Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D

part 1

It all started the day after I had been accepted for early admission to Columbia College.

December 19, 1993.

I was seventeen years old.

I had left my family at home in Providence, Rhode Island, and was attending my senior year of high school abroad at an international school in Paris. I was having a great time, living with friends of my parents, Edgar and Linda Phillips.

Wait.

Idon’t remember everything that happened.

Some memories I’ve forgotten over time.

Some events I blocked out as soon as they happened.

And I suppose it didn’t start on that exact day,

that it started in high school,

or before,

much before maybe,

at birth,

or pre-birth; it started with my grandfather, who had this illness, or with the relative of his who passed it along to him.

Wait. Stop.

What started the day after I found out I was accepted to college was an episode so horrific that it would become impossible for me to deny that I had a mental illness for the rest of my life.

Though I had always known that something was wrong with me, what started that day was evidence, concrete evidence.

Yes. True.

Hold on. Rewind.

The history of the inside of my head is the hardest to tell, because it is nonlinear, because it is fractured, because there are so many subplots, and because I have spent so much of my energy in my young life hiding that history from the outside world.

I was born on March 23, 1976, and was loved immediately by many many daring and dazzling people. First, by my mother and father. Imagine her a stunning and leggy rebel, and him a quiet and good-natured community man. She is a sex expert, a college administrator, a coordinator with Haitian Voodoo priests in their native land and tongue, a marathon runner. He is a pediatrician, a Little League baseball coach, a napper.

My parents’ mothers are extraordinary women. My mother’s mother was a lifetime social worker, who chased people off the dunes near her summer home in Cape Cod, and made quilts, and supported public radio, and recycled, like, decades before anyone else, and read revolutionary poetry, and worried angrily about everything but loved me with tremendous ferocity from moment one. Those hugs! Would my ribs make it through her hugs! She is still alive, though currently in very advanced stages of dementia.

My father’s mother is a hot-shot theater producer. Her father and uncle started the dance hall Roseland in Philadelphia and New York City, so she grew up around nightclubs and live performance. She can be a mean lady; don’t cross her or be silly or forget for a moment who you are dealing with, but oh the soft spot…when I turned one she wrote me a birthday card: Have your mother show you this when you’re older and I make more sense to you: My love for you is irrational and uncategorical. As a teenager I spent many summers living with her. Our relationship is intense and spirited.

My mother’s father died of a sudden heart attack when he was thirty-eight. My mother was eight years old at the time.

My father’s father was a very successful orthopedic surgeon and involved community man. He was also bipolar, but our family kept it a secret. He was diagnosed the year I was born. I was diagnosed the year he died. We passed the baton.

Before he was treated, he would buy property manically in Florida or take outrageous trips into the ocean on his boat. His depressions were severe and terrifying for my grandmother, my aunt, and my father.

Like everybody else on the planet, my parents are not perfect people, nor are they perfect parents. But they loved me—I’m sure of it—from conception on forward to today. And they love each other, madly. They travel together and listen closely to each other and launch each other off into the world the way young lovers would.

I was loved and looked after by my older brother, Aaron, who was a prodigiously talented athlete and daredevil (at three he dove off of the Olympic-height diving platform at Brown University…yes, yes, an insight into my parents: they let him, they launch us too). And then later, eight years after me later, there came Ben, who seemed to emerge into the world in a cheery and mindful Buddha-like state, which he remains in now, even as a teenager. I taught him to talk and to walk, and when he mastered that, I made him dance and sing.

The atmosphere in my house growing up was always exciting and upbeat. During the week, we had dinner together every single night. My parents insisted. On weekends, my mom and dad blasted their rock and roll or folk or soul music from the moment they woke up. At parties, they were the first and last on the dance floor (my dad can actually do this thing where he swings my mother to either side of his hips and then dramatically above his head and into the air). We seemed to have an enormous network of friends from all over the world and from different parts of their lives: old hippie radicals from my father’s medical student days; students from Brown, where my mom was Dean of Student Life; actors from the theater where my nana worked. Our home more often than not had guests.

I was a child actress from the age of three to thirteen, so I received an enormous amount of attention from my family and their friends. Show me your latest commercial! Lizzie, sing that Johnny One Note song!

