But unless you say it really, really loud, I probably won’t hear you.
Oh! Before I forget! My mother wants you all to know this comes from my father’s side. She’s as normal as the day is long.
But imagine this though. Imagine having a mood system that functions essentially like weather— independently of whatever’s going on in your life. So the facts of your life remain the same, just the emotional fiction that you’re responding to differs. It’s like I’m not properly insulated—so all the bad and the good ways that you and most of the people in adjacent neighborhoods and around the world feel—that pours directly into my system unchecked. It’s so fun. I call it “getting on my grid” or ESP: Egregious Sensory Protection.
But ultimately I feel I’m very sane about how crazy I am.
But periodically I do explode. Now the good thing about this is that over time, the explosions have gotten smaller and the recovery time is faster, but what is guaranteed is that I will explode. So what I do, because I’m a good hostess (except for the Greg thing)—I provide my guests with bibs. So they don’t get my crazy juice all over their nice clothes.
You know how most illnesses have symptoms you can recognize? Like fever, upset stomach, chills, whatever. Well, with manic-depression, it’s sexual promiscuity, excessive spending, and substance abuse—and that just sounds like a fantastic weekend in Vegas to me!
Oh! This’ll impress you—I’m actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?
But when I was told about the textbook, I was told I was in there with a photo.
And I said, “Huh? What photo???”
It’s not like anyone ever called me and said, “Have you got a little snapshot of yourself looking depressed or manic?” (Like from my show, for example.)
So for years I wondered—what picture?
Well, I have excellent news. Recently I found the picture, and rather than describing it to you, would you like to see it? Because I really want to show it to you.
So I’m not crazy, that bitch is. Anyone who would wear a hairstyle like that has to be nuts! Right?
Having received word at an early age that the rest of my life was going to be challenging (at least at very odd intervals), I started seeing a shrink when I was fifteen. The first was recommended to me by Joan Hacket, and he was a psychologist and not a psychiatrist. (Psychiatrists are medical doctors as well as the rest of the psycho stuff. So they’re better trained to diagnose mental illness and—oh so much more importantly—prescribe medication for it.) In any case (so to speak), this doctor failed to diagnose my manic depression. Though one day, after I’d been seeing him for many years, he suddenly asked if I’d been hyperactive as a child. Yeah, right, and I’d just somehow forgotten to mention a little thing like that. I mean, it wasn’t as if I had an endless supply of life struggles to discuss with him at that point. Although surely adolescence is a struggle in and of itself—but not so much so that I’d somehow forgotten to mention my hyperactivity. But I think that my first doctor saw something in me that was amiss but as to what that something was, for that moment, would remain a mystery.
My second doc knew exactly what was up (and down) with me. And though generally it’s useless to diagnose someone as bipolar who is engaged in ingesting large quantities of drugs or alcohol—which I was—because drug addiction and alcoholism, done properly of course, classically mimics the symptoms of manic-depression.
So when I was twenty-four years old, Dr. Barry Stone told me that it was his utterly professional opinion that I was hypomanic, also known as bipolar one, which is the lesser version of manic depression—excessively moody— as opposed to bipolar two—excruciatingly moody, which includes the occasional hallucination and lockup ward visits. As it turns out, I was ultimately determined to be the latter (excruciatingly moody) but from where old Doc Stone sat, I was simply excessively moody. Hey, maybe the whole show hadn’t kicked in yet. Or better still, maybe the drugs were suppressing my symptoms to a certain extent.
I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste—it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the Cliffs Notes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-volume read.
I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more—simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me that I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such an insult—I stopped talking to the Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.
Jump-cut to two years after that and you’ll find me overdosing. Not that that was my intention by any means—that was simply the amount of drugs that had become necessary for me to take to get where I wanted to go. My destination being, simply, anywhere but here. But somehow en route to that numb place, I’d overshot my mark and almost arrived at nowhere but dead. Well after that happened, I was quite naturally upset and terrified. I had in no way intended to risk my life. I just wanted to turn the sound down and smooth all of my sharp corners. Block out the dreadfully noisy din of not being good enough—which on occasion I was actually able to do.
But how had I managed to end up at the destination of dead when that was never the direction I originally set off in? It’s as if I tripped and almost fell into my own grave. My only intent was to feel better—which is to say, not to feel at all.
So based on the fact that my best thinking got me in an emergency room with a tube down my throat, I had no trouble at all accepting the fact that I was an alcoholic. Not that I drank all that much—you might say I took pills alcoholically. Anyway, I didn’t have any difficulty accepting the notion that my life had become unmanageable. I mean, let’s face it, my most creative achievement at that time was having unnecessary gum surgery just for the morphine. (I don’t think you can use the word “just” and “morphine” anywhere near each other.) So I threw myself into twelve-step group recovery—believing now that alcoholism was the headline, the overriding thing wrong with me. Which was, of course, in large part true and remains true to this day.
Because I have to admit (well, I don’t have to), periodically I have had drug slips. All in, I’ve had about four or five slips since I first started going to twelve-step support groups at the age of twenty-eight. Making that four or five slips in twenty-three years, which is not great. I mean, I’m not proud that I wasn’t able to remain sober that entire time—especially in terms of my daughter, who has had to suffer the most from these largely inexcusable forays back down the dark path that is drug use. The most painful thing about returning to this dark planet is seeing the look of disappointment and hurt that these forays invariably put in the eyes of your loved ones. But ultimately you could say that I don’t have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety. And it wasn’t Alcoholics Anonymous that failed me—it’s that I have, on occasions, failed them by not working what they call a good program. But I keep going back. I’m as addicted to all the things A.A. has to offer as I am to the things that made me need those groups in the first place.
But when I first got to twelve-step land—after my stomach pumping incident—I thought, Okay, fine then, this is what the matter is with me. I’m not going to shrinks anymore. My best shrinking and thinking got me into emergency rooms all over Southern California. So I planned to be an all-meeting-all-the-time gal. Psychiatrists were a thing of the past. Why, they hadn’t even told me I was an alcoholic! So screw them—especially the doctor who tried to convince me I was hypomanic. Huh! Fat lot he knew. Well, as it turned out, what he knew was an extremely fat lot after all because over the next year of getting and staying clean and sober all the people I’d come into the program with were calming down and leveling out while I seemed to be doing just the opposite. Quick to excite, to agitate, to engage, to anger—I was heading straight up into the rafters of my overly good or bad time.
In short—okay, fine, yes, I know it’s far too late for that—I was manic, the monster was out of the box, the cat was out of the bag, and it appeared after a year of erratic sobriety that I was en route back to the shrinks and psychopharmacologists I imagined myself not needing anymore. Without the substances, I had used to distort and mask my symptoms, it was now all too clear that I was a bona fide, wild-ride manic-depressive. And this initially dismaying discovery led me to my third and best shrink, Beatriz Foster, who turned out to be the psychiatrist who finally got me to address my manic-depression.
And I ultimately not only addressed it, I named my two moods Roy and Pam. Roy is Rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood, and Pam is Sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs. (Pam stands for “piss and moan.”) One mood is the meal, and the next mood is the check.
There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I’m not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense
