The white woman on my laptop screen speaks in soothing, low tones, her voice plodding and patient as a doting elementary school teacher. She is lithe, dressed in baby blue athleisure, her dirty blond hair swept up in a ballet dancer’s bun. Lush green houseplants frame her from left and right. Her only break from California beach bunny form is the Eye of Providence tattooed on her perfectly tanned arm, or maybe the leather bohemian-chic bracelets she wears even during what I already know will be a sweaty vinyasa class.
“Letting yourself arrive to a place of gratitude for yourself, acknowledging the power of your mind, the connection to your breath. Letting yourself come back to this idea of being home within yourself.” I am here as much for the secular preaching as the guidance on downward dog and baby cobra. The instructor’s disconnected phrases are words meant to invoke feeling, not thinking. They ask you to foreground the five senses, to forget about the mind’s perpetual state of disarray, the knee-jerk rumination, and runaway thinking that breeds stagnancy and hopelessness. In general, the language of yoga teachers lives in the DMZ between spirituality and sentimentality, never quite passing border patrol.
I kneel before nothing and pray to nobody.
In my yoga instructors’ digital presence, I am no one, an empty vessel for concepts that I only grasp at feeling and can hardly publicly embrace. Her ideas are better suited to “Live, Laugh, Love” posters from the hallowed consumerist halls of TJ Maxx than the inside of my mind. Yet strangely, during yoga, I am home within myself. I am aspirationally spiritual in sculpting, sweat-wicking $90 leggings. I am Gwyneth Paltrow’s wildest dreams.
**
In the year before global pandemic, the only constancy in my life was Equinox, the granddaddy of faux-enlightened corporate wellness brands. Five days a week, the greeters scanned the barcode on my phone and granted me temporary escape from the rest of my life. I loved it. The chilled eucalyptus scented towels. The backlit vanities in the locker room and Kiehl’s products in the showers. The routine front desk check-in, the parking validation machine’s mechanical chime, the same cardio machines with the same slogan printed over and over in stark black and white: “It’s Not Fitness. It’s Life.”
My fate was sealed before I was even born, when my parents immigrated to Los Angeles in the early 90’s, coming to a city that then, as much as now, was focused on external looks and appearances. Since then, the obsession has eaten itself from the outside in, giving the public all Moon Juice Sex Dust, vaguely Eastern New Age spiritual practices, and the keto-paleo-gluten-free-clean eating the outside world derides us for. In childhood, I drank hot chocolate in a faux Parisian Santa Monica cafe while my mother had her monthly colonics appointment around the corner. She supplemented Robitussin and Nyquil with homeopathic tinctures in dark glass bottles whenever I had a cold or flu, and took me for ear candling every time springtime allergies hit my bloated sinuses.
Nearly two decades later, the world drinks green juice and turmeric mushroom powder lattes, and I do not feel completely out of place. This is the only world I have ever known, and even studying biology in college and getting into medical school cannot undo a lifetime of dabbling in the dark arts of alternative medicine, and the aura of conspicuous consumption that comes with it.
The emails I get as an Equinox member emanate some hybrid of Burning Man-esque radical acceptance and a consumer-tested version of Audre Lorde’s self-care. That such a streamlined, virtue-signaling brand is built on the backs of underpaid gym workers by a founder who once hosted a Trump re-election fundraiser is almost par for the course in the trillion dollar global health and wellness industry. There are only so many eucalyptus towels to go around.
Within the walls of a luxury gym, you could easily start to believe that if you work out hard enough, you could fix the rest of your life in the same exact way. Though familiar with yoga postures before I joined, I finally got into the habit at Equinox, three days a week, sometimes four, their classes full of sweaty young professionals and wannabe Instagram models; a place of refuge from the uncertainties of the outside world.
At Equinox, I was nobody. An out of breath, red-faced young Asian woman in standard-issue Lululemon leggings, blissfully ignored by all except one of the yoga teachers, who tenderly clasped my ankles one class when she caught me silently crying during savasana. I could fail at squat lunge form in HIIT class and no one would judge me. I could pinball from the weight floor to the usually empty steam room to the patio outside overlooking the Sony Pictures rainbow, an homage to The Wizard of Oz, filmed in Culver City, my hometown.
