Madness: A Bipolar Life Read online

  So, someone says. Are you sober?

  I stare at them. I think so, I say.

  Have you had a drink today?

  Just a couple.

  When was the last time you ate?

  I try to think. I can't remember, I say.

  Someone produces a banana. Eat this, they say. Come with us, they say. I am being herded into someone's house. You need sugar, they say, and pour me orange juice and a bowl of sugary cereal and I try to figure out what to do with the spoon. They talk to me and I try to understand what they're saying, and my brain is soaked with booze, addled with madness, but they are good people, and they are feeding me, and I am so relieved I start to cry.

  They pat me on the shoulder. Hey, they say. 'S'all right. You'll be all right.

  I don't think so, I say.

  Inexplicably, my aunt—my mother's sister, whom I adore—is sitting at the kitchen table with me. I am very startled to find her here. She doesn't explain her presence. Turns out I've been hiding in the family beach house on the Oregon coast. It's hers and my mother's, so I suppose there's no real reason she wouldn't be here.

  It seems I've called my mother at some point in the last few days. I've been gone for weeks. My parents—now divorced, my mother living in Minneapolis with her new husband, my father with his new wife in Arizona—knew only that I was on a hiking trip with a friend. They've been worried about me for months, listening to me get crazier and crazier during our infrequent phone calls. Whatever I said to my mother when I called from Oregon must have tipped her off that I was not doing so well. (No, not so well.) She called her sister, who lives in Oregon, and asked her to come get me. She also called my sister-in-law, a doctor in a Portland hospital, and made certain that a bed in the psych ward was waiting for me.

  But I know none of this. All I know is that I am in the beach house, and my aunt is here, and I am near tears with relief. I try to feign normalcy—give her a hug, tell her I just needed a little getaway, the beach house seemed the very place. I don't tell her that I didn't even know I was in the beach house. I smile and tell her I'm writing. I babble and chatter, my speech getting faster by the second. I flit from topic to topic, unable to stop, and she nods, looking at me strangely, worried, and I don't want her to be worried, I don't want her to think I'm crazy.

  Out of nowhere I hear myself lighting into HMOs and their evils, their failure to cover mental health services, and I am being extremely articulate, honing my argument, and now I am sobbing, and I say I don't know what I'm going to do, I have no way to get help, and I think it's possible I may need some help, nothing serious, but maybe just something to get me back on my feet, but they won't cover anything and it's all a bureaucracy with no connection to real people with real problems who need help. I watch tears drip from my nose onto the wood grain of the kitchen table and try to get ahold of myself, to start speaking in a nice, detached, intellectual way. This will surely persuade my aunt that I am perfectly fine, outburst aside.

  Oh, sweetie, she says.

  That makes it worse. I crawl up the stairs to the bedroom and climb into bed, sobbing so hard I am pretty sure I am going to break. The feeling of despair is so pure and clean it seems to slice a razor-sharp path through my body. My body gapes open, filling in slowly with the knowledge that there is no hope. I find this peaceful. My aunt is bending over me with the phone. I hold it to my ear. My mother's voice. More soothing noises. I am crying too hard to hold the phone, so I hand it back to my aunt.

  Now I am in a car. The towering green-blue pines and rocky cliffs that crowd against the two-lane road go by. Now we are at a hospital. Now we are in a tiny, windowless room. Now I am in a chair. My aunt is here. We are locked in. I do not understand the room. There is a TV screen that shows someone in a uniform pacing back and forth outside. My aunt explains that it is a security guard. To secure what? Me. I am concerned and ask if the figure has a gun. She tries to explain. The uniformed person makes me incredibly agitated. I have a great many questions about this new situation. I cry, wanting to know if they will come to get me, if they will let me out, if they will help me.

  I don't know what happens next.

