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May 13, 2022: The day I first wanted to announce that I was cured of serious mental illness.
All four windows of the Uber were open. Though it was mid-May and barely 8 a.m., the temperature was already in the nineties. The carās air conditioning was broken. The Uber driver apologized several times. I kept telling him it didnāt matter. He had no idea how little it mattered.
That I was even sitting in the backseat of an Uber on my way to a TV studio to make an appearance on a morning talk show to discuss my debut memoir was never supposed to happen. I was supposed to continue to live as someone with a serious mental illness should. According to my psychiatrist, I was never supposed to hold a full-time job or have a long-term relationship. I was supposed to battle manic highs and depressive lows and slowly deteriorate and finally die ten years earlier than my life expectancy, likely from suicide.
But there I was. The neighborhood was familiar: the large city high school; the Starbucks on Western Avenue; the modest, two-story houses that lined the side streets. Familiar though Iād only spent time there once when I was in a partial hospitalization program.
Halfway down the block, the Uber slowed. On the left was the TV studio, a modern building with a massive parking lot. Ironically, on the right, directly across the street from the studio, was a nondescript, yellowish brick building, inside which was the partial hospitalization program (PHP) Iād once been in.
If it had been years ago, at about that time of the morning, Iād enter that PHP and sit with the other patients in a frigidly cold room, learning cognitive and dialectical skills to āmanageā my mental illness. The air conditioner would jitter and hum, jitter and hum. The word recovery would never be mentioned.
Iād sit outside during our lunch break and eat my tuna sandwich, staring at the TV studio across the street. Cars would enter and exit the gated parking lot. Iād imagine the anchorwoman and man seated at the news deskāhair perfect, their makeup TV-ready under bright lights.
At the gate to the TV studio parking lot, the Uber driver pressed a buzzer and when asked, told them my name. The gate opened. It seemed impossible that the gate should open. I was supposed to continue to cycle in and out of partial hospitalization programs like the one across the street. I was supposed to remain someone for whom reality was detachedāsomething distant and fragile. Someone who swung between moods and self-medicated and didnāt eat or sleep for days at a time. Someone at the mercy of depression, anxiety, confusion, exhaustion, obsessions, hyperactivity, compulsions, insomnia, and panic. Someone isolated from family and friends. Someone chronically suicidal. Someone who believed that this therapist or that psychiatrist or that psychologist would finally save me if only (if only!) we could find the right diagnosis and concoction of medications and I did the right amount of exercise (what number of sun salutations leads to emotional stability?) and eat right (what is the right number of milligrams of omega-3s and vitamin D and whatever else was being touted as the key to mental health?), Iād āmanageā my symptoms.
When the Uber reached the building, I thanked the driver and got out. The lobby was cool but not cold. I checked in with security at the front. The producer met me in the lobby and took me to the green room, which was actually brown. She said an intern would be by in a few minutes and left me in the cramped, timeworn room.
The snacks on the side table seemed ostentatious. Were there people who felt zero nervousness about appearing on television and could blithely nibble an oats ān honey granola bar before going on TV? Seemed there was.
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