The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (6 page)

Like most college freshmen, I'd gone off to school not entirely clear
about what I wanted to major in or what I wanted do with my life. But
I'd narrowed it down a little. Something having to do with English,
maybe, because of my great love for books and for WTiting. Or perhaps
the legal profession—I could picture myself being a lawyer, arguing
passionately for or against something crucially important in a
courtroom. Maybe I could even help someone. Maybe I could actually
improve someone's life.

Of course, this embroidered fantasy of my bright future and the
actual reality of those early days at Vanderbilt could not have been
farther apart. Sororities and fraternities were at the center of campus
social activities; even in the early seventies, when all kinds of anarchy
were springing up at other colleges all over the country, on our sleepy
Tennessee campus it was all about young Southern gentlemen and
their belles. And while I may have been socially klutzy, I was not
stupid—I was about as far from being a Southern belle as a girl could
get. Nevertheless, it hurt to find myself so quickly on the outside
looking in.

I usually ate my meals by myself in the dining hall, but eventually
(weary of feeling like some kind of alien and having people staring at
me), I went instead to the Campus Grill, a restaurant across the street
from the university library. And there, I actually managed to meet a
guy. A nice guy.

Peter was a Ph.D. student in political science. Tall (taller than I,
which most guys weren't), he had jet black hair, a warm, easygoing
personality, and great intelligence. And he actually liked me. We had
conversations, real ones, in which he asked me about books I'd read,
writers I admired, and what I thought about things. He was so open
and easy to talk to, it wasn't long before he overcame my excessive
shyness, and we began dating. We went to the movies, studied
together, and had our meals together. Happily, Peter lived in an
apartment off campus, and so we began spending our nights together
there as well. I'm not sure which I loved more—being with Peter or
being out of the dorm and away from Susie, who lived in a world that
had little or nothing to do with me.

I don't know why I had an easier time acquiring a boyfriend than I
did social friends; one would think my painful lack of social skills
would have hobbled me across the board. I certainly wasn't overly
sexual, and on the surface of it, I didn't really have much time to
invest in a "relationship"—the rules of courtship (at least at that time,
and in that particular place) were cumbersome and seemed like a
foreign language to me. Besides, I was mostly absorbed in my studies.
But in this case, connecting to a man came naturally. It also came as a
blessing.

In addition to being a dear friend and intellectual companion,
Peter taught me how to enjoy simple intimacy—time spent together
not doing much, holding hands, being held, being made to feel special.
Peter taught me how to enjoy sexual intimacy, something that would
later become difficult for me, even frightening, during the years my
illness was in full bloom. He seemed to sense a wariness in me, and he
responded with great tenderness and patience.

Often when making love with Peter, I would suddenly get
frightened, losing the sense of where I left off and he began. For a
woman who's sure of herself, that sense of abandon, boundary-
lessness, ceding control, is primal and thrilling; in fact, it's at the very
heart of the risk lovers take with each other. But for me, "becoming
one" with a man felt like a loss of self, and it was sometimes terrifying,
as though something unspeakable lay just on the other side of it, as
though I could fall into an abyss. I wanted so much to experience what
I'd read about in books—love, passion, the kind of deep connection to
another person that would make me walling to take any risk for it. But
first, I had to learn to trust my own body and my own mind. Learning
to trust Peter was a good beginning, and he helped me to do that, but
nonetheless, in those early days, sex could be a terrifying experience.

One winter night at school, I had a guest, the daughter of a friend of
my family. I barely knew Linda, but she was interested in attending
Vanderbilt herself someday, and after her parents had spoken with
mine, courtesy dictated that she stay with me in the dorm.

