Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (27 page)

It was all a question of drawing maps, and the maps began with the behaviors and moved backward. Carol wanted to know what my problematic behavior was. She turned to me abruptly.

“Norah, what’s the behavior?”

I was game for this. I was there to be real, to put it all out there for and as myself. I didn’t hesitate. I said the first thing that came into my head.

“Affairs,” I blurted.

“Affairs?”

“Yeah. I’d say sex, but I usually tend to convince myself that I’m in love, so let’s just put it under affairs, short for affairs of the heart and loins.”

Nobody blinked or even looked over to see the expression on my face. I couldn’t tell whether this meant they weren’t surprised, or they just weren’t paying attention. Either way, it was good. I could work in that empty space.

“Okay,” Carol said, and wrote it in the left-hand column. Affairs. “Now, what’s the thought that goes with that?”

“I’m usually not thinking. That’s the problem.”

“Yes, but think about it now. Take it apart.”

I thought about it. Then, again, I said the first thing that came to me.

“If I connect with someone I won’t be alone.”

Carol repeated this and wrote it in the middle column under Thought. “Now,” she said, “what’s the perception?”

“How is that different from the thought?”

“Take it a step further. How do you take that thought and convince yourself that having an affair is the right idea?”

“You mean how do I rationalize the behavior?”

“Yes.”

“I tell myself I’m growing emotionally, sharing, fulfilling my emotional potential.”

That got a response. Bobby peered over at me sideways, as if to say, “Wow. What a crock. Do you really buy that shit you’re selling yourself?”

I looked back, turning down one side of my mouth and raising my eyebrows as if to say, “Yep. There it is. Pretty sad.”

She smiled as if to reply, “We’re all in the same stew, each one more full of shit than the next. Don’t sweat it.”

I looked back up at the board, where Carol had written out everything I’d said.

There it was all laid out.

Behavior: Affairs.

Thought: I won’t be alone.

Perception: This is growth.

Yep. A crock for sure.

That’s why they wrote it down. There’s nothing like seeing your crap writ large in blue and white in front of a group of other top-shelf shit-crockers.

That’ll wake you up.

“Now,” said Carol, “what’s the attachment? What’s the thing you’re holding on to that makes all of this come about?”

I screwed up my lips and sighed. This was going to take a minute.

The attachment. Hmm. What was I really trying to get out of the lovefest/fuckfest?

“Escape,” I said, finally.

“Okay. Escape from what?” said Carol, right on my heels.

“Isolation, I guess.”

“And . . . ?” Carol added leadingly.

No answer.

“Isolation is?” she said.

I thought again and the answer came.

“Myself.”

“So, escape from yourself?”

“Yeah. Escape from myself.”

She wrote this down under my three columns and underlined it.

There it was. The seed.

Carol moved to another part of the board and drew a stick figure.

“Okay. Let’s take this now and turn it around.”

She drew a thought bubble above the stick figure’s head and wrote inside it, “I want to escape myself.”

“That’s your thought. Your real thought. Right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Now,” she drew a large heart shape over the stick figure’s chest, “what’s the feeling underneath that?”

“Loneliness.”

“What else?”

“Terror.”

“What else?”

“Inadequacy. Hurt. Pain.”

She wrote each of these words in the heart. Loneliness. Terror. Inadequacy. Hurt. Pain. I thought of myself curled in the bathtub. Those feelings everywhere. And the thought. Escape. And the behavior. What is the behavior? Self-harm.

Carol drew an arrow pointing out from the stick figure.

“Now,” she said, “you feel hurt, lonely, afraid. That’s what’s driving you to act. But the act, the affairs, don’t make this go away. Don’t get at it, right? At least not long-term. Short-term. And then it’s just worse, right?”

“Right.”

“So what can you do instead of having an affair? What’s the new behavior?”

