few hours, half a day later. I wince at the light. I am a bat. I dangle in the corner of my room, my leathery wings folded over my face. I look at the clock. Did I call in sick to work? What day is it? Do I have class? Am I teaching? Oh, Christ. I let my head fall back on the pillow and stare at the ceiling. I am silent. I do not exist. I am merely a pair of eyes, looking around at the room. The rest of me is invisible. I won’t be visible again until someone sees me. If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I will not register in the world until I speak.

I stumble out the door, hop the bus to the university, my head bobbling as we drive over ruts in the road, listening to the slow milling of arbitrary words around my head. The words displease me. They are not in order. Everyone is talking at once. I sit in silence, staring out the window, watching the city go by.

An hour later I find myself standing in front of a classroom with chalk in my hand. They will drop a nickel in me and I will begin to talk.

MY BODY CLOCK is completely screwed up. I’m drinking again. One minute I’m flat on my face in the living room, crying and deep in despair, the next I’m tearing back up, moving so fast my head is spinning, trying to do a million things at once, trying to keep up with the rocketing, plummeting moods.

I can’t so much as clean my apartment. My bills pile up, unpaid. The phone gets turned off. I’m so broke I’m feeding my cat cans of beans. The only things in my refrigerator are a bag of wilted carrots and beer. I guzzle coffee all day and vodka all night.

What’s wrong with me? Nothing. I’m fine. I’ve just become a lazy slob. Get ahold of yourself. Now.

But I can’t. And soon enough I snap.

Full Onset

1995

The cutting helps. I’m cutting every day. I stand in the bathroom, slicing patterns in my arms. They’ll scar. My arms will, for the rest of my life, be covered with scars. I clench my teeth. Cut more. Cut deeper. The thoughts stop.

The pain is perfect. It’s precise. My mind, for one blessed moment, is aware only of the pain. The pain makes me feel alive. My heart beats steadily in my chest. I picture the blood pumping through me, reaching the cuts, spilling over, running down my arms.

Morning comes. I’m passed out on the floor. I try to lift my head. A thick and pressing sadness lies on me like a dead body. I roll over on my stomach, lay my face on the floor, close my eyes. I can’t move.

By night, I feel like I’m on speed. The moods carry me up and down, up and down. I fly and fall, crashing and sailing and crashing again.

The therapist’s office: she leans back in her chair. She’s lovely, and out of her depth. She keeps increasing my Prozac. It’s making me insane.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I say, trying to sound calm but grappling with a desperation that clutches at my chest. “I don’t think things are going very well.”

“What makes you say that?” she asks kindly, tilting her head. Sometimes her kindness gets to me. It’s excessive and saccharine, almost a parody of itself.

“I’m acting a little crazy,” I say. “One minute I’m flying around and the next I’m, you know, lying on the floor.”

“But don’t you think that’s progress? That you’re really feeling your feelings? I think you’ve finally reached a special place in your life, a place of real balance, where you’re able to fully respond to those feelings. You’re not just locked up in your head all the time, intellectualizing, pushing those feelings away.”

“Maybe,” I say, hesitant. “It just seems like maybe it’s a little much. You know, like really extreme. It seems like the feelings are taking over my entire life.”

“Well, consider this—how’s the eating going?”

“Pretty well.”

“Now, I want you to really take that in. Stop for a moment and really appreciate the significance of that. How different is that from ever before? You’ve never really been in a space where the eating disorder was under control. I feel like you’re really using the tools we’ve been working on, the mindful eating, the being in your body. You should really bear witness to the progress you’ve made in that area. I think you’ve finally, really, truly made the decision to stay alive. That’s just enormous. Can you see that? Can you be proud of yourself?”

“I’m cutting my arms up every night.”

“Have you been journaling?”

“Yes.”

“And what are you finding?”

“When I read it over, it’s like two different people are writing it. One of them’s a maniac and one of them’s completely depressed.”

“Do you think you’re depressed?”

“Not when I’m flying around.”

“I think, honestly, that you’re in much better shape than you’re giving yourself credit for. I think maybe that you are still just so angry at yourself for all the years of being sick, and so unfairly judgmental of yourself for finally breaking away from the past and finally feeling your feelings, being true to yourself, that you just aren’t allowing yourself to appreciate how well you’re really doing.”

“I really would rather not be cutting. I’m getting scars all over my arms.”

“Well, I think that’s a matter of doing some self-soothing. Have you been trying out the self-soothing techniques I suggested? Take some real time for yourself. Just sit down at night, make yourself a cup of tea, and be quiet in yourself. Wrap yourself in a warm, fuzzy quilt. Put on lotion. Splurge on some perfume. Take yourself out to lunch. Turn on some soothing music and try self-massage. Take a warm, comforting bath. Light a candle and really feel the water surrounding your limbs. Do you think you could begin tonight? Do you think you could try taking a bath?”

I take a fucking bath.

Night comes. It finally happens. It’s the scene in the bathroom of my apartment in Minneapolis. I’m twenty years old, drunk out of my mind. I am cutting patterns in my arm, a leaf and a snake. And then, without thinking, on blind, unstoppable impulse, I slash my left arm with a razor so hard I hit the bone.

