An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (5 page)

T
he past was indeed the past. The comfortable world of the military and Washington was gone: everything had changed. My brother had gone off to college before we moved to California,
leaving a large hole in my security net. My relationship with my sister, always a difficult one, had become at best fractious, often adversarial, and, more usually, simply distant. She had far more trouble than I did in adjusting to California, but we never really spoke much about it. We went almost entirely our separate ways, and, for all the difference it made, we could have been living in different houses. My parents, although still living together, were essentially estranged. My mother was busy teaching, looking after all of us, and going to graduate school; my father was caught up in his scientific work. His moods still, on occasion, soared; and, when they did, the sparkle and gaiety that flew out from them created a glow, a warmth and joy that filled all of the rooms of the house. He sailed over the cusp of reason at times, and his grandiose ideas started to push the limits of what Rand could tolerate. At one point, for example, he came up with a scheme that assigned IQ scores to hundreds of individuals, most of whom were dead. The reasoning was ingenious but disturbingly idiosyncratic; it also had absolutely nothing to do with the meteorology research that he was being paid to conduct.

With his capacity for flight came grimmer moods, and the blackness of his depressions filled the air as pervasively as music did in his better periods. Within a year or so of moving to California, my father’s moods were further blackening, and I felt helpless to affect them. I waited and waited for the return of the laughter and high moods and awesome enthusiasms, but, except for rare appearances, they had given way to anger, despair, and bleak emotional withdrawal. After a while, I scarcely recognized him. At times he was immobilized by depression, unable to get out of bed, and profoundly
pessimistic about every aspect of his life and future. At other times, his rage and screaming would fill me with terror. I had never known my father—a soft-spoken and gentle man—to raise his voice. Now there were days, and even weeks, when I was frightened to show up for breakfast or come home from school. He also started drinking heavily, which made everything worse. My mother was as bewildered and frightened as I was, and both of us increasingly sought escape through work and friends. I spent even more time than usual with my dog; our family had adopted her as a stray puppy when we lived in Washington, and she and I went everywhere together. She slept on my bed at night and listened for hours to my tales of woe. She was, like most dogs, a good listener, and there were many nights when I would cry myself to sleep with my arms around her neck. She, my boyfriend, and my new friends made it possible for me to survive the turmoil of my home life.

I soon found out that it was not just my father who was given to black and chaotic moods. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, it became clear that my energies and enthusiasms could be exhausting to the people around me, and after long weeks of flying high and sleeping little, my thinking would take a downward turn toward the really dark and brooding side of life. My two closest friends, both males—attractive, sardonic, and intense—were a bit inclined to the darker side as well, and we became an occasionally troubled trio, although we managed to navigate the more normal and fun-loving side of high school as well. Indeed, all of us were in various school leadership positions and very active in sports and other extracurricular activities. While living at school in these lighter lands, we wove
our outside lives together in close friendship, laughter, deadly seriousness, drinking, smoking, playing truth games through the night, and engaging in passionate discussions about where our lives were going, the hows and whys of death, listening to Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann, and vigorously debating the melancholic and existential readings—Hesse, Byron, Melville, and Hardy—we had set for ourselves. We all came by our black chaos honestly: two of us, we were to discover later, had manic-depressive illness in our immediate families; the other’s mother had shot herself through the heart. We experienced together the beginnings of the pain that we each would know, later, alone. In my case, later proved rather sooner than I might have wished.

I
was a senior in high school when I had my first attack of manic-depressive illness; once the siege began, I lost my mind rather rapidly. At first, everything seemed so easy. I raced about like a crazed weasel, bubbling with plans and enthusiasms, immersed in sports, and staying up all night, night after night, out with friends, reading everything that wasn’t nailed down, filling manuscript books with poems and fragments of plays, and making expansive, completely unrealistic, plans for my future. The world was filled with pleasure and promise; I felt great. Not just great, I felt
really
great. I felt I could do anything, that no task was too difficult. My mind seemed clear, fabulously focused, and able to make intuitive mathematical leaps that had up to that point entirely eluded me. Indeed, they elude me still. At the time, however, not only did everything make perfect sense, but it all began to fit into
a marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness. My sense of enchantment with the laws of the natural world caused me to fizz over, and I found myself buttonholing my friends to tell them how beautiful it all was. They were less than transfixed by my insights into the webbings and beauties of the universe, although considerably impressed by how exhausting it was to be around my enthusiastic ramblings: You’re talking too fast, Kay. Slow down, Kay. You’re wearing me out, Kay. Slow down, Kay. And those times when they didn’t actually come out and say it, I still could see it in their eyes: For God’s sake, Kay, slow down.

I did, finally, slow down. In fact, I came to a grinding halt. Unlike the very severe manic episodes that came a few years later and escalated wildly and psychotically out of control, this first sustained wave of mild mania was a light, lovely tincture of true mania; like hundreds of subsequent periods of high enthusiasms it was short-lived and quickly burned itself out: tiresome to my friends, perhaps; exhausting and exhilarating to me, definitely; but not disturbingly over the top. Then the bottom began to fall out of my life and mind. My thinking, far from being clearer than a crystal, was tortuous. I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize that I had no memory at all for what I just had read. Each book or poem I picked up was the same way. Incomprehensible. Nothing made sense. I could not begin to follow the material presented in my classes, and I would find myself staring out the window with no idea of what was going on around me. It was very frightening.