There’s so much more. Great-aunts and uncles, cousins—there were dozens upon dozens of people ready and loving at my birth and around through my childhood and adolescence. All of them intense, complicated, but gentle. They are artists and dancers and writers; they are bankers and doctors and college professors.

My family was spread in New York and Los Angeles and Providence and Brazil. We seemed willing to go any distance for a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a reunion, an event. There was always gossip and secrets upstairs and children downstairs making up a show.

My great-aunt Ruth, the matriarch, told me at one meeting of the annual Kissing Cousins Brunch (which only the female members can attend) that mine was a good generation. And we are. My cousins are all fun, loving, and creative. We are noisy, and we laugh hard. We make time for one another. And we have inherited our parents’ and grandparents’ gentle and protective nature.

In my family, and extended family, we might each of us be a little crazy, but our intentions are pure. We never set out to hurt one another, and so we rarely do.

This is where I come from.

The larger universe, as you might understand, has always seemed unnecessarily brutal.

Paris was wonderful. Knowing that I had successfully escaped my high school in Providence made it all the more delicious.

A beautiful elite private school, Providence Academy is set on a hill with rolling greens and beautiful facilities. I had gone to public school until ninth grade, and after nine years in the public school system, the Academy was a culture shock stranger than any before or since. This tribe I came upon at the age of fourteen, in CB jackets and polo shirts, had the oddest and most fierce codes of conduct for itself.

I suppose I was an insider, but I never felt that way. I was invited to all of the parties. I was friends with the right people. I dated popular guys—but I never really got it. The ski trips. The parties where no one danced. The humor. The arrogance. The racism and homophobia. Everybody agreed about everything. Lacrosse players were demigods, kids drove Beamers, and the coolest guys in my class pissed on one of the most popular girls at a party our sophomore year. They were the sons and daughters of the wealthiest businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and Mafia leaders in Rhode Island. Everyone was imitating what prep school should be and had always been. But none of it came naturally to me.

I was stuck. I had begged my parents to go there because my older brother attended. Understanding the financial sacrifice they were making, I couldn’t possibly complain.

Little ole me, who grew up in a politically radical and charged household. Who had kept a journal of her feelings every day since kindergarten. Who had performed professionally as an actress since she was three, spending a better chunk of her childhood missing school, surrounded by artists. Who still suffered, despite at least a dozen therapeutic interventions dating back to almost prelingual times, from intense and inexplicable mood swings.

Wait….

Okay.

By my sophomore year, I had started dating this really popular boy named Chace Metcalf. He was a junior, but his friends immediately accepted me into their clan. It was not a serious relationship. We were not intimate emotionally or sexually. Actually, I think he was in love with someone else the entire time we went out: a girl who was away at boarding school. By my junior year our relationship was over, but my fixation on him had just begun.

I obsessed over him. It shames me to remember hundreds of pages of Chace journal entries, hours of conversations with friends on the subject, and countless futile attempts to resurrect what had only been a limp connection in the first place.

Chace was never cruel to me, but he didn’t need to be.

I tortured myself.

Well, wait….

My depression and anxiety used Chace as a tool for their torture. It’s hard to read my journals from that period because I kept writing how much I hated myself. At the time I decided, with what felt like clarity, that Providence Academy was doing me in. I needed to escape.

I devoted myself to completing my credits in three years and convincing my parents to let me go to Paris to finish high school.

Ithink I was happier in Paris than ever before.

My French school was like college—you didn’t have to be there nine to five. I would wake when needed, pack my bag for the day, and walk past the high-class hookers on the corner to the Metro. I’d ride ten minutes to school, passing views of the Eiffel Tower. I would spend my free time wandering around or sitting in cafés smoking and drinking coffee.

No one in Paris had ever heard of lacrosse or Winter Solstice Balls or the Sophomore Girls Posse.

It was my first taste of power, the power I had within me to change my conditions to better my life. I had a lot of freedom, a lot of time on my hands. I felt attractive, intellectually stimulated, adventurous. I thought myself naive and unknowing in so many areas—international politics, French culture, sex. I was always in a position of learning, and it was comfortable. I just learned a lot every day. I understood only half of every French conversation; I relied on my new school friends and Linda to let me know when something was due or when I had to be somewhere.