NOW I’M SOMEONE else. Now I’m someone who’s tried to kill herself. I’ve opened my artery and not even felt it. Has it gotten that bad?

No problem. A blip on the screen of my usual nuttiness. I’ll simply start over. No more of that. Out with the cutting. Out with the Prozac. Out with the old me, and in with the new.

Obviously, the next thing to do is to skip town.

I head off for California in my rattling car. I’m getting out of here. I’m going to go be a real writer. I take only some books, a ratty blue bandanna, a few clothes, and my cat.

And the five-inch purple scar on my forearm, which looks like a terrible worm.

Part II

The New Life

1996

Suddenly, I’m writing a book about my years with eating disorders. I don’t really know how that happened—a writer I know talked me into it, insisted I should—but I sit at my desk all day, pounding it out. The sun crosses the floor of my one-room apartment in Oakland as I race through the pages, barely aware of the world, trying to forget the crazies, the razor, the cut.

Now I’m drinking in earnest. At the end of the day, each day, I head down the street to the liquor store to buy the night’s supply of vodka. I go home, add a splash of orange juice to an eight-ounce tumbler, fill the rest of the glass with the vodka, and spend the evening at my desk writing poetry, then stay up all night reading every secondhand book I can afford. I stagger around my apartment, completely unaware that I am quickly crossing the line from binge drinker to alcoholic. It happens overnight.

And here’s the kicker. On impulse—it just occurs to me—I stop by Julian’s house. Julian is a friend from my adolescent California days, the only semi-sane friend I had. He is a nice guy, kind, a port-in-a-storm kind of fellow. And he is also a little boy, aimless, easy to sweep away. He has no life—now he can have mine.

I pull up to his house, my hair in a crewcut, wearing a tank top, old jeans, and a beat-up pair of boots. He opens the door. His jaw drops. I grin.

We spend a year in a particleboard apartment, drinking constantly, playing grownups. My new life is complete. I’ve abandoned the crazy years, the crazy self, and here I am with a book deal, a future, and a fiancé. We spend the nights in Melendy’s Bar, pool balls cracking, Patsy Cline on the jukebox, swimming in smoke. We talk nonstop, laugh our heads off, plan an extravagant wedding, an extravagant life.

Our families and friends are alarmed, wondering where the hell we got this idea, urging us to wait, but we ignore them—it’s perfectly reasonable that two twenty-two-year-olds who knew each other as kids and have now been living together for all of a year are completely prepared to begin a life together.

Idiots.

WE MARRY in July, and the next day, because this is perfectly obvious, we get in a moving van and head back to Minneapolis. I want to be near my family, my friends, my cousin Brian, who’s been my closest friend since we were kids, the one sane point in the whirlwind of my chaos, the voice on the phone long-distance, the writing on the letters, the hand that held my string as I bobbed and wove in the breeze.

So Julian and I go sailing forward at a breakneck pace. We’re grownups now. I am spending money as fast as I make it, and we jet around the country to lavish hotels in cities, anywhere, everywhere, eating fabulous meals, blowing thousands of dollars, making drunken fools of ourselves, collapsing on endless king-size beds. At home, I careen from parties at friends’ houses to Brian’s downtown apartment, where I talk a mile a minute and we cackle with laughter. He’s the dearest person to me in the world, a person of substance, solidity, sanity, and a deep and abiding gentleness, and he is what I rely on, even if I’m not entirely aware of it, to give my life some semblance of sense. As much as we laugh, he gets me to sit still for a minute, tries to tell me I’m going too fast, that I’m going to crash, but I ignore him, that’s the old me, I’m a different person now. I go racing through the mall, buying everything in sight, staggering under bags and bags of things I’ve bought, who cares what they are? I want it, I have to have it, it’s perfect! It’s gorgeous! I can’t stop shopping, our house fills up with china, crystal, expensive sheets, mountains of books, gourmet cookware, every kind of booze you can think of, paintings, clothes and more clothes and more clothes. We’re like little kids. We are little kids, but don’t tell us that—we’re having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties—the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine.

I sometimes feel as if I’ve raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. Crazy people don’t have dinner parties, do they? No.

We go to concerts and plays, and never once do I let on that sometimes the music turns colors in my mind, veering toward me, making me flinch. I laugh at the funny parts and clap when everyone claps, even if I’m confused, disoriented, scared.

When I get lost as I drive through the streets of my city, I tell no one. Every night, after a day of writing, I open the bottle of wine, and Julian and I settle in for an evening of drunken glee. I make the fancy meals and wash the wedding dishes and write the thank-you notes for all the million wedding gifts on stationery stamped with my married name.

Crazy people don’t have stationery, do they?

The wineglasses will stave off the madness, surely, or the breakfast nook will, or the husband himself. I’m not going crazy.

Not again.

