Marya Hornbacher - Madness - A Bipolar Life

I don’t care. The future is unfurling ahead of me. I’m going to be a writer if it kills me. I will kill myself trying, I will get there, I’ve got to learn it, train for it, write it until the writing is perfect, until I get it, until I make it, I’m going to be real. This time I won’t fuck it up. I won’t fail.

The sun crests the horizon halfway, a winter sun, a blinding white. I stagger from the study lounge, carrying my piles of papers and books, and stumble down the stairs and into my room. My roommate is still asleep, the room still in shadow. As she mumbles in her sleep, I pull on my running shoes, go out into the cold, head across campus to the classroom building with the half-mile-long hall.

I run. Time stops. Thoughts stop. The never-ending pounding of my blood, the energy that surges through me all the time these days, it never runs out, I feel as if I will explode with it, I run. Up and down the long hall, compulsively touching the cold metal door on each end, must touch it or it doesn’t count, one mile, five miles, ten miles, chanting thinner, thinner, thinner, I am killing myself with the running, the starving, but I am alive, I run in the morning, between classes, during lunch, after school, during dinner, after workshops, before bed, and when I stop, I panic, afraid that until I run again, the flesh will creep back on my body. I’ve got to burn it off, get down to bones, a running, writing, starving skeleton, I eat only carrots and mustard, drink gallons of coffee, chatter with my friends, who tell me to stop, who worry, but they don’t understand, the flesh is always encroaching, trying to drown me, I will be thin, clean bones.

1990

I am caught. I pace up and down the hospital halls, the eating disorders ward back home, refusing to believe I’m half dead. These doctors are fools, my parents’ terror unfounded. Let me out! I holler. Leave me alone! I scream as the nurses chase me with Dixie cups of Ensure, the evil drink, all calories and fat. They’re trying to make up for what I’m burning while pacing, pacing, pacing the halls, panicked, hyper, locked in. I beat on the doors, crying, yell at my parents, stare at the food they put in front of me six times a day, Get it away, I won’t eat it, you can’t make me .

The doctor tells my parents I’m depressed. I know I’m not. Something else entirely is wrong. But doctors always say people with eating disorders are depressed. His diagnosis ignores my agitation, the fact that I sail up and crash down minute by minute. I guess he has his reasons: the extremity of my anorexia and bulimia is, to say the least, distracting. I have a life-threatening condition. No one—not my parents, not the therapists, and certainly not the doctors—has time to focus on the mayhem of my moods. Their primary goal is keeping me alive. But they’re missing the forest for the trees. (That happens to this day to patients with eating disorders. Doctors zoom in on the havoc that starving, bingeing, and purging wreaks on the body; and while it’s certainly true that some people with eating disorders have depression, the doctors assume that all of them do. So in people with eating disorders but without depression, the symptom is treated, but not the cause, and the physicians end up ignoring the mood disorders that the patients may actually have. The real underlying mental illness runs wild, advancing steadily, irreparably damaging the mind.)

Fuck this! I shout at my parents. I stand up from my chair and say again, Fuck this!

Marya, sit down .

No! I shout. I pace in circles around the room. The other patients and their families watch me from the corners of their eyes. My brain is burning. I stand over my parents, waving my arms. You can’t just keep me here! I scream. What about my civil rights?

You have no civil rights, my mother points out. Not until you’re eighteen .

I’m moving to California, I say.

What are you talking about?

I’ll live with Anne (she’s my father’s first wife), and I’ll go to school and everything .

They stare at me.

It will be totally good for me, I say, honing my argument—this plan has just occurred to me in the last three minutes, but now it is essential, imperative, that I go. It is the most important thing ever in my whole life.

I perk up, suddenly loving and cheerful. It will be totally healing for me, I say. I will totally get better. You won’t have to worry about me. I’ll totally take in the sea air. It’s very centering out there .

California will be perfect. No one will watch me.

I’ll totally take long walks on the beach, I say. I’ll walk in the sunshine and celebrate the rain. I’ll get back in my body. I’ll do yoga. I’ll totally blossom. You see? It’s perfect. It’s just the thing .

My parents look at each other.

A few weeks later, they let me out of lockup, and I’m sitting on a plane.

1990

Here I am, healing. Centering. By now I’m convinced that my eating disorder is entirely sensible, necessary, that I’m completely sane and everybody else is nuts. Obviously I had to get out of there.

I rattle through the salt-air night in the back of a pickup truck, heading for Bodega Bay. The bottles of booze, the baggies of pot, the friends from school. We trudge through the dunes, lie on our backs, stare up at the ocean of sky. I am in heaven. This is my hideaway. Here, I can starve without anyone stopping me. I can drink myself high, smoke myself into a steady drifting down. Here, I can write all night. If I can just make it through high school, I can escape to college in some city far away. I’ll be a writer and show them all that I am not a fuckup, I can make it, I am real.

The moods are steady, sky-high. My mind is racing ahead and I chase it, writing as fast as I can, failing heart stuttering, body disappearing. I can do anything. Nothing can stop me.

I’m a flurry of motion, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, arms flying, shuffling papers into piles, brain racing, reading snippets of writing, hopping up to get something on my desk, making rapid little red-pen marks on the pages, cutting and pasting, short of breath, pulse pounding, I am back in my element, where I can do a thousand things at once, fueled by the rabid energy triggered by the booze, no food, no sleep, I stand up and compulsively do three hundred leg lifts, balancing on the back of the chair—and I leap onto the chair and pierce my nose with a safety pin—and I climb out my window onto the roof, flinging my head back to look at the glorious blanket of stars and their halo, and the round-bellied moon—and I spin around in circles, arms out, teetering near the edge, dizzily gazing out over the dark, thick woods that surround the house—and I hop back in the window, grab my jacket, and dash down the stairs and out the door.

I walk down the long driveway onto the winding dark road that runs nearby, the Spanish moss hanging in heavy swags from the cypress and eucalyptus trees. I walk down to the strip mall in town, the neon signs fizzling in the night. I am violently alive. Every snap and spit of the neon pierces my eyes. A few cars go by, the whoosh of their tires making a hollow echo in my ears. This is my secret life, these nights I prowl and hide in shadows in the dark, walk the roads near their guardrails, the hills dropping sharply from the road to the valley below. Eventually, the lights, the noise, become too much, and the frenzied intensity begins to fray, tearing at my brain, slicing through my body like razor blades, and I walk down the road to my boyfriend’s house. He is older, stupid, stoned, and he passes me the joint and I take a deep drag and pass it to his sister and get up to get myself a drink. I flop belly-down on the carpet, watch the interior of my mind as it empties of thoughts. The agitation begins to subside, and I slide into a rocking, gentle nothingness. We watch idiotic reruns on TV. I am starving, and the hunger pinches at my gut. My head lolls. I lay face down on the carpet, the laugh track on the television rolling over me. I fall asleep.