I had all kinds of seemingly good answers for this. Go to the gym. Clean the house. Call a friend. But the real answer, as the staff at Mobius would try to teach me, was to face it. Face yourself. Face the pain, the loneliness, the fear. Sit with it. Don’t run. It was basic applied Buddhism. Be present and mindful. Focus.

My way of conceiving it was more pedestrian. Think of what’s scary in a horror movie, I told myself. The unseen, the imagined, is always more frightening than what’s graphically portrayed. The same holds true in your head. Face your fear, step into it, look at it head-on and it will diminish in stature, lose its hold on your imagination. But run, and it’ll grow wings, breathe fire, and fly after you.

“So what can you do instead of having an affair?” Carol repeated.

“Stay with the discomfort,” I said. “Face it.”

“Good.”

She wrote the word “STAY” on the board in caps. I said it to myself thoughtfully. Stay. It was a good word, especially when you weren’t saying it pleadingly to someone else.

The thought is: I want to escape myself.

The feeling is: loneliness, hurt, fear.

The new behavior is: stay.

It made a somewhat confusing sort of sense. If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

I wrote the word “STAY” in my notebook, also in caps, and underlined it. Carol was looking at me intently with her eyebrows raised inquisitively, as if to say, “You got all that?”

“Okay?” she said, her hand poised to erase the board.

I nodded.

That, in a nutshell, was process therapy. Stop, map, redirect. Learning the mechanism wasn’t hard. I did that the first day. But putting it into practice in real life in the face of temptation, that was something else altogether. That would take time. Time and a lot of energy.

We went around the room, all six of us doing our charts and stick figures. Aside from Katie and Bobby there was Petunia, a twenty-five-year-old imposing stack of man meat who looked like he’d completed Navy SEAL training. He had been shaving himself bald since the age of twelve, and had a diamond-embedded gold hoop in each ear, which only added to the menacing effect he had on you at first sight. He wore thick black rubber Michael Jordan ID bands on each wrist: one said “Baller,” and the other said, “I own the guy guarding me.” He smoked Black & Mild cigars, the kind you can buy in the drugstore, and often sported them, white plastic filter and all, perched behind one of his ears. He was at Mobius because he’d tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of Seroquel and alcohol. He’d nearly succeeded and had spent a week in intensive care. This last detail didn’t surprise me in the least because, despite his appearance, Petunia was a tender reed, sensitive, and, like his cigars, mild. Hence the nickname.

Then there was Cook, a thirty-nine-year-old former coke and pot dealer, who’d been in the business deep enough to fly the stuff himself from the Caribbean. He had just done a ten-month stint in prison. Not for drug trafficking, of course. If he’d been caught for that he’d have been away a lot longer. They got him for passing a bad check or something, but it was generally understood to be in lieu of the real crimes that they couldn’t quite catch him for.

Finally, there was Gary, another coke and pot aficionado, forty years old. He owned and operated a computer gaming Web site. He was a perfect mix between a high-strung secular Jewish computer nerd and a burned-out California surfer dude. He wore board shorts and brightly colored T-shirts and walked around barefoot, but he could argue God with you like a Yeshiva student.

He’d been at Mobius three times in the last four months, always of his own accord, taking, as he said, many steps forward but also a few too many back. He was even more into den chi bon than I was. He made these loud moaning and hissing sounds when he breathed in and out, and you were always guaranteed to get a good sweaty fire circle going when he was in it. Gary was a person you could be weird with and he wasn’t threatened by it, but you could also be serious and tell him your problems. Like me, he was there to learn, and he didn’t have any trouble letting go of his rational inhibitions.

As you can imagine, escape was a big attachment for everyone in that room.

Get out in a hell of a hurry.

That kind of escape.

Up, down, sideways. Didn’t matter which drug. Just out. Out of the present. Out of the mind. Out of pain.

Again, the drug was a means. The real problem was the same as mine. Just the loud ouch of being alone and inadequate, and your thoughts like the Promethean eagle, pecking out your liver every day.