A slender, very pretty girl, Linda had a drug history and (my
parents had told me this) had been compelled to spend some time in a
mental hospital. As willing as I'd originally been to have the company,
her actual presence unsettled me—from the moment she arrived, I
was agitated, on edge. I don't know what ultimately set me off—the
knowledge of what had happened to her, or my own increasingly
convoluted inner workings—but what happened next came completely
out of nowhere. I suddenly grabbed a blanket from my bed, ran
outside, covered my head with the blanket, and then ran around
wildly in the ice and snow, arms stretched out, pretending to fly.

"What are you doing!?" Linda cried out, having followed me
outside the dorm. "Stop that, Elyn, you're scaring me!"

Even though I heard her, even though I registered the genuine fear
in her voice, I continued to run, as though powered by some kind of
engine. "No one can get me!" I shouted. "I'm flying! I've escaped!"

Eventually, Linda's plaintive cries moved me to stop; she was
genuinely frightened, and even in my odd frenzy, I knew it. Perhaps
she was scared because she recognized in me the kind of behavior she
had seen in the hospital. Or perhaps I was just out of control and
might well have scared
anyone
who saw me. In fact, I'd scared
myself—I had no idea what had come over me. I had no clue.

Some months later, I was in the dorm with Peter and Susie and
once again felt the way I had the night Linda was visiting. Abruptly, I
challenged them. "I'll do anything you ask me to!" I yelled. "Ask me
anything,
and I'll do it!"

Laughing at first, they decided to play along. "Sing a song," one of
them asked.

I warbled something—a Beatles song, off-key and with all the
words in the wrong places. My audience seemed delighted.

"Dance the twist!" they said. I did.

"Come on, ask me to do
anything,"
I pleaded. "You want me to
take my shirt off?" I did.

Glancing at each other nervously, my friends started to realize
something had gone seriously haywire.

"You want me to quack like a duck? I can quack like a duck!" And I
did.

"You want me to swallow this whole bottle of aspirin?" And I did.

Suddenly, the way they were looking at me sank in. They were
scared to death. And suddenly, so was I—the dangers of what I'd done
were staring us all in the face. I ran into the bathroom and quickly
made myself vomit, then couldn't stop shaking from fear. Peter took
me straight to the Vanderbilt Hospital emergency room, where the
doctors thought this had been a suicide attempt.

"No, no," I said weakly, "I was just playing around. It was stupid.

I'll be fine, really." They wanted to call a psychiatrist, but I assured
them there was no need, that I was perfectly OK. Ultimately, and
reluctantly, they allowed us to leave. Shaken and somewhat fragile
(and completely mystified at myself), I left the hospital with Peter,
both of us wondering what on earth had just happened. We talked
about it for days afterward, and then gradually the intensity of the
feelings and the experience seemed to fade. When I thought about it at
all, it was with confusion and a growing sense of unease: What
was
that?

Each of these incidents was isolated and brief, lasting only an hour
or so, and I was able to bring them to a close on my own. They were
impulsive, even dangerous. My best guess is that my illness was
beginning to poke through the shell (for lack of a better word) that
helped me, indeed helps all of us, maintain a separation between what
is real and what is not. For the next few years, that's where things
would precariously balance—me unwittingly trying to keep the shell
strong, and my illness trying equally hard to break through.

At the same time that my mind was starting to betray me, it was also
becoming the source of enormous satisfaction. Beyond the narrow and
disappointing world of an undergraduate social system that had no
place for me, I discovered academia—great ideas, high aspirations,
and people (teachers and students alike) whose own intellectual
curiosity seemed to give them a real purpose in the world. In
particular, I discovered philosophy. I fell in love with it. To my great
delight, I found that I was actually good at it, too. My grades were
excellent; my classmates sought out my opinion; and my professors
welcomed me into their offices, to talk about what I was studying, or
to continue conversations begun in class.

Philosophy and psychosis have more in common than many people
(philosophers especially) might care to admit. The similarity is not
what you might think—that philosophy and psychosis don't have
rules, and you're tossed around the universe willy-nilly. On the
contrary, each is governed by very strict rules. The trick is to discover
what those rules are, and in both cases, that inquiry takes place
almost solely inside one's head. And, while the line between creativity
and madness can be razor thin (a fact that has been unfortunately
romanticized), examining and experiencing the world in a different
way can lead to sharp and fruitful insights.