When I joined Equinox in late December 2018, living at home a year after college graduation sans full-time job, the $200 monthly membership fee would have been impossible for me to afford on my own. From the Philippines, where he works as vice president of a bank, my father agreed to pay for dues. I added his credit card on file online and I wondered how many other ostensibly adult children at Equinoxes across the country were doing the same exact thing.
Of my two parents, my father has always been the cheapskate, the spitting image of the Asian immigrant father who cut coupons and hoarded boxes of old stuff in the garage. He stopped letting me order soft drinks at restaurants when he realized I invariably wouldn’t finish them. But in 2018, my father shelled out, again, for his youngest daughter, the one he called spoiled all throughout her life. When I forgot once in college to waive the quarterly University of California health insurance fee in time, he hung it over my head for months. This time, however, he paid for Equinox without a moment’s hesitation. My father, you see, was deeply afraid. He was afraid that I would become manic psychotic again.
My father, unlike my mother—whom he is still married to (albeit in a recently long distance relationship)—is a firm believer in Western medicine and the scientific method. Paradoxically, my mother is the health professional in this marriage of two striving middle-class Chinese Filipino immigrants, having worked as a dentist for over thirty years. He had already wired my mother some $50,000 for a therapy program I’d attended the summer of 2018. By then he had read the writing on the wall, that the troubles of his brother (attempted suicide), in-laws (too many cases to list here), and wife (bipolar disorder) were due for a next-gen iteration. That December, a step below floridly manic, I chatted rapidfire with the Equinox advisor, who was more than happy to recruit a new member before the onslaught of New Year’s Resolutioners.
Although only aware of my multiple hospitalizations, fractured personal and professional relationships, and social media outbursts via WhatsApp, my father vaguely knew that exercise was likely to help his severely mentally ill daughter out of the throes of mania. It could even potentially put her onto a trajectory where she might be financially independent and capable of living on her own day.
**
My future that winter hung precariously in the air, at the whims of second-generation antipsychotics, dubious American therapists he hardly trusted, and the influence of a strange new boyfriend who, my father would later learn, flew me to Paris less than two months after we’d met in a Chinatown art gallery. For my father, $200 a month was a small price to pay to throw something at the wall and see if it stuck.
Nearly all of those things are gone from my life now, but what remains, strangely, is my slavish devotion to health and fitness. I chase some unreachable wellness ideal to manage a lifelong disorder that kills some people, publicly embarrasses many, and destroys entire families as the bipolar people in question ride out manic and depressive episodes like the mechanical bull at a West Hollywood Western-themed gay bar.
The various holes I punched in my life while psychotic are now crudely filled with white spackle, or perhaps instant ramen, the edges sanded down so finely you can hardly see or feel them. Among other habits like meditation and eating a generally health-conscious diet, doing yoga and things of that ilk seem to be all that stand between me and the abyss of mania and paranoid delusions.
I live in a precarious state, knowing that much of what keeps me sane enough to function in the world is buoyed by immense economic privilege and a set of unique life circumstances. I tally my expenses weekly, monthly, yearly, crunching the numbers on the price of sanity, knowing my parents will not be there to cushion my fall forever, and that given my post-psychosis career switch to journalism, I am not likely to have much wiggle room in my future day-to-day budget.
Before I switched to a relatively inexpensive online-only option, my therapist cost $150 per weekly session. My former psychiatrist billed $150 per visit, not covered by insurance. $200 or so for the gym. Groceries like omega-3 rich wild caught salmon, spinach, blueberries–sometimes organic, mostly not.
Still, one must eat.
I can already hear the sneers and criticisms from online commentators. After all, I can always switch to a cheaper gym.
In reality, I stubbornly, adamantly refuse after experiencing my first panic attack at my significantly cheaper old gym while suicidally depressed. It was the first place my mind strained against an unfamiliar reality, pushed to the brink of delusion. In comparison, the generally less-sticky-fingered Equinox clientele have given me relative peace of mind.