So for all of us it was the same cure, the long haul of learning to be present. Learning to face. All this, and I hadn’t yet been there a day. That was Mobius for you. Roll up your sleeves and operate, elbow deep in the guts first thing. I liked it.

 

Our process therapy session broke up for the day at three thirty, and we all piled into the white van that they used to shuttle us around in, and which we quickly nicknamed the short bus. Diggs drove us to the apartments for the hour or so of late afternoon downtime we always had between classes and the evening’s activity. Monday night was bookstore night, but the night tech on duty (Diggs finished at four o’clock) took me to the grocery store instead to buy my week’s provisions.

I filled my half of the apartment fridge with foods I like, and like to think are healthy. Naturally, I still had to have one of my drugs. I bought lots of makings for coffee: grounds, sweetener, cream, filters. Mirabile dictu, there were two coffeemakers in the apartment and one in the kitchen at the offices.

The apartment was very comfortable, carpeted wall to wall, central heating and air, washer, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, and two full bathrooms. My roommate and I each had our own bathroom. My room had a single bed, a walk-in closet, a night table, a bedside lamp, a dresser, and a ceiling fan. My roommate was a TV junkie and a late-nighter, so I spent most of my postdinner time in my room with the door closed, reading or writing in my notebook.

A tech, whoever was on duty on the night shift, always woke us gently in the morning at around 7:45 to give us our medication, if we needed any. A couple of months after leaving St. Luke’s, when the fear and downward thought spirals, though less intense, still hadn’t gone away, I decided that trying to go without meds while in the middle of a book project wasn’t the greatest idea. I went back on 20 milligrams of Prozac, the lowest maintenance dose. By the time I got to Mobius, I was holding steady. While I was there, I took my pill first thing at breakfast.

There were always two techs on duty in the evenings. During the night they’d make the rounds of the four apartments every few hours and peek into our bedrooms to make sure we were there. Most of the techs were either recent college grads like Diggs, interested in pursuing a career in mental health, or just doing an easy, relatively well-paid nonjob (they got $12 an hour) until they figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. The rest were youngish parents with two jobs trying to make ends meet, or slackers who couldn’t handle more commitment in a job than a night shift with nutters.

The shifts went from 8:00 a.m to 4:00 p.m. (Diggs’s time), 4.00 p.m. to midnight, and midnight to 8:00 a.m. It was all just glorified babysitting, shuttling us from place to place, or running errands, picking up laundry soap or bug spray or whatever else, if we needed it. They had to inspect our bags at the grocery store and gather receipts for what we bought, that sort of thing, but they never made a big show of being our keepers. Sometimes they sat on the couch with us at night and watched TV, or they sat at the dining table and did paperwork or read. There was also a small loft room above the kitchen in our apartment that had been made into an office for the techs, so they could use the computer or get on the Internet.

The techs were cool. They had the keys to the apartment, but the door was never locked except when we all went to the offices during the day or out for our activities in the evenings. They left us alone, even as they watched over us, or listened over us as they worked in the office above. They chatted with us if we wanted to, and they catered to our needs willingly, even if it meant driving to the store at odd hours.

We came and went pretty much as we liked, at least on the grounds of the apartment complex. It would have been quite easy to slip away and get high or drunk if you wanted to, or break the rules in other ways, including romantic encounters with other clients, as I learned that Bobby and Cook were doing virtually every night down at the Jacuzzi.

This was grounds for dismissal, but I didn’t get the impression that the techs were making a particularly concerted effort to catch us in flagrante. If you shoved it in their faces, they’d have to report you, but otherwise the prevailing attitude at Mobius seemed to be that it was your cure, take it or not, and more often than not your money as well, so why sweat stolen kisses or other small infractions, if that was your game. Dr. Franklin’s whole program revolved around his understanding of the will and its role in a person’s mental convalescence. He wasn’t going to give you the delusion of agency, only to shackle you with spies.