  I am in a cage. I am dreaming, but I am not asleep. It is a daydream. But then it is night; I do not know how to explain it to the figures in the room, who surround me. I cannot move; I flail but in a very contained sort of way because it would seem my ankles and wrists are restrained. The figures in the room murmur, which must mean I'm crazy again, because otherwise they would speak in normal voices. But I am strapped down + they murmur + I cannot lift my head + for it is full of medicines to calm me + aha! It is not a cage for there is no roof! Which means = it is a bed with bars. And the figures peer over me and study me as if I am a rat. Or perhaps I have just been born and they are admiring my perfect little ears. And then a face comes into focus: a savior! Surely he will tell me where I am, for if he is here and I am here then = he must know where we are but there is a sudden flower; it is a sunflower; I shriek, Sunflower! It is the color of rust; is that even possible? Is there a flower the color of rust? I realize it is threatening; why has he brought me this flower; it seems to say I know you. Rather than saying, for example, Get well, obviously. As a daisy would say; however, I dislike daisies, have always disliked them, to the point of truly hating them, for no reason that I am aware; van Gogh painted sunflowers! The sunflower is redeemed. So I take it and eat it. Then they take away my sunflower, which I love very much; they say, We'll just put this in a vase; which is so uninspired a notion I laugh at them for they must be very boring to one another and themselves; I am not boring; I am, I discover, full of ideas; I mention the green beans; I can lift my head! I announce that I will leave if they don't give me a dress to wear to the occasion; and some fabulous shoes.

  The next thing I know, I am coming to, and everyone in the world is standing above me. My mother is in here somewhere. I am aware of her presence. My father is or is not here, it's not quite clear. I understand that if he is not here yet, he will be soon, for this is a highly unusual situation, and he will need to come explain it to me.

  There are bars on the bed. The people murmur. I am here, and they are here, which means I am somewhere, somewhere safe, and I don't have to drive anymore, and the shrieking has stopped, and my mind floats in a bath of sedatives, sunning itself on its back like a seal.

  I am mad. The thought calms me. I don't have to try to be sane anymore. It's over.

  I sleep.

  When I come to again, the sound has been shut off. My head has become a kaleidoscope. It turns and turns, and the shards of color tumble and arrange themselves differently every time. At some point the colored patterns organize themselves into the shapes of people and things, and my head becomes a telescope instead. I watch them on their little planet, unsure how far away they are. They come and go, the view from the telescope emptying out, focusing now on the plastic light on the ceiling above, which is another strata of space, which has a light, which is possibly a star. Then they reappear in the telescope again and I am much relieved. When I move my telescope from side to side, the figures and the colors pan past so fast it makes me dizzy.

  I am sedated. I don't understand what's going on. I know only that I am in a hospital and that my family is here. Someone is beside me, my doctor, my mother, my friend, and I murmur a few things, and I hear my sentences begin to tangle into incomprehensible, nonsensical gibberish, and it frustrates me, trying to make myself understood, and I slide back into sleep.

  The things that happen are out of order. Nothing follows. My facts are my facts alone.

  I travel from bed to bed. Today I am in a bed without bars. A nice woman with short blond hair is talking to me. I feel as if I am underwater. I establish for myself that she is my doctor. Her voice echoes, garbled, in my head. I concentrate on what she is saying. I try to keep myself afloat. Do you understand me? Oh, yes, I nod, wanting to be polite. She is saying something about medication. She uses the word helping. We are trying
to [burble burble]. We want you to know [burble]. Your mother and father are here. Tell me how you. We are. They are. We will. Better soon. As soon as we.

  I hear myself say something. My own voice is very near, so near I am not sure if it makes it from the echo chamber of my skull out into the air. I remember I had many questions that I was saving up for when she came. My questions trip over one another, and I can't keep one sentence separated from the other. The words tangle up. She says, I'm sorry, I don't understand. I try to explain myself, but I am sinking, my eyes start to close, I hear myself mumble, getting farther away. Marya? You're not making any sense. She stands to go. I'll come back later, she says. Frustrated, sinking, I nod.

  I am upright. I am wearing my robes. I stare at the table, where a peanut butter sandwich has appeared, though it confuses me and I don't know what to do with it. My hands lie in my lap. My hands are heavy. Someone is watching, and I lift my head. I have visitors. They furrow their brows and look sad. I tell them not to worry, it will be fine. My mouth will not cooperate. I would be embarrassed but I can't concentrate that long.