Together with the gym’s temperature-controlled, soothing interior design and forever-busy cleaning staff, they create an environment conducive to living a structured routine lifestyle–a core, evidence-based tenet in treating bipolar disorder. Drag me as much as you want. When the stakes at hand include possible involuntary hospitalization and an inability to hold down full-time work, I’d rather not upset the apple cart.
So today I continue, indefinitely, in some vein, hoping to stay high-functioning enough to build a career, so I can work and continue to throw money at the issue, knowing just how much it has helped so far, and to not alienate the people in my life who support me and accept me, “broken brain” and all, as depressed-cool female writers on Twitter love to say. But before I was “well” in the most loaded, privileged sense of the term, I was sick in the head, and before I was sick in the head, I had never been that “well” to begin with.
In 2018, at age twenty-two, I went to Death Valley and realized all I really wanted was to die. To be exact, Death Valley’s Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, is where I first wanted to die–this being a narrative arc so incredibly on-the-nose I would change it if this were fiction.
But because this really happened, I sat in my car with S., a guy my age who would never love me, I even knew it then, using every ounce of willpower to give him a passable performance of a normal, happy girl on a weekend road trip to the California desert.
Chewing on a few caps of magic mushrooms, I knew my future was devoid of anything. Not hope. Not despair. Just nothing. Before the drugs even started to hit, I had already been grasping at straws, my mind turning over and over for a conclusion, an explanation for how my life had gone up until that point, the search function returning zero results.
This was my Taylor Swift year, and nothing seemed to be going according to plan. With a 100th percentile MCAT score and a stellar resume, I’d applied to medical schools across the country, racking up thousands of dollars in travel costs, yet came away (nearly) empty handed, squeaking by with a single acceptance at a school in New York. When I tripped in Death Valley I had yet to receive that letter, and felt confident it would never come. I had little on my resume aside from research and an ill-fated stint at a medical startup, and little going for me except my ability to date a series of Silicon Beach startup engineer bros like S., as though a MRS degree still held water in the 21st century.
By the time that letter came that April, I had already obliterated the future in my head, the confines of the next day, month, year a gaping black hole of nothing where I would always fail to succeed. Whether or not I had bipolar disorder seemed beside the point, though the diagnosis was a strong possibility, given its hereditary nature and the fact my mother had it. I spent 18 hours a day in bed many days that spring, hoping the world would disappear while I slept. I marked time by the weekly house calls I made to S. to smoke weed on a dirty white Ikea couch and escape the fact my life was coming apart at the seams. I tried a therapist off an acquaintance’s recommendation, paying Nicky, a chipper white female therapist, $100 a week plus the parking meter, leaving each session unconvinced this alien from another world would bring about any kind of psychic relief.
There seemed to be no point to me, I thought, in even trying antidepressants, which I knew from undergraduate psychology classes worked in less than half of those that took it. I wanted something faster, newer, better. So, with my mother’s hesitant permission (she was convinced I needed a gym membership and a life coach, not drugs or therapy), I tried intravenous ketamine, spending $300 an infusion that news articles I read suggested they might stop myself from wanting to kill myself. Might. (They didn’t.)
When I finally tried a second mental health professional, the visibly disturbed Santa Monica psychologist referred me directly to a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. T. While sitting in her calming white minimalist office in a West LA office building, I confessed to Dr. T that I no longer felt intelligent or likeable or capable of anything. She looked at me with her wide green eyes, and told me going off to medical school that summer was out of the question. I should not try to study or work. I was sick.
“You are very smart and capable, as your academic record shows. But right now you are not well,” Dr. T said. “You’re experiencing impaired cognitive function because of the depression.”
“I know. But I’m not suicidal enough to actually try to kill myself, and what is the point of the psych ward in that case?” I said in return. She recommended, instead, a partial hospitalization program (PHP), wrote me a script for Zoloft, and told me to eat more “whole foods.” The sheet on the prescription pad literally said “whole foods.”
A PHP, in Medicare’s official parlance, is a “structured program of outpatient psychiatric services as an alternative to inpatient psychiatric care.” Although the PHP most people imagine is probably a remote, serene celebrity rehab center in Malibu with a private chef, the term encompasses everything from the upscale treatment compound to the halfway homes criminal drug offenders are mandated to attend. They are, even at the lower end, extremely expensive, and in many places across the country, difficult to find, and the time commitment, usually similar to a full work day, makes the option only truly viable for the extremely rich, well-insured, or desperate.
My mother expressed skepticism. In her mind, she “cured” herself of her own illness by using, for a time, a personal trainer who she paid over $10,000 to teach her weightlifting. She flip-flopped between agreeing with Dr. T and decrying her and the rest of the mainstream mental health world as a bunch of swindlers and liars. She had begun reading about auditing, the Church of Scientology’s process that supposedly rids an individual of “spiritual disabilities.” My mother was convinced it would help me.
Though my suicidal depression had made me desperate, I wasn’t that desperate. I could feel my slipshod ego, unshielded as a crab without a shell, increasingly more prone to getting pulled into any kind of cult like the Manson girls in the 60s. I still knew that crock of bullshit was not going to do me any good.
**
Around this time I found the proper word, finally, to describe my mental state: dissociation. As I skimmed online through vaguely reliable websites and Google Scholar, “psychosis” popped out at me. “The word psychosis is used to describe conditions that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality,” the National Institute of Mental Health’s website stated.
Shit, that’s me, I thought, and though so emotionally numb at this point even sadness and despair had become unknowable, I managed a few tears. I set my laptop down and ran to my emotionally exhausted mother.
“I think I’m psychotic,” I said. “I know I’m dissociating–that’s the word–and I might be psychotic.” She brushed me off, hardly acknowledging my concern, consumed by her own culpability in my broken state. “It’s always the mother, isn’t it,” she snarled. “What do I need to do? Kill myself? Would that make you happy?”
After consulting with my father over WhatsApp, she finally agreed to start looking at PHPs. What changed her mind, most likely, was watching her adult daughter throw a tantrum in the shampoo section at Target after a minor miscommunication with the pharmacist dispensing the Zoloft. Because this is Los Angeles, the land of celebrity meltdowns, there happened to be one conveniently located just ten minutes’ drive from my childhood home. It was the same place where my mother had attended group therapy there a decade prior after getting out of rehab, albeit in a much smaller form then.
Psychological Care and Healing, or PCH for short, offered outpatient programs for therapy, leisure, and lunch from 9 to 5, five days a week. The first month of outpatient treatment cost $26,000, with each subsequent month costing $19,500. “This facility provides the highest level of care to patients outside of the inpatient psychiatric ward,” I heard a staff member tell a prospective low-level grunt worker on my intake day. “You’ll see cases you won’t see anywhere else.”
Bleary eyed “clients,” as patients were politely referred to, weaved in and out of the rooms of a nondescript office building that emptied into an open courtyard filled with the sounds of a bubbling fountain. In the corner of the parking lot, a group of smokers perched like crows on an electrical line. I scowled at them, my unwashed bare face bloated from lack of sleep, the skin of my stomach visible below my crop top distended from the eating disorder I’d picked up while depressed.
I would spend $45,500 of my parents’ money, most likely wired from the Philippines, over two months in treatment. There I got to know the young adults who smoked all day and skipped group sessions, their affluent parents threatening to cut them off if they didn’t agree to stay at PCH. The OCD patients sequestered upstairs in their own clinic, undergoing exposure therapy. Working adults burning out from corporate jobs who had no idea how they’d pay for another month of treatment, or shamefully going back to their elderly parents for money, tails between their legs. A few patients fresh from psychiatric wards all across Los Angeles County, Las Encinas being the most infamous of them–and an absolute hell house, according to one guy my age I met who had sexually assaulted his fiancée while in a manic psychosis.
Over the course of the two months, I met over two dozen patients who ran the gamut from an 18-year-old suicidal, self-harming bipolar redhead from Colorado to a middle-aged Indian woman with heavy-set eyes, depressed and tired after her fiancée left her for another woman to an elderly woman, who I liked most of all, with severe treatment-resistant depression. Her name was Sydney, and ever since she had retired from working at a Bay Area arts nonprofit she felt she had no identity.