IT SEEMS TO HAPPEN overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It’s very simple. Happens like you’re flipping a switch. Julian and I are going along, having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it’s dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and pitching it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls. I feel like a Tasmanian devil. The room spins, I run up and down the stairs, I can’t stop. Julian tries to grab me, holding my arms until I scream myself out and collapse, exhausted, in tears—but there are nights I manage to squirm free and run out the door. Sometimes I just run as far and as hard as I can, until I can’t breathe, until my heart is about to explode, or until, stumbling drunk, I fall and hit my head on a tree stump or the curb and lie still.

Sometimes, though, I get in my car.

I peel out of the driveway, roaring up Thirty-sixth Street, away from my pretty house and sleepy neighborhood. Slow down! I am screaming at myself, Marya, slow down!

And the madness screams back, I won’t!

It slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking: my hands are its hands, and its hands are filled with an otherworldly strength. Its hands feel the need to lash out, to hit something, so it tightens its white-knuckled fists on the wheel, its bare foot slamming the gas. My head jerks back. Half in abject terror, half in awe, I watch the lights streak across the sky, bending as I careen around corners, up Hennepin, down through the seething nightlife of Lake Street, past the spectrally brilliant movie theater marquee, the crowds a blur, stoplights are not for me! Streetlights smear behind me like neon streamers. I hurtle forward. The only thing that matters is motion, forward motion, propulsion, I veer onto the freeway, playing chicken with the cars. The road comes at me full speed, it looks as if it will hit me dead between the eyes, but then it swerves around me just in time. The other cars, the median, the guardrail flash around my face, and I in my roller coaster am clattering and screaming along. I wind up in some unknown neighborhood, over by the river or on the north side of town. I turn the car around and, my rage spent, find my way home.

Rage swings into a stuporous sleep, and sleep swings into the awful morning sun. My head slides off the edge of the bed, and my mood plummets from shrieking high to muffled low, my heart beating dully on the inside of my ribs. I fall out of bed and stumble down the stairs, heading for coffee, but get too tired on the way and lie down on the living room floor, a painful hole yawning open in my chest. This old, familiar ache does not feel so much like sadness as it does like death, if death is blunt and heavy and topples into you, knocking you flat.

Julian comes in, carrying a cup of coffee. He sees me there on the floor. “Do you want help up?”

I mean to shake my head no, but my face is pressed into the carpet, and it would be too hard to shake it anyway. He picks his way through the wreckage of the night before, clears a chair of debris, and sits down, crossing his legs, an action I find futile and absurd. Slowly, I lift myself up. I’m dizzy—I always am after a rage—and I try to focus my eyes. I look around me at the mess: there’s a jagged-edged half of a wine bottle, a pile of green glass shards nearby. There’s a circular stain of wine on the wall, streams running down as if it leaked blood, and a puddle-shaped stain on the carpet below. There are the remains of a couple of smashed glasses. The bookshelf is cockeyed, leaning precariously on the back of the couch. Books everywhere. The couch has moved across the room from where it’s supposed to be. I peer at what looks like a hole in the wall. I look at Julian.

“Lead crystal clock,” he explains.

I nod, still looking around the room. “This is bad,” I finally say.

“Not good,” he agrees.

“Sorry,” I say.

“It happens,” he says.

“It does,” I say, bewildered. “I don’t know why.”

He leaves—does he even understand what’s happening? I certainly don’t—and I stand barefoot, alone in the mess. I go over to the hole in the wall and stub my toe on the aforementioned lead crystal clock. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands. Wedding present. Ugly. I marvel that it didn’t break. I set it down on the table and look out the window. My shoulders slump.

I shake the fog out of my head. Get a grip, I think. I’m fine. It’s little-boy Julian who’s making me crazy. No one could cope with his dependency, his lack of drive. It’s stressing me out, this game the two of us play, his kicking back, jobless, using my money, embracing the identity of kept man.

No, I correct myself. He’s my savior, companion, the husband, the rock. Our life is normal, balanced. We’re just like everyone else.

I cling to the persona of the good wife, the disciplined writer, the hostess, hanging on with both hands. But even I wear down eventually: the constant fighting, the afternoons crashed out in bed, the sudden spells of ruthless energy—they’re just too much.

I give in. I call for help.

The Diagnosis

April 1997

I page through the phone book surreptitiously, looking out the window to make sure Julian hasn’t pulled up to the house yet. For some reason, I don’t want him to know I’m calling a psychiatrist. Maybe that would confirm the incredibly obvious. Or maybe he hasn’t noticed that I’ve gone completely nuts. I run my finger down the column and stop at one Richard Beedle, M.D. I like his name. A man named Beedle can’t be all bad.

I sit in the waiting room, paging through an old Time. It’s the same Time they keep in every waiting room. There is only one, and everyone has it, and it is sorely out of date. Bored, I slap it shut and study the painting of flowers on the opposite wall. It looks like every other painting of flowers on every other wall of every office of every psychiatrist, psychologist, nutritionist, behaviorist, et al. that I’ve ever seen.

He calls me into his office. I take my usual place in the usual chair on the usual empty afternoon. I study him the way I always study them. Some of them are mean, some very smart, some idiots, most a little hurried, but some just plain old nice—your usual cross-section of humanity. This Beedle looks to be okay. He has one wandering eye and wears a brown suit. I watch his eye while he settles into his chair. Does he get to see two whole scenes at once? Is one part of him having a conversation with me while another is looking out the window at the new green leaves on the trees?