  I shuffle across the room to the little table where they keep crackers and oranges and tea and powdered hot chocolate and lukewarm water. The water is lukewarm so we can't scald ourselves. The movie plays in a loop. From the faraway place in my head, I watch my insane game of one A.M. cribbage with a speechless enormous man who sometimes inexplicably laughs and struggles with a pencil to mark down the score. I do not know how to play cribbage. I have never known how.

  My feet in hospital footies are tucked under me. I am a smallish creature, a rabbit or a mouse, swimming in miles of hospital cotton, dazed and riding fluorescent dreams. The colors of the cards blur red-black as I turn my head. I study three dead flowers in a Styrofoam cup: two yellow, one purple. I struggle to remember their names. A man named Beast tried to kill himself last night. I say I am sorry about that. He talks to me slowly and I raise my eyes. He says, Do you know flowers, and I say, Yes. It takes a moment to force the word but I say, Yes, I know flowers, and he says, Do you know a flower like a firework, an explosion, but purple, or blue, and I picture the wet bush flush with balls of blue outside the kitchen window, after the rain, when I stared at it for hours, letting the coffee go cold in my cup, clinging to the cup in the face of the astonishing blue while I cried. This was maybe yesterday or maybe last year. It was in the house on the coast or it was in my childhood home or it was somewhere I can't remember now. I pick through the rubble of my brain. My brain is an archaeological site. Yes, I say, carefully deciphering the complexities of my cards, yes, hydrangea. We stare at each other, amazed.

  It is very late now, it is the same night or another night, and the man with the clipboard walks from room to room glancing up at the dry-erase boards outside the doors to check our erasable names to distinguish one drugged figure in the bed marked WINDOW from the one in the bed marked DOOR. He will mark on his yellow sheet: B (BACK), L (LEFT), F (FRONT), R (RIGHT). I am A (AWAKE). This too will go down on the yellow sheet and soon they will come, cooing, to give me an A (ATIVAN), because wouldn't it be nice to sleep?

  There are two beds in my room. This means I am better now. It means I am oriented. When I came they must have asked me questions to which I did not know the answers—Do you know what day it is? What year? Who is the president? Do you know where you are?—but to which I apparently do know the answers now. Hospital, I must have said, and that was the right answer so I won, and the crowds cheered. They have moved me from the room where I began, where they murmured, a lifetime before, or last week, where there was only one bed, the emergency psych room. Now there are two beds. Sworls of threadbare blankets wrap around our two figures like cotton galaxies. The thick blue dark gently presses its fingers into our eye sockets, the shallows of our open mouths, the crook of an arm pulled close to the body for heat. A damp and heavy sleep fills the room, a third body, breathing.

  These are my facts. There are other facts. I do not learn these facts until much later. The other facts are as follows: I crashed into a depression that lasted for another nine months. The two-year mania in California that led into the psychosis that sent me tearing across the country with Crazy Sean and landed me in the hospital in Oregon for two weeks came to a sudden halt as depression took hold. It was the next stage of the cycle of bipolar: manic depression hits both extremes, one following the other. The higher you fly, per cliché, the farther you fall. After a manic episode, the body and mind are exhausted, completely spent. I hit the wall. I picture myself flattened against it like a cartoon character, two-dimensional, sliding down.

  I've spent my fair share of days flung across the bed, racked with a dull, aimless grief, and I've curled up on the floor in a corner of the room, my thoughts black and seething, and I've understood the word despair, the word defeat. I've felt the loss of the will to breathe, and felt the momentary wish to die. But it was momentary. I was always able to pull myself out. Or, really, mania always returned and sent me lying again.

  This is different. I do not have the energy to pull myself free. I do not have the energy to even care that I am trapped. This is beyond caring, beyond a will to die, beyond will. Death is there, but you can barely lift your hand to reach out for it, and you cringe at the faintest suggestion of light. You can wish for death, but it is like wishing for sleep, a sense of exhaustion so profound that your whole body aches. And just as sleep does some exhausted nights, death eludes you. It is right there. You feel it. But it won't come close enough. And if you have the energy to cry, that's why.

