Many readers of this blog have written to ask about my mental health history. But after writing about it in print for almost seven years, I find myself too tired—or drugged?—to repeat it all again.
Thus, I present to you, THE EXPLANATORY COLUMN (I don't know why I put that in all caps), which should answer many of your questions. It was the first column I ever wrote for Philadelphia Weekly, in 1999. Forgive the out-of-date references: Both my cats are dead now, for instance. But it should give you the basic idea. Here it is:
Lost and Found
For the past two weeks, a Mexican heavy metal band was living in my bathroom fan. Okay, I know what you’re thinking: They weren’t living there, they were probably just using it as a cool place to jam. Either way, today’s the day the music died, and my bathroom is once again free of guitar feedback and Kiss-style Spanish. But the bathroom fan still speaks to me, its prosaic hum telling me what I need to hear: The drugs are finally working.
Before you launch a volley of “Just Say No!” buttons, hear me out. While I am a drug addict, I have an excellent excuse: The drugs I take—stimulant, mood-stabilizer, anticonvulsant and the ever-important antipsychotic—are not only legal, they are eagerly thrust upon me by my psychiatrist, who represents the interests of friends, relatives and society at large—i.e., you.
And though my drugs are definitely “mind-altering,” I thank God every day that my mind is altered, thus allowing me to distinguish between my life and the Pope’s.
But before I discovered the right “medication cocktail,” as the doctors so blithely call it, I lost seven years of my life. Most people can’t imagine losing that much time; we get just a glimpse when some guy who’s been in a coma since 1990 unexpectedly awakens and, blinking from the flashbulbs, asks, “What’s happening with the Gulf War?”
My plundered memory—not knowing who I voted for, no narrative of my past—is troubling. But my lost sense of myself—who I was, what I would be—is worse. I returned from my war to a bombed-out self, the structure too damaged to rebuild, so who I am will have to be built from scratch. It’s an opportunity I’m lucky to have: There were times when no one knew if I would survive. But Spikol is back in the game.
My mental illness, which I’ll just call “being two cents short of a nickel,” was diagnosed in 1991, when, as a graduate student, I was first admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature—a field best exemplified by sentences like, “The meta-subtext of the Other is part Marxist-metaphysic, part post-colonial-pastiche”—could make anyone feel removed from reality. But I don’t think the other students spent their downtime breaking dishware and mirrors because of a delusion that glass was an active, murderous substance.
In between such “episodes,” I tirelessly pursued my lifelong dream: Tenured professorship at 28; marriage to a sexy renegade scholar; a Victorian fixer-upper in Swarthmore soon to be filled with the pitter-patter of precocious feet.
Having grown up in downtown Philadelphia with privilege-plus, the product of happily married parents and private schooling, I had no reason to think my modest goal of academic bohemianism was unrealistic.
But, as they say, fortune is a woman and a woman is a sometime thing—especially if that woman is me. My chemicals just wouldn’t cooperate.
The last episode started, as all terrible things do, discreetly: a little paranoia here, a little obsessive-compulsion there and enough dissociation to render hours, even years, meaningless. I think I called my mom the day after I sat, head in oven, waiting for Sylvia Plath to take me away.
My mother’s tenacity, which saved my life, was borne of a creeping awareness that, despite all the pills and potions, her baby still couldn’t tell a hawk from a handsaw, let alone finish an advanced degree.
Now, I am finally stabilized, after endless visits to the best in the crazy-cure biz, hundreds of medication combinations, too many lost weekends in the loony bin and—as the coup de grace for the truly treatment-resistant—shock treatments.
But seven years of this shit has taken its toll.
I’ve had to relearn the world, from tooth-brushing to small-talk no-no’s. (“What do I do? Uh, I think I bought milk today...”) When asked what it’s like to lose so much time, I can only compare it to falling asleep in a bread line in the former Soviet Union and waking up in a SuperFresh, surrounded by a bounty of unfamiliar free-market exotica.
Everything is news to me, and any historically based assumptions about my tastes, knowledge or parallel parking ability are not to be relied upon.
Physical evidence, like the plethora of 19th-century novels in my apartment, proves nothing. I can’t get through the first page of a novel now, let alone the siege that is Brothers Karamazov. Photos of me and my husband, from whom I’m now separated, tell the tale of a once-happy couple; sadly, I have almost no memory of our married life together.
At 30, most of my peers are trying to “find themselves,” to determine who they are fundamentally, not just what feels good right now. It would be so much easier to “find myself” if I hadn’t gotten so completely lost.
Like Rip Van Winkle awakening in a crappy loft apartment with two cats and a stellar jazz collection, I know one thing—and only one—for sure: Since there’s no going back, I have to move forward. I’m not sure where I’ll wind up, but keep your seat belts fastened. It should be one hell of a ride.