He mispronounces my name and I correct him, as usual. This is how all psychiatric visits start. He looks friendly enough, so I decide to give him a chance.

“What brings you here today?” he asks.

“I’m going crazy.”

“Well, don’t beat around the bush,” he says. “Jump right in.”

“I’m going nuts. I mean, I am nuts. I’ve always been nuts. They’ve been telling me I have depression for years, but they’re wrong. I used to have an eating disorder. They’re always giving me Prozac. I know, I know, you’ll probably give me Prozac too, which, okay, I understand, you have to give me something, though I should mention that if you had something other than Prozac I would be open to trying it, just so you know. In fact, I’m open to pretty much anything, at this point. I’m kind of desperate.” Weirdly, I laugh. “I mean, kind of really desperate. Not to make a fuss or anything. I don’t want to overstate my case. I don’t want to be malingering. Do you think I’m malingering? Once a nurse told me I was malingering when I told her the Prozac was making me crazy.” I pause. “What exactly is malingering?” I ask.

“It’s when you’re making a big deal out of nothing. Making symptoms seem worse than they are.”

“See?” I say, and throw up my hands. “Exactly. I don’t want to be malingering. I definitely don’t want to make something out of nothing.”

“You’re not malingering.”

“Well, that’s good. But anyway, really, now that I think of it, this really is nothing. It’s not such a big deal. I mean, I’m not crazy crazy. I’m not wandering around with a grocery cart full of newspapers and cans talking to myself. I mean, I talk to myself a little, but not in a crazy way—doesn’t everybody talk to themselves?” He nods. He sits with his hands folded on his desk. He hasn’t written anything on his notepad and appears, oddly, to be listening. I appreciate his attention; it’s very courteous of him. “By the way, oh my gosh,” I say, suddenly flustered, “I’m going on and on. I know you’re busy. I know you must have a million patients. Have I already used up my time?” I ask, a little panicked.

“No.”

“How much time do I have?”

“As much as you want. This is a private practice. I’m not an HMO, so no rush.”

“Well,” I sigh, collapsing back in my chair—I notice I’ve been sitting bolt upright the whole time—“thank goodness.” I take a little breather.

“May I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I say, feeling magnanimous.

“Do you always talk this fast?”

“Yes.”

He nods. “Okay,” he says. “Go on.”

“What was I saying?”

“Feeling crazy, but not crazy crazy.”

“Right,” I say. “So I guess that’s it. Do you mind if I look around?”

“Not at all,” he says, so I get up and go over to his bookcase and read all the titles and look at the framed photos and laugh at the little framed cartoon—a man is lying on a couch, yammering on, and the doctor’s writing TOTALLY NUTS!!! on his little pad—and I go over to the window and hop up on the sill and swing my feet a little, then hop back down and come back and sit in my chair.

“All better?” he asks. I laugh. “Has anyone ever mentioned the word mania to you?”

“Nope,” I say, folding my hands across my middle.

“They haven’t,” he says. “I find that a little odd.”

“I mean, I’ve heard the word, obviously,” I say. “I’ve just never heard it applied to me. Is that what you’re saying?”

“It was, yes. Out of curiosity, what does mania mean?”

“Mania—well, going around like a maniac, I guess.” Now that I think about it, that doesn’t sound so far off.

“Sort of,” he says. “Anyway, you’re right, you don’t seem depressed right now. You seem like you’ve got lots of energy.”

“I do indeed,” I say. “Indeed I do.”

“An unusual amount of energy,” he replies.

I shrug. “Pretty typical for me,” I say. “I like to keep busy.”

“What do you do to keep yourself busy?”

“Oh, working, mostly. Or seeing friends. Cleaning, laundry, things like that. I like to have a clean house. Very clean. Unusually clean. Spotless, in fact. I’m an extremely good housekeeper. Most of the time.”

“Except?”

“When I’m not. I go through stages. Sometimes I don’t clean the house for months. But usually,” I say, not wanting to give the impression that I’m a lazy slob, “it’s pretty clean.”

“What else happens when you go through those stages?”

I furrow my brow. “I don’t know. Nothing. It happens in the afternoon, usually. I just want to crawl into bed and hide from the entire world and stop thinking. My brain empties out. It’s kind of an effort to breathe. It’s like time slows down. It feels like I’m flattened. I don’t want to do anything. I can’t concentrate. I feel like a failure. I sort of hate myself.” I shrug. “It goes away. Then I get energetic again.” I fiddle with my ears, not wanting to tell him about the rages. I feel like I’ve said too much already and come off as crazy. Can’t have that.

“Is there a pattern to the swings?”

“Swings?”

“What did you say? Stages. Do you have any idea when the stages come and go? I mean, you know when they happen during the day, right? Do you see any pattern over, say, a few months?”

“No. Sometimes they happen, sometimes not. I’m just kind of moody. Which,” I say, “is kind of the issue. I’m really insanely moody right now. I mean, I’m out-of-my-head moody. I can’t stand it. I’m going nuts. As I said.”