I have always enjoyed the company of adults, and my relationship with Linda Phillips was very important to me. When I got home from school she asked me how my day was, and we’d sit in the kitchen and talk. We discussed everything—our families, the neighbors, sex, politics. Linda is really smart and has a mind for personalities, so it’s her pleasure to chat for an hour and analyze a friendship or a boy situation. She really took me in as a peer, brought me to parties, took me out shopping. She was fun. The neighbors would be changing, and she’d turn off all the lights and we’d watch.

My new friends were fabulous. I had a theater class, and we were required to go see a show every week. Franklin and I would get stoned beforehand and then walk around the city. Tildy had lived her whole life moving every three to five years—DC, Mali, Haiti, Paris. She called herself a global nomad. These kids had stories; they had been around the world and had had intellectual people at their dinner tables their whole lives. They read; they went to museums. They had theories about history, about America, about just about anything.

I remember going to a nightclub on a school night with the whole gang of girls. It was sadomasochism night, and Bethany wore a skin-tight black dress and jumped up on a speaker and gyrated away as soon as we got there. I wrote in my journal that she danced like a cheap whore and that I couldn’t wait to go out with her again. Those were things you wouldn’t find Carter Danforth doing back in Rhode Island. But my new friends knew about freedom.

I really felt that I belonged. The social rules were lax. There was no dress code. No one wore fancy clothes, or hip clothes. We just put clothes on.

I was enjoying the adventure only an urban locale can provide, and time was flying. I remember thinking I had never been this happy for this long my whole life.

Stop.

And then I got into college. And everything was perfect. For just a moment, a few hours really, a morning. And then I went insane.

I remember walking slowly through the courtyard of my school in Paris, and I remember seeing Tildy through the window. She had heard the news, and she was waving fiercely. I remember Franklin telling me that I wore a shit-eating grin all through English class later that day.

I remember a little fuzz building in my head that made Paris a bit grayer than it was already.

I remember attributing the fuzz to my achievement.

I remember I felt uncomfortable, as if my jeans were too tight and my shoes too big, but in my head.

I’m having troubles expressing myself to people, the last entry of my journal reads. Maybe I don’t know what I mean. It’s hard to remember the beginning of my sentence now that I’m all the way at the end.

I remember thinking, why were things off when I had just gotten into college? I mean, I had worked my whole life for this.

The spiraling of my logic was getting more severe, chasing conclusions at quicker and quicker paces, while my actual articulation was getting slower and slower. I remember feeling I could not say much at all that would be right.

And I remember Linda explaining it away. I was going home the next day anyway, and Linda always thought that I had some pretty seriously mixed-up feelings about my family. She, of course, had some pretty mixed-up feelings about my family. I remember that. But I was going to Providence, and I remember reassuring myself that these circles would diminish once I was on domestic territory.

I remember the pit in my stomach,no thanks. I remember not wanting to go out for the celebratory dinner Linda and Edgar proposed.

When I woke the next morning, it was time to leave. I remember the plane ride well. I remember being very Linda in French blue jeans and the right shoes and jewelry and a blue sweater that I still have. I remember it covered my butt, and Linda thought that was a good thing. I remember the nervousness hadn’t disappeared; in fact, I remember wondering why it was getting worse. I was jittery, worried, riddled with anxieties that created paradox laid over paradox. I don’t remember what it was all about, really, but just that the load was getting more and more burdensome.

I remember it was the kind of plane where the last row was a smoking section. I sat there next to a guy about my age. My first impression was that he was probably on drugs. He looked raggedy; his hair was blond, long, and stringy; his face was scruffy. He looked skinnier than he should be, and he had a drink in hand. It was the kind of flight where you could have an unlimited number of cocktails, and he and I drank quite a bit during the flight. He certainly didn’t fit the composite of the people Linda wanted me around. Where had he been in Paris, and why hadn’t I been there?

He broke the ice. You know, he said, the most interesting people I have ever met were in the smoking sections of airplanes.

Really? I asked, giggling, not fashioning myself as all that interesting.

He was an artist, and he said he had been bumming through Paris.

Eventually he revealed that he had gone to a prep school near my house. So we were from the same place, going back home. And I was getting drunk, and feeling much better about life. His sense of humor was spastic and offbeat, and my vision of reality was already morphing, so he was pleasantly perfect. He was my first