I was used to my mind being my best friend; of carrying on endless conversations within my head; of
having a built-in source of laughter or analytic thought to rescue me from boring or painful surroundings. I counted upon my mind’s acuity, interest, and loyalty as a matter of course. Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all of my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile. It was incapable of concentrated thought and turned time and again to the subject of death: I was going to die, what difference did anything make? Life’s run was only a short and meaningless one, why live? I was totally exhausted and could scarcely pull myself out of bed in the mornings. It took me twice as long to walk anywhere as it ordinarily did, and I wore the same clothes over and over again, as it was otherwise too much of an effort to make a decision about what to put on. I dreaded having to talk with people, avoided my friends whenever possible, and sat in the school library in the early mornings and late afternoons, virtually inert, with a dead heart and a brain as cold as clay.

Each day I awoke deeply tired, a feeling as foreign to my natural self as being bored or indifferent to life. Those were next. Then a gray, bleak preoccupation with death, dying, decaying, that everything was born but to die, best to die now and save the pain while waiting. I dragged exhausted mind and body around a local cemetery, ruminating about how long each of its inhabitants had lived before the final moment. I sat on the graves writing long, dreary, morbid poems, convinced that my brain and body were rotting, that everyone knew and no one would say. Laced into the exhaustion were periods of frenetic and horrible restlessness; no
amount of running brought relief. For several weeks, I drank vodka in my orange juice before setting off for school in the mornings, and I thought obsessively about killing myself. It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different. Certainly no one in my family did. Two friends were concerned, but I swore them to secrecy when they asked to talk with my parents. One teacher noticed, and the parent of a friend called me aside to ask if something was wrong. I lied readily: I’m fine, but thank you for asking.

I have no idea how I managed to pass as normal in school, except that other people are generally caught up in their own lives and seldom notice despair in others if those despairing make an effort to disguise the pain. I made not just an effort, but an enormous effort not to be noticed. I knew something was dreadfully wrong, but I had no idea what, and I had been brought up to believe that you kept your problems to yourself. Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: “To be sure,” wrote Hugo Wolf, “I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

It was impossible to avoid quite terrible wounds to both my mind and heart—the shock of having been so unable to understand what had been going on around me, the knowledge that my thoughts had been so completely out of my control, and the realization that I had been so depressed that I wanted only to die—and it was
several months before the wounds could even begin to heal. Looking back I am amazed I survived, that I survived on my own, and that high school contained such complicated life and palpable death. I aged rapidly during those months, as one must with such loss of one’s self, with such proximity to death, and such distance from shelter.

I
was eighteen when I reluctantly started my undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was not where I wanted to go. For years I had kept in the back of my jewelry box a red-enamel-and-gold University of Chicago pin that my father had given me; it had a delicate gold chain linking the two parts of the pin, and I thought it was absolutely beautiful; I wanted to earn my right to wear it. I also wanted to go to the University of Chicago because it had a reputation for tolerating, not to say encouraging, nonconformity, and because both my father and my mother’s father, a physicist, had gone there for graduate school. This was financially impossible. My father’s erratic behavior had cost him his job at Rand, so, unlike most of my friends—who went off to Harvard, Stanford, or Yale—I applied to the University of California. I was bitterly disappointed; I was eager to leave California, to be on my own, and to attend a relatively small university. In the long run, however, UCLA turned out to be the best possible place for me. The University of California provided
me an excellent and idiosyncratic education, an opportunity to do independent research, and the wide berth that perhaps only a large university can afford a tempestuous temperament. It could not, however, provide any meaningful protection against the terrible agitation and pain within my mind.

College, for many people I know, was the best time of their lives. This is inconceivable to me. College was, for the most part, a terrible struggle, a recurring nightmare of violent and dreadful moods spelled only now and again by weeks, sometimes months, of great fun, passion, high enthusiasms, and long runs of very hard but enjoyable work. This pattern of shifting moods and energies had a very seductive side to it, in large part because of fitful reinfusions of the intoxicating moods that I had enjoyed in high school. These were quite extraordinary, filling my brain with a cataract of ideas and more than enough energy to give me at least the illusion of carrying them out. My normal Brooks Brothers conservatism would go by the board; my hemlines would go up, my neckline down, and I would enjoy the sensuality of my youth. Almost everything was done to excess: instead of buying one Beethoven symphony, I would buy nine; instead of enrolling for five classes, I would enroll in seven; instead of buying two tickets for a concert I would buy eight or ten.

One day, during my freshman year, I was walking through the botanical gardens at UCLA, and, gazing down into the small brook that flows through the gardens, I suddenly and powerfully was reminded of a scene from Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
. Something, I think, about the Lady of the Lake. Compelled with an immediate and inflaming sense of urgency, I ran off to
the bookstore to track down a copy of it, which I did. By the time I left the student union I was weighed down with at least twenty other books, some of which were related to Tennyson’s poem, but others of which were only very tangentially connected, if at all, to the Arthurian legend: Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
and T. H. White’s
The Once and Future King
were added, as were
The Golden Bough, The Celtic Realm, The Letters of Héloïse and Abelard
, books by Jung, books by Robert Graves, books about Tristan and Isolde, anthologies of creation myths, and collections of Scottish fairy tales. They all seemed very related to one another at the time. Not only did they seem related, but they seemed together to contain some essential key to the grandiosely tizzied view of the universe that my mind was beginning to spin. The Arthurian tragedy explained everything there was to know about human nature—its passions, betrayals, violence, grace, and aspirations—and my mind wove and wove, propelled by the certainty of absolute truth. Naturally, given the universality of my insights, these purchases seemed absolutely essential at the time. Indeed, they had a certain rapturous logic to them. But in the world of more prosaic realities, I could ill afford the kind of impulsive buying that this represented. I was working twenty to thirty hours a week in order to pay my way through college, and there was no margin at all for the expenses I ran up during these times of high enthusiasms. Unfortunately, the pink overdraft notices from my bank always seemed to arrive when I was in the throes of the depressions that inevitably followed my weeks of exaltation.