“What’s happening?”

“I’m having these rages,” I finally confess, embarrassed. “I kind of go into these insane rages and wind up smashing all kinds of shit and throwing things and hollering and crying.”

“Any particular reason?”

“No. That’s the thing. It just happens. It comes out of nowhere. Well, it happens at night, usually. At night I’m crazy, in the morning I’m flat. So at night I have these rages and destroy all this shit and am horrible and awful, and then in the morning I wake up and look at it and kind of want to die. I mean, not die die,” I say. “I never want to really die.” I lean forward, wanting to set the record straight. “But I’m not depressed, for God’s sake. You said so yourself. They’ve always said I was, but that doesn’t make any sense. I’m usually pretty happy,” I say, sitting back in my chair, waving my hand, suddenly aware that that sounds a little ridiculous at this point. “I mean, seriously. It’s not like I lie around all day. How could I get up every morning and work, and do all this stuff, if I was depressed?” I laugh in disbelief.

He nods amiably. “Ever wish you were dead?”

I consider it. “I wish I wasn’t crazy.”

“Ever attempted suicide?”

“Not exactly.”

He raises his eyebrows, then skips on. “Let me ask you a couple of questions.”

The questions are endless, and with each one, I feel a little crazier. But I also start to feel like he might know what’s going on. Which means there might be something he could do.

“You say you had an eating disorder? How long ago?”

“Started when I was nine. I finally started getting a handle on it a couple of years ago, when I was about twenty.”

“What about cutting, any history of cutting?”

“A little bit. Ages ago.” I’m torn between wanting his help and not wanting to seem crazy. The cutting was crazy. I don’t care to elaborate.

“What about drinking? Drugs?”

“Drinking? I suppose so, yes. But not too much. Nothing that would cause concern.” I’m thinking, Drinking? All the time. Until I can’t see. Until the crazies go away. I drink myself sane. I’m not about to tell him that. That’s the last thing I want him to know. I’ll tell him anything he wants to hear except about the drinking. It’s my last hope to keep myself from going totally over the edge. “No drugs,” I say.

“Do you have a habit of being impulsive? Things like shopping, making snap decisions? Taking sudden trips?” The more he asks, the less I can answer. Snap decisions? Always. Shopping? Until I’ve nearly gone broke. Trips? I just took a trip. Lit off at night, drove six hundred miles to see an old friend, on a whim.

“What about sex?” I slept with the friend, too, without thinking about it, then felt like shit. “Not to pry, but would you say you sleep with a lot of people? More than you mean to? Sometimes it feels like you don’t want to but can’t stop?” For as long as I can remember. I can’t begin to count the beds, the nights when it felt easier just to close my eyes than to get myself home.

“Do your thoughts race?”

I sit up. “That’s it,” I say. “That’s what I mean when I say crazy: I can’t get the thoughts to stop. It’s torture. It’s hell.”

“Do you ever feel like you’re not in your body, like you’re numb?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Sometimes during the rages. Sometimes when I get really happy. It comes and goes.”

“Does it bother you?”

“I don’t know. It’s just weird. It feels like I might just go flying off.”

“Does anything make the feeling go away?”

“I pinch myself.”

“Does it work?”

“Not really.”

“Do you ever cut yourself?”

“Not anymore.”

“When you did, did it help?”

“Yes,” I say flatly.

“Good for you for not doing it anymore.”

“I slipped once. Nearly killed myself. I’m not interested in doing it again.”

“Slipped?”

“Slipped.”

He lets it slide.

“How far apart are the mood swings?” He keeps saying that! What’s he talking about? “Every few months, weeks, days?”

“I wouldn’t know about mood swings,” I say. “It’s nothing that specific. It’s just, I don’t know—” Now that I think about it, it’s obviously fucking mood swings. “More like I just go flying around, up and down. Sometimes days. Hours. Minutes. So fast I can’t keep track. I’ll be going along in a perfectly good mood and suddenly I’m pitching shit all over the house. I’ll be lying in bed feeling like I’m dead when suddenly I’m up and running around. It’s maddening. I’d give anything to be just normal for an entire day. Just a day. That’s all I’m asking.”

“What about sleep, do you sleep? Can’t fall asleep or can’t stay asleep? Wake up early even when you don’t want to?”

“I would sell my soul for one good night of sleep. I lie awake for hours, then prowl the house all night. By morning everything feels surreal.”

“Nightmares?”

“When I sleep.”

“What about work, what kind of work do you do? Do you find it hard to work? Easy? Can you stop working? Or do you just keep going?”

“I’m a writer. I write and write. I would write until I was dead, the way some dogs will keep eating and eating until they die. I can’t stop. And then, suddenly, I have nothing to say. It goes away. The words are gone.”

He’s studying my face.

“Do you ever feel hopeless?”

The word yawns open in my chest. “Not really,” I say, looking out the window.

“But sometimes?”

“Sometimes.”

“When?”

I still don’t look at him. “When I stop to think about it.”

“About this?”

“About any of it. About being crazy.” I chew my thumbnail and look at him. “It’s getting worse,” I say. “It’s getting harder not to think about it.”

