An Unquiet Mind Read online

  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.

  An Education for Life

  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 ins
ights, 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.

  Much as it had during my senior year in high school, my classwork during these galvanized periods seemed very straightforward, and I found examinations, laboratory work, and papers almost absurdly easy during the weeks that the high-flying times would last. I also would become immersed in a variety of political and social causes that included everything from campus antiwar activities to slightly more idiosyncratic zealotries, such as protesting cosmetic firms that killed turtles in order to manufacture and sell beauty products. At one point I picketed a local department store with a homemade placard that showed two very badly drawn sea turtles scrunching their way across the sand, with bits of starlight overhead—a crushing reminder, I thought, of their remarkable navigational abilities—and the words YOUR SKIN HAS COST THEM THEIRS printed in large red letters beneath the picture.

  But then as night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash, and my mind again would grind to a halt. I lost all interest in my schoolwork, friends, reading, wandering, or daydreaming. I had no idea of what was happening to me, and I would wake up in the morning with a profound sense of dread that I was going to have to somehow make it through another entire day. I would sit for hour after hour in the undergraduate library, unable to muster up enough energy to go to class. I would stare out the window, stare at my books, rearrange them, shuffle them around, leave them unopened, and think about dropping out of college. When I did go to class it was pointless. Pointless and painful. I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me. I felt utterly alone, and watching the animated conversations between my fellow students only made me feel more so. I stopped answering the telephone and took endless hot baths in the vain hope that I might somehow escape from the deadness and dreariness.

  On occasion, these periods of total despair would be made even worse by terrible agitation. My mind would race from subject to subject, but instead of being filled with the exuberant and cosmic thoughts that had been associated with earlier periods of rapid thinking, it would be drenched in awful sounds and images of decay and dying: dead bodies on the beach, charred remains of animals, toe-tagged corpses in morgues. During these agitated periods I became exceedingly restless, angry, and irritable, and the only way I could dilute the agitation was to run along the beach or pace back and forth across my room like a polar bear at the zoo. I had no idea what was going on, and I felt totally unable to ask anyone for help. It never occurred to me that I was ill; my brain just didn’t put it in those terms. Finally, however, after hearing a lecture about depression in my abnormal psychology course, I went to the student health service with the intention of asking to see a psychiatrist. I got as far as the stairwell just outside the clinic but was only able to sit there, paralyzed with fear and shame, unable to go in and unable to leave. I must have sat there, head in my hands, sobbing, for more than an hour. Then I left and never went back. Eventually, the depression went away of its own accord, but only long enough for it to regroup and mobilize for the next attack.

  For each awfulness in life, however, I seemed to have been given an offsetting stroke of luck. One of these occurred in my freshman year. I was taking an upper-division psychology course in personality theory, and the professor was demonstrating different ways to assess personality and cognitive structure. He held up Rorschach cards before the class and asked us to write down our responses. Years of staring up into the clouds and tracing their patterns finally paid off. My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches’ brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses. It was a large class, and everyone’s answers were passed forward and handed to the professor. He read aloud from a sort of random selection; midway through I heard a recital of somewhat odd associations, and I realized to my great horror that they were mine. Some of them were humorous, but a few of them were simply bizarre. Or so they seemed to me. Most of the class was laughing, and I stared at my feet in mortification.

  When the professor had finished reading my intensely scribbled sheets, he asked if the person who had written those particular responses would please stay behind to talk with him for a while. I was convinced that, being a psychologist, he could see straight into my psychotic underpinnings. I was terrified. Looking back on it, what I suspect he actually saw was someone who was very intense, quite determined, serious, and probably rather troubled. At the time, being acutely aware of just how disturbed I really was, I assumed that the extent of my problems was equally obvious to him. He asked me to walk back to his office with him, and, while I was conjuring up images of being admitted to a psychiatric ward, he said that in all of his years of teaching he had never encountered such “imaginative” responses to the Rorschach. He was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre and original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written.

  The professor asked me about my background, and I explained that I was a freshman, wanted to become a doctor, and that I was working my way through school. He pointed out the university regulations stating that I was not allowed to be taking his course, as it was for juniors and seniors only, and I said that I knew that, but it looked interesting and the rule seemed completely arbitrary. He laughed out loud, and I suddenly realized that I was finally in a situation where someone actually respected my independence. This was not Miss Courtnay, and I was not expected to curtsy. He said he had a position on his grant for a lab assistant and asked me if I would be interested. I was more than interested. It meant that I could give up my unremittingly boring job as a cashier in a women’s clothing store and that I could learn to do research.

  It was a wonderful experience: I learned to code and analyze data, program computers, review the research literature, design studies, and write up scientific papers for publication. The professor I was working with was studying the structure of human personality, and I found the idea of investigating individual differences among people absolutely fascinating. I immersed myself in the work and found it not only a source of education and income, but escape as well. Unlike attendance at classes—which seemed stifling and, like the rest of the worlds schedules, based on an assumption of steadiness and consistency in moods and performance—the research life allowed an independence and flexibility of schedule that I found exhilarating. University administrators do not consider the pronounced seasonal changes in behaviors and abilities that are part and parcel of the lives of most manic-depressives. My undergraduate transcript, consequently, was riddled with failing grades and incompleted classes, but my research papers, fortunately, offset my often dreary grades. My mercurial moods and recurrent, very black depressions took a huge personal and academic toll during those college years.

  At the age of twenty, after two years of undergraduate studies, I took off a year from the turmoil that had become my life to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. My brother and cousin were studying at English universities at the time, and they suggested that I come over and join them. But I had been deeply affected by the Scottish music and poetry that my father loved, and there was something very appealing to me in the Celtic melancholy and fire that I associated with the S
cottish side of my ancestry, even though I at the same time wanted to get away from my father’s black, unpredictable moods. Not entirely away, however; I think I had a vague notion that I might better understand my own chaotic feelings and thinking if I returned in some sense to the source. I applied for a federal grant, which enabled me for the first time to become a full-time student, and I left Los Angeles for a year of science by day, and music and poetry by night.

  St. Andrews, my tutor was saying, was the only place he knew where it snowed horizontally. An eminent neurophysiologist, he was a tall, lanky, and droll Yorkshireman who, like many of his fellow English, believed that rather superior weather, to say nothing of civilization, ended where the Scottish countryside began. He had a point about the weather. The ancient, gray-stoned town of St. Andrews sits right on the North Sea and takes blasts of late-autumn and winter winds that have to be experienced to be believed. I had been living in Scotland for several months by that time, and I had become a definite believer. The winds were especially harsh just off the town’s East Sands, where the university’s marine biology laboratory had been built.