Not only did philosophy give me a surprising joy, it also imposed a
structure on both my mind and routine that I'd been unable to provide
for myself. The rigor of the material, and the lively give-and-take of
the students and faculty in the department, imposed a kind of order
upon my days. Suddenly, I had attainable goals, a sense of
productivity and purpose, and tangible results against which I could
measure my progress. By the second semester of my freshman year,
the department allowed me to take courses in the graduate school. I
completed that year (and every year thereafter at Vanderbilt) with
straight As.

The summer after that first year, I returned to Miami and my family,
with a reading list, some work to do for an incomplete course grade,
and some assigned research for the following semester. But once away
from Vanderbilt, from the community I'd found there and the
structure that academic life imposed on me, I began almost
immediately to falter. I felt no enthusiasm for a summer vacation, or
spending time with family or old high school friends, and in spite of
the objective evidence of good grades, I couldn't summon any
particular pride in what I'd accomplished. Instead, I felt gloomy,
uncertain, and oddly depleted. Working in isolation, either in my
room at home or in the quiet coolness of the library, I found I had a
hard time concentrating. Nothing I wrote was original or good enough
to turn in to my professors. When I woke up in the morning, the
thought of muddling through the day filled me with dread. After a few
weeks of this misery, I decided to ask my parents if I could talk to
someone about it—maybe a therapist, someone who would help me
straighten out my mind and put my summer to better use.

       I'd never before actually asked my parents for this kind of help (the
Center had been
their
idea), and it was a little awkward explaining to
them that I just couldn't get my mind to work right. To their credit,
however, they didn't get upset, or panic, or tell me to "shape up" on
my own. Instead, they took me seriously, and arranged for me to see
an acquaintance of theirs, a psychiatrist named Karen. She had a
reputation for sending people home after a first meeting with the
same one-size-fits-all diagnosis: there was nothing so wrong that a
few and probably minor lifestyle changes couldn't fix. In addition, she
was rabidly anti-medication. In fact, she was widely perceived as some
kind of maverick in her profession. She'd written a book which I found
and quickly read.

Even though I'd asked for this kind of help, there was nothing in
my short time with Karen that calmed, reassured, or enlightened me;
to the contrary, she scared the wits out of me.

"Elyn, I want you to go stand in the corner," she said at our first
meeting.

Confused, I looked at the corner and then looked back at her; was I
being punished for something? "I...I beg your pardon?"

"Yes, yes, go stand in the corner. And then, I want you to focus on
the feelings you have inside right now. When you're ready, yell them
out. Just yell as loud as you can."

I couldn't imagine what on earth this woman was talking about.
Yelling in a corner? There was no way. I didn't know her, she didn't
know me. I wasn't even sure that I trusted her; how did I know that
she wasn't going to relay every single thing I said and did to my
parents?

"Oh, well," I stammered. "I couldn't do that. I'm sorry, but I...Can't
we just sit and talk about this trouble I'm having, this concentration
problem? And maybe you could give me some tips or some ideas about

how to get my mind to work the way I need it to?"

Patiently, Karen tried to get me to reconsider, explaining that it
was a tactic she'd used before, and it often brought good results.
Really, I should try it, just for a minute or two.

"No," I said adamantly. "I can't."

After I returned home from an equally disconcerting second
meeting (nevertheless having scheduled a third), I underwent a sort of
debriefing with my parents. Was I feeling better? Not particularly.
Had she given me any exercises or new routines that might resolve the
problems I was having with my schoolwork? No, she hadn't. Did I
think she might be of some help soon? I didn't know. Maybe after
another meeting or two, we would figure out a way for me to fix
things. To fix myself. I could sense my parents' increasing anxiety that
there was no clear solution to this problem.