The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (5 page)

It was around this time that I read Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar.
Even
though it was fiction, Plath described the central character's gradual
descent into shattering mental illness in a way that could only have
come from her own struggles. I identified with it. I identified with her.
"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death,
just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would
choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant
losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began
to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground
at my feet."
That's me,
I thought.
She's me!

I guess Plath affects a lot of teenage girls this way, depicting as she
does the sense of isolation and disengagement (and not a little fear)
that typifies this time of life, especially for those who are sensitive and
often lost in the world of their books. For days afterward, I couldn't
stop thinking about the girl in the novel, and what she went
through—for some reason it made me restless, distracted. One
morning in class, with Plath on my mind, I suddenly decided that I
needed to get up, leave school, and walk home. Home was three miles
away.

As I walked along, I began to notice that the colors and shapes of
everything around me were becoming very intense. And at some point,
I began to realize that the houses I was passing were sending messages
to me:
Look closely. You are special. You are especially bad. Look
closely and ye shall find. There are many things you must see. See.
See.

I didn't hear these words as literal sounds, as though the houses
were talking and I were hearing them; instead, the words just came
into my head—they were ideas I was having. Yet I instinctively knew
they were not
my
ideas. They belonged to the houses, and the houses
had put them in my head.

By the time I walked through my parents' front door—one, maybe
two hours later—I was tired, hot, and very frightened. Immediately, I
told my mother what had happened on my long walk, and how scary it
had been, to have those thoughts from the houses inside my head.
Completely unnerved, she promptly called my father at work. He came
right home, and after I repeated what had happened, they quickly
drove me not to a doctor, but to the Center. I adamantly denied using
any drugs, the counselors believed me, and although everyone tiptoed
around me for a day or so, soon the incident passed with no further
comment.

The Center had become the place around which we had rearranged
much of our family life. I was driven there, dropped off, and picked up
each day. The parents of all the Center kids met there every two
weeks, for group meetings; there were occasional family picnics or
other social gatherings. And, in spite of feeling a consistent low-level
resentment that my parents had stuck me there until high school
graduation, I had settled in and I had come to feel comfortable there.

Most of us figure out, as we grow up, that we wall ultimately belong
to (or struggle with) two families: the one we're born into and the one
we make. For some teens, the beginning of the second family is the
football team, or the drama club, or the kids we go to summer camp
with every year. Gradually, those may be replaced or supplemented
with friends in a college dorm, or our colleagues and friends in our
first job. For me, the process of making the second family began at the
Center. We all had something in common—committing to live in a
world without using drugs, without, in fact, relying on anything
artificial or chemical in order to get through our days. We shared a
common purpose; we cared intensely about one another's well-being.

How we felt, how we were, how we would cope when we moved back
out into the world were
the
central topics of conversation: the fight to
be strong, the determination to stay clean. Refuse to give in. Fight like
hell. Succumbing is never, ever OK.

Although I was easily keeping up with my high school work (in
fact, my grades were excellent, and stayed that way), I felt less and less
connected to the place where I took those classes, or to the other
students. My whole day, figuratively and literally, was aimed at getting
to the Center, and being part of that community.

I learned to smoke cigarettes there—if the counselors (who seemed
to know so much, and be so worthy of my respect and emulation)
smoked, then it was cool for me, too. No one ever talked then about
nicotine being a narcotic, or about this being an addiction that was as
potentially dangerous as any other. It's just what people did in those
days. Very soon, being without a pack of cigarettes made me very
uneasy—it would be decades before I could break the habit altogether.

It was also at the Center that I had my first sexual experience.

Jack was twenty-one, I was seventeen. A big age gap, seventeen to
twenty-one—that's how long it takes to go all the way through high
school, to go all the way through college. Whole, massive
developmental leaps happen in those four years. Given my age, the
timing was probably right, but there are all kinds of legitimate reasons
why the location and the relationship itself were wrong.

There was something about Jack—an addict in recovery who had
traveled the world—that was incredibly attractive to a sensitive,
moody girl with a vivid imagination. He may well have been seriously
impaired by drug use and other life experiences, but that's not what I
saw. I saw a good-looking, older, "wiser" man who listened to me and
actually seemed to care what I thought. We were in some meetings
together, we passed each other in the halls, we had coffee a couple of
times, and when he asked me to the movies, it was a no-brainer.
Holding hands with him, kissing him, being kissed by him—it was
exciting. And since he'd been places I hadn't, and knew things I
didn't, when it came time to decide whether or not to go further, I let
him take the lead in that as well.

For me at seventeen, it was dizzying, exhilarating, as though we
were getting away with something (which, in a way, we were). Still,
even with all the excitement of one's "first time," I knew enough to
know it was bad sex. My suspicion is that hardly anybody has a good
"first time," but the whole production had loomed so large in my
psyche that just getting it over with was, frankly, a relief. Just as my
head didn't explode when I smoked pot, my heart didn't get broken
the first time I had sex, I didn't get pregnant, and I didn't come down
with a horrible disease. It could have been much worse.

My time at the Center ended when I graduated from high school,
convinced (as are many eighteen-year-olds) that the most exciting
part of my life was about to begin. There's no question I was stronger
than I might otherwise have been, strengthened by a community that
had invested a great deal in me. I'd come to love the people there—the
counselors, the other "patients"—and believed they felt the same
about me. I was determined never to disappoint them or let them
down.

As for the Center's antidrug mission, yes, that was a success,
too—but of course, I had never used drugs that much to begin with.
What my experience at the Center primarily did was drill into me an
unflinching attitude toward illness or weakness:
Fight it.
You can fight
it, and you can win. To be weak is to fail; to let down your guard is to
surrender; and to give up is to dismiss the power of your own will.

