I was feeling so profoundly dreadful that when the one thing I didn’t think could possibly happen, happened I was not only disheartened, it started eating away at my belief that my situation was temporary. It started destroying my hope. A few weeks after I started the Prozac, I began to feel profoundly worse.
I had been engaging in self-destructive behavior and that self-destructive behavior got more serious. It was noticed and commented on by strangers and friends alike. I couldn’t control it. My thoughts began racing, which only amused me, but it was distracting and I would stand in my living room with my head in my hands and laugh because I couldn’t get my own mind under control. I remember once I was trying to make a phone call and I had to just hang up and walk away; I couldn’t focus well enough to dial. My apartment, which had seemed the height of independence in September, began to feel like a prison. I was afraid to be alone.
One weekend in March I went with a friend to a summer music camp being set up in Mississippi similar to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. We went to help with building construction. When we got back to Michigan I asked if I could move in with her and her partner out in the country. They kindly agreed and so instead of disintegrating behind a locked door I did it with an audience. Not one of my more flattering periods.
My mother loaned me her car for a few months so I could move out to the country with these friends and still get into town for class and work, etc. I know she was worried about me but I was so busy being worried about myself I didn’t have a lot to give her. I don’t remember seeing the psychiatrist during this period but I probably was.
While almost incapacitated by depression part of the time, I also had more physical energy than usual. I was chopping wood, taking my friends’ four dogs for long walks in the woods, and swimming laps on campus. Laps upon laps upon laps. I dropped several dress sizes and had to buy new clothes. For a reason I didn’t understand and didn’t care about, I charged $1,000 worth of new clothes in one afternoon on a student’s budget without a thought as to how I would pay that off. As long as I was buying new clothes I also bought a new leather jacket. Oh, why not? It was more money than I had ever shelled out for anything except tuition.
As the semester wore down I hit a brick wall in terms of my ability to think. I couldn’t finish my homework any longer. I couldn’t write my final papers. I triaged my classwork and approached some of my professors. I took a lower grade in one class and stopped my work there altogether. My studiousness earlier in the semester meant that despite falling apart, I still made the Dean’s List.
I was drinking a lot of herbal tea during this period, convinced of its restorative powers. I didn’t “believe in doctors.” I didn’t trust psychiatrists as a class of doctor, despite my reaching out to one a few months before. One of my favorite books was “Woman on the Edge of Time” by Marge Piercy, a scathing indictment of everything the psychiatric industry has ever been accused of, rightly or wrongly.
As the semester wound down I evaluated my position the best I could and determined that a) herbal tea didn’t work b) alcohol was bad for me c) my self-destructive behavior was a hot mess. I needed help and I was back to square one. I wanted to see a doctor, a different doctor.
I called my psychiatrist and asked her for a reference to a psychiatric hospital. “Really?” she said, genuinely surprised. She named two hospitals within easy driving distance. I picked one.
My mother had two requests of me as the semester wore down: she wanted me to walk in graduation, something she hadn’t done for her own, and she wanted to have a family graduation party at home. I agreed to both. I’m shining in the pictures, a vision of radiant, perky health. My thoughts were racing so fast I was having trouble with conversations. During that week I would go from dizzingly happy to barely able to get out of bed, all on the same day. “Something” was profoundly wrong and I didn’t have a clue as to what it was. I was scared.
I’d called ahead to the hospital. My intake evaluation was the day after the party.
I had been accepted to a combination archival and library science Master’s program at the University of Maryland. I’d signed a lease with a roommate on a great apartment. I was still planning to go. I didn’t realize that my life as I knew it was about to end.
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