“Does anything help?”

I snort. “A drink?” He doesn’t laugh. “Not really,” I say. “No.”

Nothing. Nothing makes it go away.

He finally scribbles something on his notepad and clicks his pen. He looks at me.

“You don’t have depression, that’s for sure.”

“No shit.” What a relief.

“You have bipolar disorder.”

I sit there. “Is that the same as manic depression?”

“The very same.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s crazy. I mean, manic depression: that’s crazy.”

He shrugs. “Depends on how you look at it. I wouldn’t say it’s crazy. I’d say it’s an illness.”

“Bipolar disorder,” I repeat. “Do you take Prozac for that?”

“Not a chance,” he says. “You’re right that the Prozac makes you feel crazy. I’m going to prescribe a mood stabilizer. It should help.”

My chest floods with a mixture of horror and relief. The relief comes first: something in me sits up and says, It’s true. He’s right, he has to be right. This is it. All the years I’ve felt tossed and spit up by the forces of chaos, all that time I’ve felt as if I am spinning away from the real world, the known world, off in my own aimless orbit—all of it, over. Suddenly the solar system snaps into place, and at the center is this sun; I have a word. Bipolar. Now it will be better. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it’s a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild. If it has a name, if it isn’t merely an utter failure on my part, if it’s a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. Then it has a cure. At least it has something that should help.

And then the horror sets in. All that time I wasn’t crazy; I was, in fact, crazy. It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away. All my life, I’ve thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I’ve always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I’d be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone else.

I think how impossible it seems that I have never connected the term manic depression—I guess they’re calling it bipolar—to myself. For that matter, it seems impossible that they would never have applied it to me.

What if this Beedle fellow is right? What if my good moods are the same thing as mania? And what if, God forbid, the lows are the same as depression? And what if manic depression means crazy? Well, obviously, it does.

So. I’m crazy as a coot. Mad as a hatter. End of story. That’s all, folks, now you can all go home. I’m sure, sitting here in the doctor’s office, that there’s no final cure for the truly insane. I am no longer young, wild, crazy, a little nuts. I’m a crazy lady.

I knew it all along.

“WENT TO THE DOCTOR today,” I say, yanking the cork from a bottle of wine. Julian is sitting in the breakfast nook, reading the paper.

“Are you sick?” he asks, taking the glass I hand him and glancing up at me before looking back at the front page.

“In a manner of speaking,” I say. “He says I have bipolar disorder. It’s the same thing as manic depression.”

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t think so. But it sort of explains the last few months.”

“How so?” He sets the paper down and takes a swallow of wine.

“The rages,” I say, stirring something on the stove.

“This was a psychiatrist you went to?”

I nod. “Named Beedle.”

“Beedle,” he muses.

“Right,” I say. “Anyway, he gave me a prescription.”

“For rages? What do they prescribe for that?”

“Mood stabilizers.” I look at the prescription slip in my back pocket. “Depakote. I think it’s supposed to help, you know, sort of all around. With the moods. And things.”

“Ah yes,” he says. “The moods. And things.”

“So I should be a little less crazy.”

“All right,” he says, and bites into an apple. “When’s dinner?”

By the end of the evening a miracle has occurred, and I’m feeling fine. All those years of changing my thoughts! improving my attitude! have suddenly become very useful. By my second glass of wine, I have chosen a new perspective! as follows:

Bipolar? Kind of an overstatement, but whatever. Just another name from yet another shrink. Interesting, but not really relevant to my day-to-day—after all, it’s not like I’m sick. I’ll take the meds, though—they’ll get rid of the rages, and the afternoon lows. Back to normal in a jiffy, back to my usual good mood. And surely no one needs to know; why focus more on what a fuckup I am? They’ll take it wrong and make a fuss. This is really no big deal. I’ll be good as new.

I’m immensely pleased with myself for changing my thoughts in this so-healthy way.

MY INSURANCE doesn’t cover Dr. Beedle, so he refers me to someone it does, a Dr. Lentz. I like him—he’s mild, cheerful, seems awfully concerned. He asks how things are going; I’ve got to get rid of the rages and lows, so I tell him about those and he fiddles with my dose. He asks me, for some reason, how much I drink, and tells me if I drink a lot, the meds won’t work, but since I’m not an alcoholic or anything, his question has no relevance.

I’m delighted with these meds, and I usually take them. When I feel bad, anyway—that’s what they’re for, right? To cheer me up? It’s those depressions I hate, and the rages, and the spinning thoughts—what I want is to hit that perfect high. That’s my normal self.

And I’m getting happier and happier all the time, working constantly, keeping the house spotless, throwing parties that feature gales of laughter and me at the very top of my game. These meds are a miracle! I tell him how much they’re helping. Perhaps I’m a little too happy? Why, no! He raises an eyebrow as I babble on about how inspired I am, so I tone it down—obviously not too happy, I say, dismissing the thought with a wave of my hand. I’m just back to normal! It’s summer, after all. This is the way I’m supposed to be! I’m always high as a kite in summer!

