Allen drove us up to a prewar brownstone on the Upper East Side, where the psychiatrist, Sarah Levin, lived and worked. My mom and I walked to the entrance and pressed the buzzer. A Carol Kane falsetto trilled through the intercom: “Come right in and sit in the waiting area. I’ll be right with you.”
With its white walls, magazines, and bookcases filled with all the classics of literature, Dr. Levin’s waiting area seemed straight out of a Woody Allen film. I was excited to see the psychiatrist. I wanted her to confirm, once and for all, my bipolar self-diagnosis, but also I considered psychiatric visits entertaining on a certain level. For a period of time after an old breakup, I had gone to three separate psychologists, testing them out. The exercise was largely self-indulgent, inspired by watching too many episodes of the HBO show
“Come on in,” said Dr. Levin, appearing at the door. I smiled: she looked like Carol Kane too. She motioned for me to sit in the leather chair.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I always take pictures of my patients to keep track of everyone,” she said, nodding at the Polaroid camera in her hands. I posed, not sure if I should smile or remain serious. I remembered what my friend Zach from work had once told me years before when I first went on live television during the Michael Devlin affair: “Smile with your eyes.” So that’s what I tried to do.
“So tell me a bit about why you’re here,” she asked, cleaning her glasses.
“I’m bipolar.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Say that again?”
“I’m bipolar.”
She nodded as if agreeing with me. “Are you on any medication for that?”
“No. I haven’t been officially diagnosed. But I know. I mean, I know myself better than anyone, right? So I should know if I have it. And I know that I do,” I rambled on, the illness imposing itself on my speech patterns.
She nodded again.
“Tell me why you think you’re bipolar.”
As I made my case through my strange, jumpy logic, she jotted down her impressions on two pages of wide-ruled paper: “Said she had bipolar disorder. Hard to conclude,” she wrote. “Everything is very vivid. Started in last few days. Can’t concentrate. Easily distracted. Total insomnia but not tired, not eating. Has grand ideas. No hallucinations. No paranoid delusions. Always impulsive.”
Dr. Levin asked if I had any history of feeling this way and wrote, “She’s had hypomanic attacks her whole life. Always has high energy. But has negative thoughts. She was never suicidal.”
Dr. Levin’s opinion was that I was experiencing a “mixed episode,” meaning both manic and depressive elements typical of bipolar disorder. She moved several large books on her desk around until she found her scrip pad and scrawled out a prescription for Zyprexa, an antipsychotic prescribed to treat mood and thought disorders.
While I was in the office with Dr. Levin, my mother called my younger brother, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. Even though James was only nineteen, he already had a wise, old-soul quality that I’ve always found comforting.
“Susannah had a seizure,” she told James, trying to control the wavering of her voice. James was stunned. “The neurologist is saying she drank too much. Do you think Susannah is an alcoholic?” my mom asked him.
James was adamant. “No way is Susannah an alcoholic.”
“Well, Susannah’s insisting that she’s manic-depressive. Do you think that’s a possibility?”
James thought on this for a moment. “No. Not in the least. That’s just not Susannah. Sure, she can be excitable and temperamental, but she’s not depressive. She’s tough, Mom. We all know that. She deals with a lot of stress, but she handles it better than anyone I know. Bipolar doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Me neither,” my mom said. “Me neither.”
CHAPTER 11
KEPPRA
Later that next night, I had an epiphany. Forget bipolar disorder: it was the antiseizure medication Keppra. The Keppra must be causing my insomnia, forgetfulness, anxiety, hostility, moodiness, numbness, loss of appetite. It didn’t matter that I had been on the drug for only twenty-four hours. It was all the Keppra. An Internet search proved it. These were all side effects of that toxic drug.
My mother pleaded with me to take it anyway. “Do it for me,” she begged. “Just please take the pill.” So I did. Even during this time when I hardly recognize myself, there are still shadows of the real Susannah, a person who cares what her family and friends think, who doesn’t want to cause them pain. Looking back, I think that’s why, despite the battles, I often caved at my family’s insistences.
That night, as the alarm clock by my bed struck midnight, I lifted my head with a start.
The next thing I knew, I was upstairs on the third floor, where my mom and Allen slept. They’d moved up there when James and I were teenagers because it had worried them too much to hear us coming and going at night. Now I stood over my mom’s bed and watched her sleep. The half-moon shone down on her. She looked so helpless, like a newborn baby. Swelling with tenderness, I leaned over and stroked her hair, startling her awake.
“Oh, my. Susannah? Are you okay?”
“I can’t sleep.”
She rearranged her mussed-up, cropped hair and yawned.
“Let’s go downstairs,” she whispered, taking my hand and leading me back into my bedroom. She lay down beside me, brushing out my tangled hair with her beautiful hands for over an hour until she fell back asleep. I listened to her breathing, soft and low, in and out, and tried to replicate it. But I didn’t sleep.
The next day, on March 18, 2009, at 2:50 p.m., I wrote the first in a series of random Word documents that would become a kind of temporary diary over this period. The documents reveal my scattered and increasingly erratic thought processes:
Basically, I’m bipolar and that’s what makes me ME. I just have to get control of my life. I LOVE working. I LOVE it. I have to break up with Stephen. I can read people really well but I’m too jumbly. I let work take way too much out of my life.
During a conversation earlier that day when we discussed my future, I’d told my father that I wanted to go back to school, specifically to the London School of Economics, even though I had no history of studying business. Wisely, gently, my father suggested that I write down all my racing thoughts. So that’s what I did for the next few days: “My father suggested writing in a journal, which is definitely helping me. He told me to get a puzzle and that was smart because he too thinks in puzzles (the way things fit together).”
Some of the statements are incoherent messes, but others are strangely illuminating, providing deep access to areas of my life that I’d never before examined. I wrote about my passion for journalism: “Angela sees something in me because she knows how hard it is to be good at this job, but that’s journalism, it’s a hard job. and maybe it’s not for me I have a very powerful gut.” And I went on about my need for structure in a life that was quickly falling to pieces: “Routine is important to me, as is discipline without it I tend to go a little bit haywire.”
As I wrote these lines and others, I felt that I was piecing together, word by word, what was wrong with me. But my thoughts were tangled in my mind like necklaces knotted together in a jewelry box. Just when I thought
