Loud in the House of Myself (15 page)

“
HOW DID YOU
do your tattoo?” I asked my Uncle Junior.

“With a needle and thread. And India ink. Y’all probably don’t know what India ink is these days.”

“A needle and thread?”

“Yeah, you would just wrap the needle in the thread, and then dip it down in the ink and poke little holes in yourself, and the ink would go into your skin.”

“But then it goes away?” His was so faded it was barely visible beneath the hair on his knuckle.

“Mine went away. It’s supposed to last forever.”

As with so many borderline suicidal gestures, the breakdown dissipated as quickly as it came on. As soon as I hit Cincinnati, I was wildly blissed out again. When manic, as when stoned, everything struck me as profound, such as the fact that in Cincinnati there are bookstores that hide from you. The city is made of hills covered with Victorian houses in various states of splendor and disrepair, and, short of Barcelona, it was the most magical place I’d ever seen. In one of the big old houses, on top of a hill near the university, in the shadowy ghetto underside of which I lived, was a bookstore called Bookstore. Their books were halfheartedly shelved; some of them were simply stacked slapdash upon the lower bodies of naked mannequins: books with legs. The top halves of the mannequins took up space on the various threadbare love seats scattered throughout the place. There was an entire room of
plays
. The first time I stumbled into the place, I was greeted with a book about Mummenschanz, when I’d just been—no lie—walking down the street thinking about Mummenschanz. I was in speed-fueled lit-dork love.

I lived in a three-story house with six other twenty-three-year-old theater interns from all over the country, and the usual drama ensued, but my brain was stimulated, so for the first few months it was a euphoric time. At night, after rehearsals, the other interns and I walked from the Ensemble to Kaldi’s Coffee House, had long conversations about Theater with a capital T, and bonded over excessive amounts of very strong coffee. I took to smoking clove cigarettes and wearing my reading glasses all the time, primarily because I wanted to impress a boy, Reese, the lighting designer, and George, his musician friend. They both had beards, and George actually carried around bongo drums. Reese was lanky and delicate, thoughtful and smart, with shaggy black hair and glasses. He was divine, and I quickly promoted him to the exalted position of Love of My Life (du jour). I’d know once and for all that I was sophisticated, I reasoned, if I could just score a boyfriend who looked like Trotsky. And score I did: before long, Reese and I were a couple, head over heels, making out on the lighting grid late at night after rehearsals.

I shrank due to Ritalin and caffeine, my weight dropping to 125 pounds, but I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. I was in love, and I was on medication, and even if it wasn’t the right medication, it certainly pepped me up and made me chipper. So what if I got a little bit anorexic again? I got a little bit anorexic again.

Which was, of course, the beginning of the downfall. For a while, everything was suspended, new. Everything sparkled, radiated, shone. I stood in front of the candy machine in the basement of the theater one night, staring at the gummy, multicolored Chuckles, swooning over the particular beauty of the black ones. The whole world opened up to be appreciated, and I was grateful for the chance to appreciate it—I just thought I’d be even more capable of doing so if I had a better body.

I coupled the Ritalin with cigarettes, and dropped twenty pounds in the first three months I was there. The nicotine, amphetamine, and frequent, vigorous sex with Reese were all I needed; nutrition seemed unnecessary. My roommates, who had said upon meeting me what most people say—“You’re so full of energy”—rapidly grew annoyed as that energy became irritability, a boundless hyperactivity punctuated by grouchiness and aggression. In the parlance of bipolar disorder, this is called an “agitated mania,” or a “mixed state.” If mania is uncomfortable but fun, mixed states are uncomfortable and no fun at all.

Cincinnati was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression—of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar: they are afraid of you, have grown tired of you, unable to put up with the bottomless pit of your need and despair. You become disillusioned with them for being unable to do so, and the good old borderline “splitting” comes into play: they are mean, you are bad, everything is one way or the other and you have no more options than you did in the place from which you ran. As the people in Cincinnati turned into the people in Arkansas—directors stopped casting me, roommates and colleagues started avoiding me—I waited for the ultimate bomb to drop. I counted the days, the minutes, the breaths, until Reese broke up with me.