I WONDER what difference it might have made in my life if I’d taken my bipolar seriously right then. If I had, in fact, stopped to think about it. Maybe read up on it. Maybe learned something that might have changed the way I lived, something that in turn might have altered—maybe dramatically—the way the following years played out. I sit here now, writing these words, just out of the hospital for the umpteenth time this year. My vision is blurry, my speech is slurred, I can hardly keep my fingers on the keys. I’m not safe to drive, I can’t make a phone call; I woke up the other day in a hospital bed, staggered out to the nurses’ desk, and demanded to know how long I’d been there. “Eleven days” came the calm reply. “Eleven days?” I shouted. “What have I been doing this whole time?” The nurse looked at me. “Well, you’ve been sick,” she said. That means I’ve been sleeping for days on end, when I wasn’t running around like a demon possessed, and getting electroshock, and being wheeled through the ward with my head lolling onto my chest, and downing Dixie cups full of pills, and slurring through the haze of medication and chemical malfunction to my hospital psychiatrist (who is nothing short of a saint and who makes a regular practice of saving me from the vicissitudes of my mind), and falling back into bed again, and launching myself out, and running around; eleven days, twelve days, fourteen. It happens like clockwork, every few months. Hospitalizations lately: January 2004. April 2004. July 2004. October 2004. January 2005. April 2005. July 2005. December 2005. January 2006. July 2006. September 2006. October 2006. November 2006.

IT’S APRIL 2007. I haven’t been in the hospital in six months. Okay, I was completely out of commission, living in my pajamas, moving from my bed to my office, sitting with my head in my hands, trying like hell to have one coherent thought, for February and March. But I stayed out of the hospital. I’m doing fucking great.

For years after I was diagnosed, I didn’t take it seriously. I just didn’t feel like thinking about it. I let it run rampant, and these are the results. But what does it matter, what might have happened? What might have happened didn’t. This is what did.

The Break

July 1997, Nine A.M.

One hot, sunny morning, three months after I first hear bipolar disorder from Dr. Beedle, I am suddenly, floridly mad. Just like that. Mad. I am going along, minding my own business, when I find that I have gone completely over the edge. Why today? Who cares? I am not thinking a bit about that, because, as I said, I’ve gone insane and couldn’t possibly care less why. You don’t wonder, when you’ve completely lost it, how. You were going about your morning, and now you are mad, and you can’t remember what it was like before. You will never really remember. Your life breaks in half, right there. Sure, I’ve been crazy before. I’ve been crazy all along. But this is different. This is fucking nuts.

Because I haven’t told Lentz about the suicide attempt in 1994, he’s diagnosed me with bipolar II. Bipolar II is a little milder than bipolar I (though it’s still hellish); bipolar II has more depressive episodes than manic ones, and when the manic episodes occur, they’re not as severe. I don’t know it yet but I’ll soon find out: what separates bipolar II from bipolar I is a manic break. Bipolar I is harder to manage, harder to treat, and often, because of the extremity of the disasters caused by full-blown mania, more likely to mess up the patient’s life. On this summer morning, I experience that defining break. I go from bipolar II to bipolar I just like that. A doctor might put it this way: I go from sick to really, really sick. For the average Joe, I go from having an illness “just like diabetes!” to being flat-out crazy.

But I, cheerfully mad as a hatter, am entirely unaware that something has snapped and will never be put back together. Here we are: it’s Tuesday, and now we are quite mad. Not mad as in moody. Mad as in under the impression that I am God.

I am driving through the city. I am speeding. It seems that I have had a good deal to drink, to calm my nerves, for I am just a touch nervous. I woke up this morning and things were a little off. I went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and stopped in the doorway. Glass covered every surface. I vaguely remembered throwing the coffeepot at my husband’s head. Hell. No coffee. There was blood on the floor; I checked my feet, which were covered with shallow cuts that were more or less painless. I wondered absently if they really were painless, or if I was numb.

It occurred to me that I had to leave immediately, and I went upstairs to collect my purse and shoes. I made it as far as the car when I noticed that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Oh, for goodness’ sake, I thought to myself, and went back into the house shaking my head. I put on my blue-flowered sundress, and then realized I ought to shower, so I took a shower, and stepped out soaking wet, my dress clinging to me, and then there was a fold in time and now I am driving, very fast. I am downtown. I am speeding through a parking lot, honking at nothing. I run inside a building and find I am at my husband’s place of work. I kiss everyone hello, despite their surprise (perhaps they are surprised because I am all wet?), and I babble excitedly and my husband calls Dr. Lentz and kindly escorts me back to my car and sends me on my way, and it is very important that I put on lots of lipstick, it’s always good to look nice for an appointment with a shrink, it makes one look much more sane, and I am pacing in his office, Please sit down, Marya, really, would you sit down? Have you taken your meds? Are you suicidal? Have you been drinking? Does your husband know where you are? Did you drive here? No, you certainly cannot leave—

Inexplicably, I am in the car again. From out of nowhere, Julian is here and is driving and I am bouncing up and down in my seat, we are going on an adventure! We’re going to California! I want to move to California! Or New York, let’s move to New York! I find a bottle of vodka under the seat and drink most of it because I am clearly a little agitated and shouldn’t be seen like this, it’s embarrassing. And now we are at a hospital. Why are we at the hospital? My husband looks worried. I am sitting on a gurney and they are taking my blood, which apparently I don’t care for because I bat them away and shriek that they are invading my privacy and this is still America and they can’t just do whatever they want. Then, for no reason I can see, I am being wheeled along a corridor. I say I can walk perfectly well and hop up and wheel the chair myself, though the person in the blue pajamas declines to get in; and they unlock a large door and we are in a safe place and they take my shoes.