  Down, down, down. It doesn't feel like depression; I am not sad. I am underwater. I am a body. I follow the world through my telescope. I am drugged, and so feel nothing at all, as the doctors scramble to find some combination of meds that will stabilize me. I sleep almost around the clock. The doctor explains to me that I am very sick. She explains to me that I need to stop drinking or I will never get better, it will always be this bad. My parents explain things to me too. They speak slowly. They explain to me, over and over, where I am, but I am profoundly confused. They sit in the hospital all day, every day, propping up my head with their hands, answering my endless, repetitive questions, wondering if I will return to sanity soon, or at all.

  Day Treatment

  Late August 2000

  After two weeks, I am discharged and taken to my aunt's Portland house to recuperate. I go to sleep for a week, passed out on the living room floor. When I'm marginally cognizant again, my mother and I fly back to San Francisco. The plan is that I will enter a day program for people in crisis—people who are severely depressed, manic, paralyzed with anxiety, but presumably not psychotic, and believed to be nonsuicidal. My mother is staying at a hotel near my house, spending virtually every waking moment with me until I get back on my feet. I'm not suicidal because I couldn't possibly make myself care enough that I am alive to summon up the energy to off myself, not that I could even organize such an event if I tried. I cling to my mother like a monkey, her presence the only thing that makes sense.

  She drops me off at the hospital for day treatment every morning, and I spend the day in group therapy with the rest of the completely nonfunctional patients. The room feels strange, hollow, populated by motionless silent bodies who sit, unaware of the sunny summer day outside. There is a sense of being nowhere, floating on the hospital floor in the middle of space. The cumulative madness in the room circulates, collecting on our shoulders and weighing them down.

  We sit in a circle, trying to talk. The day program tries to give us something to do other than kill ourselves or lie on the couch thinking about how depressed we are and how much we wish we were dead. It is meant as a crisis-management program only, intended to keep us safe and occupied for as long as the episode lasts and until we are able to function on our own again. Most of the patients are depressed. I am not sure why I am here. I don't feel depressed. I feel nothing at all.

  At home, my mother sits with me, talks slowly and gently, as if
talking to a skittish dog. Her presence is the only thing that I am fully aware of. I am terrified all the time. I ask her the same questions over and over, make her repeat the answers until my fear lessens a little bit, only to fixate on something else to fear. I make her explain everything to me, and I nod, but I don't understand. Oh yes. I see. I see nothing but the reeling sun. The world is enormous. I am a tiny speck on earth, and I cling to my mother's ankle, crawling up her leg like a flea.

  "But what if I get lost?" I am frantic. We are trying to leave my house.

  "You won't get lost. I'm with you."

  "But what if you lose me?" I stare into her face with the fervent faith in her rightness usually seen in zealots.

  "I won't lose you. You can hang on to my sleeve."

  I nod. "All right," I say. I pace, then stop. "What if you get lost?"

  "Then we're screwed." My mother laughs so hard she nearly falls off her chair. I don't think it's funny at all, and start drawing a map.

  Another day of day treatment. They have steered me onto the correct floor and into the correct room, and now I am lying on the floor of the psych ward lounge. The sunlight blares into the room. The institutional curtains are from the seventies, orange with little white squares. They are bleak and so I close my eyes. Periodically, someone tries to rouse me, but it is a Herculean effort to lift my head a few inches, to whisper that I can't stay awake. Dimly, I watch the other depressed people sitting in a circle, on couches and chairs. I am bewildered by the fact that they are upright.

  There is a young woman on her knees, rocking, wailing, afraid. Her voice tears at my ears and I think I will die if she does not shut up.

  I fade in and out of a sedated sleep. There is a perky young woman. I've met women like that. They take their perky, happy faces out in public, and wear them around, smiling and smiling, and then they go home and shoot themselves in the head. I watch her. She smiles and chatters on. "So my friend Dave called me this morning, and he said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'I got out of bed. I ate some cereal. Now I'm lying on the couch.' And he said, 'You rock!'" She laughs. "So I felt good for a minute. But then I hung up the phone and everything emptied out and I wanted to be dead all over again." She laughs.