“I’ve wasted disgusting amounts of money here,” she said, her pursed thin lips painted with red lipstick, her dyed black bob always neatly combed. She’d been there for nearly a year, her husband in the Bay coming to visit her every so often. Before, she was somebody, she said. “Now I’m just useless to everyone. My husband, my daughters, my son,” Sydney said, bringing a tissue to her face. She was capable of crying, which made me jealous until my own emotional numbness wore off.
That summer I grew to like Sydney, and a fair number of other patients too. It became slowly apparent that I lived in a different world from most of them. The girl, a few years younger than me, didn’t know what Darwin’s theory of evolution was, because she’d attended a selective charter high school for the performing arts, her Chanel logo-emblazoned espadrille flat bobbing up and down as we ate lunch together in the courtyard. The Miami-born spiritual healer living alone in a two-bedroom apartment in a luxury high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard that invited some of us for Shabbat dinner, every inch of the place covered in what looked like antiques and artisan gifts from her travels. Among them all I liked Sydney most, despite the major differences: age, race, life stage, most likely because I never knew either of my grandmothers. She became that for me, in many ways.
Her life was a time capsule. “I never breastfed my daughter,” she said one group session, gloomily. “My mother told me it was savage.” Into another story we all went about the La Leche League in San Francisco, when Betty Friedan-era feminists fought for the right and social acceptance to breastfeed. She had met Nora Ephron and Joan Didion. She went to Lowell, a Bay Area magnet high school I had always dreamed of going to when I found out that the writer of one of my favorite children’s series had gone there. Her husband had also gone to Lowell, and convinced her when she was in her early 20s, stubbornly working and keeping her own apartment against her mother’s wishes, to marry him and become a mother herself.
By the end of the summer, the day-in day-out therapy had done its work and I was feeling better, even better than before my depression, and hopeful for the future. I had a deferred offer to medical school waiting and a whole year while I deliberated if medicine was the right career for me. Against the wishes of my caseworker, my parents decided that $45,500 (minus a few hundred reimbursed by insurance) worth of treatment was enough to cure their daughter.
And I didn’t entirely disagree. I felt brand new, able to stand on my own two feet, albeit precariously, ready to leave the cushioned world of PCH. One of the therapists, George, agreed to see me three times a week for $150 a session, an aftercare option that my caseworker reluctantly agreed would provide some benefit. George was a blue-eyed White Russian and an ex-drug smuggler from Brooklyn. I liked him immensely. To go back to the wild west of Psychology Today and sift through more chipper white women like Nicky seemed unthinkable, especially given that I couldn’t shake the fact they only told me what I wanted to hear. Over a month, he would cost $1,800, not covered by insurance, but he was the only person I truly trusted of all the therapists I met there.
**
My mania arrived just as summer left, the sunsets coming earlier and earlier. The almost imperceptible shift of the sunsets and sunrises ran in parallel as depression lows became euphoric highs that careened, finally, to the apex of psychotic break. Early fall is always hot in Los Angeles. On one Indian summer night I walked into a Chinatown art gallery pretending to be the heiress to a soy sauce company and left having propositioned a brown guy for sex named M. I left PCH, starting a short-lived job as a hostess at a brunch place, where I managed to infuriate another employee to the point she threatened to beat me up after our shift. The world felt fabulously connected, my real life starting up again, revving up for a delicious year of (mental health professional-supervised) fun before medical school began.
Before any of that could happen, however, the world had other disturbing plans. I met a man at a party in the Hollywood Hills, a young red-headed ingenue sitting in his lap, and saw him outed as a sex offender in the Los Angeles Times the next week, triggering disturbing childhood memories of sitting in the office of a child talent manager who looked at my older sister like a hungry wolf.
It was September 2018. The U.S. entered into a trade war with China, and M., who hovered somewhere between sugar daddy and boyfriend at the ripe old age of 25, and whose ideologies he openly described to me as “ethnonationalist” and “anti-globalist,” started to redpill me with stories of failed free-trade capitalism and shadowy conspiracies pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein and the Democratic Party.