I sit here in the hospital room painted the shade of pink that is supposed to make people calm. I examine, enchanted, my feet in their blue hospital footies, while someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it’s going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.

Unit 47

Same Day

“For all is well in our little tiny town,” I sing, my hands a blur as I deal out the millionth game of solitaire of the night. I stand up in my chair, sit down in my chair, hop out of my chair, do a little Snoopy dance, my hospital gowns flapping about me like wings—I’ve grown inordinately fond of these gowns and am wearing several at once, “for dramatic effect”—and I sing the Snoopy song, stand on my chair again, imitating Snoopy as vulture, plop down. “I never did like Peanuts much,” I remark to the catatonic man who sits across from me, “but when I was little my parents took me to see the Peanuts musical, and I liked that, but I thought it was kind of ridiculous that all the kids were played by grownups.” I look at the man, who is just off an unfortunate suicide attempt, and, feeling bad for him, I climb onto the table and deal him a game of solitaire too, very pleased with myself for doing so upside down. I spit tobacco juice in a little cup, this nice man having loaned me some chewing tobacco since I am not allowed to smoke. “I don’t mind that stuff,” I say, my lower lip full of chew. “Here,” I say, climbing off the table and coming around to the back of his chair, “old chum,” I say, banging him on the back, “you play like this. You pretend that all the face cards are aces, and so when you get a face card you put it here, and then you go through the deck looking for all the twos or fours, which you use as wild cards, and when you do get an ace, or a joker, we’re playing with two jokers, see, then when you, like I said, do get an ace, you turn the face cards upside down on it and call it a double ace, and after that you flip the cards upward, like regular solitaire”—I am leaning over him, my hands flying over the table like a blackjack dealer’s, my arms on either side of his head, and I’m stacking the deck and shuffling the deck and stacking it and shuffling, and flipping up the cards—“and you start going for a flush or a full house.” I fan out my hand, the result, apparently, of the above machinations, say, “See?” and pound him on the back. “It’s very grand!” I cry, and go skipping down the hall, am shushed (nicely) by the very nice night staff as I skip by, skipping backward back to the desk; “You’re very nice,” I say, “I like you very much,” and I skip on, skip straight on till morning.

Dr. Lentz has explained to me that I’m having the good kind of mania, a euphoric mania. Everything is beautiful, simply gorgeous, I am talking a blue streak and what I’m saying is nearly incomprehensible, seeing as I’m dashing through a thicket of random thoughts so quickly no one can follow (it’s called flight of ideas). I am grandiose, delusional, I’m flinging my body about; I am, to the casual observer, clearly possessed.

It would seem I’m a textbook case. Every symptom of mania I could have, I have, in force: the extreme, minute-to-minute mood swings, rapid speech, the grandiosity, the impulsivity, the delusions, the feeling of complete invincibility, and the absolute conviction that certain untrue things are true. I can hear my thoughts zipping and whistling through my head, and see them snap and sizzle in streaking red lines on a complex grid that was designed by God and given to me personally; I am a millionaire high-society lady and should be treated with the utmost respect due to my superior station; my car can fly. These and various other ideas flash through my head, passing as quickly as they arrive. What causes them? I’m guilty of every precipitating factor you can think of—no sleep, gallons of booze, not enough effort to stick with my medication, a complete inability to grasp the seriousness of my diagnosis—and, it turns out, I have a disorder that has gone untreated for too long. But from my perspective, a manic break is a fine, fine thing, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why everyone is so upset.

The staff of this hospital, at least, is experienced and trained (and did I mention that I like them very much?), so my batshit state is nothing new to them. I’m on Unit 47, where they put patients who aren’t capable of being responsible for themselves—the suicidal, the very manic or profoundly depressed, the schizophrenic during a severe episode of delusion, and the variously psychotic. They dose me with a powerful antipsychotic, probably Zyprexa. It’s a stopgap to get me down off the ceiling while, over the next few days, Dr. Lentz works on figuring out what kinds of meds and how much of them I’ll need long term. I don’t mind taking it, not at all—these people are lovely, absolutely lovely, and so nice! I’ll do whatever they say.

Dr. Lentz makes his rounds in the morning. He sits on a chair in the center of the room and I sit on the edge of the bed, bouncing up and down. I come in and out of the conversation. I stop bouncing and fall back on my bed. I sit up again. I fall back, sit up, and keep finding him still there, sitting on his chair. I leap to my feet and start striding in purposeful circles around him, studying him from all angles, walking in and out of the stream of light coming through the window.

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