Which, of course, he did. Fall turned to winter and my beautiful new city turned to ice. One night I sat on Reese’s bed, naked, shivering, and he told me I was just too much of an actress for him.

“What?” I squeaked, as my vision narrowed to that pinprick that precedes impending doom, the one where you know everything is about to change and you are in the last remaining seconds of the reality to which you have become accustomed.

“You just…sometimes you’re just too
intense
. Like you’re always acting.”

Of all the words in the world I hate,
intense
may very well be the one I hate the most. It is certainly the one which, when leveled at me, carries with it the shame of all the times I’ve heard it before, and embarrasses me like a small child who has just peed her pants.

I remember he said, “I’m sorry,” which of course the person dumping you never really is, or at least not enough that they’re willing to stay with you. I remember running out the door and sitting in the hallway crying. I remember my black eyeliner dripping on my white T-shirt and leaving little dots. I remember half of me falling away, and my surprise that there always seemed another half of me to do so. What percentage of my original self was I by that point? A quarter? An eighth? A sixteenth?

I fell apart with a whole new level of tragedy and drama. My room in our big old drafty house was right next to the living room, and I couldn’t bear having people that close to me. I decided I didn’t deserve windows—there was always some new thing I didn’t deserve—so I moved into the basement. Cincinnati had a record snowfall that winter, more snow than I had ever experienced in my life, and the one small window I did have was always obscured by drifts. Fair enough, I deserved that too. I found the black hole inside me and lived there, and as a prelude to a decade-long battle with the mental health care system, it was strangely peaceful.

As the Ohio River valley froze to a silver January, I slowed like a fish trapped beneath a top sheet of ice, occasionally looking up toward a vague memory of the sun. I came straight home from the theater every evening at six o’clock, went straight to the basement, and crawled into bed. I had only a mattress separated from the concrete floor by a thin piece of industrial carpet, which, given my lifelong tendency to pack my living space with as much color and art as possible, was the most obvious indication that I had thoroughly given up. I narrowed my life to nothing but survival and sleep, becoming a very efficient creature. I no longer did things for pleasure, so I required no excess light or water. I did not read or soak in bubble baths—in fact, I washed myself simply by squatting in the bathtub in front of the faucet, not even putting the plug in the drain. Comfort was too much trouble, as was standing up in the shower. I needed little energy, and as such, little food. That winter I simply waited to disappear.

Lying sleepless for hours on end beneath a pile of blankets and discarded clothes—too exhausting to put them on hangers, to figure out if they were dirty or clean; once a week I shoved the whole mass into the washer and threw them back on the bed when they were dry—I pretended I was a prisoner, doing time in my own head. I remembered a story we’d read at Governor’s School, Ursula Le Guin’s
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,
in which the happiness of a utopian city is dependent upon one forgotten child suffering in a basement, a sacrificial victim. I pretended I was performing a meritorious act, as opposed to simply giving in to depression without a fight. I longed for uninterrupted sleep, but it never came—I catnapped like a prisoner constantly afraid of sudden attack. In my dreams, Reese left me over and over again.

