Madness: A Bipolar Life

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 (#ulink_afefeb15-7ea7-54fa-bf0d-da9e44e1839e)

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 worryabout 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 (#ulink_5b05a0e9-4d9e-5916-9017-3a79382d279d)

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 (#ulink_72508129-2b73-59d4-b467-a6cbad0803b9)

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. (#ulink_f7e9e84d-8a0a-51ae-8ef0-23b20529f100)

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.