The fundamental flaw in all of this, though, is that it neglects
something intrinsic to the complex real world and to complex real
human beings. In fact, it is
not
necessarily true that everything can be
conquered with willpower. There are forces of nature and
circumstance that are beyond our control, let alone our
understanding, and to insist on victory in the face of this, to accept
nothing less, is just asking for a soul-pummeling. The simple truth is,
not every fight can be won.

chapter three

I
N SPITE OF
the fact that Nashville's Vanderbilt University was a
beautiful campus—old ivy-covered brick buildings, wide swaths of
green lawn—my freshman-year dorm room was more than a little
dilapidated and dingy. My bedroom at home had been peaceful,
orderly—the housekeeper kept it clean and neat, and my mom
over-saw the arcane details, like pretty curtains at the windows and a
bright spread on my bed. But once at Vandy, I was on my own,
dismally unprepared to think about how the furniture should be
arranged, whether the linens matched, and what was the optimum
position for my desk and the lamp upon it. Tall, geeky, and socially
uneasy—sporting scruffy jeans most of the time (years before
everybody else on this particular campus would wear them) and a

nondescript hairstyle—I was suddenly back to square one in terms of
fending for myself.

In the early seventies, Vandy was still happily stuck in the 1950s,
or maybe even earlier; in fact, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that I'd
ended up in the Old South. With rigid social mores, and hard-and-fast
roles for men and women, it was a far cry from some of the other
schools where I might have gone, places which might have been more
welcoming to a nice Jewish girl (albeit one with more than a few
moods and quirks). But those schools were in the North, my parents
wanted me to stay in the South, and ultimately, Vanderbilt was it.

My very pretty roommate, Susie, was everything I wasn't—a petite,
lively brunette with the requisite Southern drawl and charm to spare.
She was street-smart, socially adept, and popular from her first day on
campus, especially with the boys. When the phone rang, it was always
for her. She was nice enough to me, but she was always on her way
out, always on her way to someplace else.

One afternoon when I was studying, Susie came into our room and
said that she needed to ask my advice about another girl in the dorm.

"Sure," I said, a little flattered that someone who clearly had so
much on the ball would want to consult me about anything. "What's
up?"

"Well," she said, "this is kind of awkward, actually. There's a girl
here in the dorm who, um, kind of smells not very good. A bunch of us
were talking about it the other night. We're trying to decide what's the
best thing to do."

"Do about what?" I asked.

"About maybe telling her. That she really needs to take a shower
once in a while." She wrinkled her little nose. "And shampoo her hair.
You know? Nothing fancy or anything. Just—well, I don't know, what
do
you
think? Do you think we should just tell her straight out? Might
hurt her feelings, maybe. Or should we just leave little hints, or maybe
a note? Not a mean one, of course. But something that might help her
out."

"My gosh," I said. "That is a tough one. But how nice of you to be so
concerned about her. I think you should just straight-out tell her. It's
always best to be direct with people, at least in my opinion."

She nodded. "Yes, I guess so. But still, the idea of hurting
somebody's feelings...Well, anyway, thanks for talking to me about
this."

I wondered, afterward, what Susie and her friends decided to do
about the unfortunate girl, and what her response to them had been.
But it never occurred to me to ask. And it certainly never occurred to
me—then—that the girl in the dorm who needed to take a shower, the
one they'd been talking about, was, of course, me.

Even a casual observer will agree that many college freshmen
quickly become away-from-home slobs; after all, for the first time in
their lives, nobody's after them to hang up their clothes or straighten
out their messes. But I'll bet that even as the dirty laundry piles up to
the ceiling and dorm rooms start to look like hovels, very few of those
kids actually neglect to bathe or shampoo or brush their teeth
regularly—because that would almost certainly guarantee an instant
end to their social life. What, then, was happening to me? After all, I'd
been brought up by attentive parents, in a family with means, plus two
brothers who wouldn't have hesitated to tell me, "You stink!" So why
was I unlearning the most basic of lessons: simple cleanliness?

Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, becoming imperceptibly
thicker as time goes on. At first, the day is bright enough, the sky is
clear, the sunlight warms your shoulders. But soon, you notice a haze
beginning to gather around you, and the air feels not quite so warm.

After a while, the sun is a dim lightbulb behind a heavy cloth. The
horizon has vanished into a gray mist, and you feel a thick dampness
in your lungs as you stand, cold and wet, in the afternoon dark.

For me (and for many of us), the first evidence of that fog is a
gradual deterioration of basic common-sense hygiene—what the
mental health community calls "self-care skills" or "activities of daily
living." Once away from my parents' watchful eyes, I grew inconsistent
about asking myself the taken-for-granted questions. Or maybe I was
muddled sometimes about what the right answers to those questions
should be. Are showers really necessary? How often do I need to
change clothes? Or wash them? Have I eaten anything yet today? Do I
really need to sleep every night? Do I have to brush my teeth every
day?

Some days, the answers were clear as a bell: Yes, of course. For
heaven's sake, Elyn, clean yourself up! And so I did. But other days,
the questions and the answers were just too hard to sort out.
I don't
know, I don't know.
Or, simply, I just couldn't remember: Did I do
that already? Did I do it yesterday? Taking care of myself meant doing
more than reading a book or finishing a term paper; it meant
strategizing, organizing, keeping track. And some days, there just
wasn't enough room in my head to keep all that together. I'd left the
Center, I'd left my parents, and everything slowly began to unravel.