People with borderline personality disorder are notorious for self-destruction in the face of breakups. The worst thing we can imagine is being called out on our faults and subsequently abandoned—the pain of betrayal is so intense it can feel as if the person who left us has taken our heart and soul with them. Unlike those with clinical depression, who generally contemplate and commit suicide quietly, borderlines do it loudly, making sure everyone around us knows about it. In the midst of the chronic interpersonal catastrophes that punctuate our lives, we cannot imagine that things have ever been better or that they ever will be. We are either invincible or wholly worthless, and if we’re worthless, we might as well die, even if just the day before we felt capable of changing the world. The loss of love negates everything good about us. Never mind that everyone else in the world has gone through at least one bad breakup; ours—our current one, never any of the ones before—is
the worst
. Nobody else has ever experienced such pain, and the only relief from that pain is punishment, swift and severe. So we cut, or burn, or starve, or purge, or write all over ourselves with Sharpies, or imprison ourselves in basements. One in ten of us die by our own hand, not all of us intentionally. Borderlines have a very high rate of accidental suicide; in the heat of the moment, we make grand attempts, hoping to be saved, but sometimes no one comes along to save us.

The problem with the savior complex is that eventually our saviors get very tired indeed. It is too much trouble to keep dragging us back from the ledge, and it’s not their job anyway. In the end, we can only save ourselves, but generally need psychiatric help to do it. I lay in the dark for months, until I could bear it no more and opened up the phone book one morning in search of a shrink who would see me even though I had no health insurance. I found exactly one place in town that offered sliding-scale fees: Central Clinic, the outpatient mental health facility of the University of Cincinnati. On a dark frigid February afternoon, I left the theater and hauled myself there. Now I think there should have been some sort of fanfare as I walked through the smudged glass doors, into the waiting room with its battered orange plastic chairs, cracked floor tiles, and threadbare rug. There should have been trumpets to herald the start of battle, the advent of war. There should have been someone to hand me the official uniform as I checked in at the grubby front desk and gave them my last twenty bucks. But there wasn’t, there was only a tired-looking woman with a mountain of paperwork on her desk, to which she added my intake forms. I sat down to wait for my next redeemer to call me into his chambers, watching the schizophrenics who had just received their Clozaril shots shuffle past.

My god,
I thought,
maybe that’s what they’ll do to me
. It was just like in the movies: right down the hall, human beings sacrificed their personalities and dreams to the piss-colored syrup in the syringe of some Nurse Ratched, and now I sat among them, waiting.

My first psychiatrist at Central Clinic was one Dr. Shores, who wore short-sleeved shirts that came untucked and with whom I would develop something of an alliance before his residency was over and I was handed off to the next incoming clinician. At our first session, he ate canned peas straight from the can. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t have time for lunch.” He was well-meaning, Dr. Shores, if absentminded, and although he didn’t sit around with me and talk about books, he did hand across his desk my second psychotropic prescription: this time, lithium.

For the unfamiliar, lithium is a hard-core, no-joke, we’re-not-fucking-around-here drug. I talked to Dr. Shores for all of fifteen minutes before he diagnosed me as bipolar and wrote the prescription. So I stopped at the clinic pharmacy on my way out, and traded them three bucks in change scraped from the bottom of my purse for a plain brown bottle in a plain brown bag. In the bottle, little white tablets,
three a day,
and then home to learn about the crippling hell of psych med side effects.

Four days later, I found myself crawling around on the floor for two hours, looking for my car keys. This in itself might sound a bit excessive, maybe a little extreme, but not completely outside the range of acceptable human behavior. I mean, if you had to go somewhere really really important, and you lost your keys, and you had no other choice, you might be reduced to crawling on the floor for two hours looking for them. I, however, spent two hours looking because I kept forgetting what I was doing. Every now and then I’d sort of lift off from the launching pad of my brain, get distracted by a piece of lint, spend ten minutes pondering the lint, and then spend thirty more seconds looking for the car keys before I noticed a shiny object and had to stare blankly at that for a while. I know it was two hours because I looked at my watch a lot, seeing as how my wrist was right there in front of my face. Every now and then I’d think,
Hmm, fifty-five minutes and I still haven’t found those goddamn keys, interesting
. On lithium, time completely ceased to be relevant. I decided, in fact, that time was a quaint, archaic concept, an outdated philosophical construct specific to Homo sapiens, which everyone followed because everyone else did. Whatever. It didn’t apply to me.