After spending most of a year immersed in my own misery, the deluge of terrible news sent me into a tailspin. Since I’d spent much of my time since Trump’s inauguration avoiding the news beyond major headlines, I began an ideological free fall, desperately clinging to parts of my woke social justice values that seemed silly and small amid global turmoil and the impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Like many other women, I outed men who sexually assaulted me publicly online for the first time as Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress. Unlike many other women, however, I kept going, as my Facebook statuses went from indignant to a level of unfiltered intensity I’m sure many found vaguely disturbing, skipping from rape apologist culture to the nature of online authenticity to my high school bullies.
**
The week of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, I got an IUD at Planned Parenthood, sincerely convinced that Roe v. Wade was on the chopping block. With my legs in stirrups as a novice nurse assistant tried and failed several times to insert the Mirena into my dilated cervix, I felt my brain revert to a primal state as the spring-loaded IUD finally shot past the cervical os. Clutching the forearm of another staff member, I cursed Donald Trump and the unevenly stacked Supreme Court of the United States for forcing me to finally do this as I vomited and nearly involuntarily shat myself.
Though the idea of a singular God spot in the brain has been disproven, I knew firsthand, for the first time in my life, why people turned to the concept of an Abrahamic God for comfort. “I knew then there was no God. There was only me, five strangers of color, and a disgusting amount of bodily fluids separating me from Animals,” I wrote at the time, hypomanic and my writing still vaguely coherent. I had sent a text to Sydney earlier that week, telling her about my life after treatment, that I thought of her and the work women like her had done so I had access to contraception. A few days after my IUD, I got a phone call out of the blue from another patient that I quickly declined, a sickening feeling coming over me that somehow knew it was about Sydney.
She never responded, because she hung herself on a weekend visit home.
I knew, even from my last few days there, that Sydney had been antsy about going home, permanently, that she was frustrated, after so much money and time, that she was still not feeling better. Now, she was gone. In a special center-wide meeting, they asked us not to tell the press about it. She was related, after all, to a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice.
To have grown up in Los Angeles is to accept, in many ways, the ordinariness of celebrities, business moguls, and the like–the Hollywood set that makes your wildest fantasies come true on screen. But to learn, suddenly, that I was one degree of separation away from the highest court in the country struck a different chord, one that would ultimately send me to the soft, grey edge between personal delusion and shared reality, a realization that would shake my sense of self to the core as I learned, truly, what even the substantial amount of money my professional parents made could not buy.
It could not buy, as Sydney knew firsthand, the ability to not only attend PCH, but weigh its costs and benefits against MacLean, Harvard’s inpatient psychiatric institute, which she told me was actually inferior to PCH for myriad reasons. Nor could it grant me access to UCLA, and thus one of the country’s, top practitioners of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a promising new form of electroshock therapy, which Sydney had begun to consider. It could not buy a life with casually turned down visits to the South of France or a life where I might casually meet Joan Didion for lunch, like she had.
I have always lived in a state of heightened class consciousness. I have always known I was affluent, because I got new clothes throughout the year, when my classmates growing up didn’t, because I didn’t have to work during college, and of course, because my parents had been able to afford PCH. But to come into contact with the sheer incredulity of power and influence, to be touched, however briefly, by the sheer unreality of the moneyed American elite, induced no small part of the psychosis that was to come.
When you are rapidly devolving into a state of mania, when your cell’s genetic fates, personal stressors, and life circumstances cosmically align to send you to the psychiatric ward not once, twice, but three times in a matter of a month and a half, it is difficult, but not impossible, to form a cohesive timeline of one’s life events. Between September, as the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings drew to a close and Capitol Hill made its decision on who to believe, and December, when I first joined Equinox, I present here one extremely abridged second-hand source, external police and medical record-verified version of events:
In mid-October, I went to Paris with M. When my mother found out, she threw me out of the house, calling me cheap. I became convinced that M., who is South Asian and Muslim, was a possible ISIS sympathizer after making jokes about taking me as a sex slave and witholding my passport. Like many people with a degree of paranoia, pathological or not, I was convinced the government was reading my messages online.
By Halloween, I was in the psych ward. Released five days later with a tentative bipolar diagnosis, I was able to vote in the midterm elections. I refused to take the antipsychotic medication. On the first day of the devastating Malibu fire, I drove into the burning hills with a friend who wanted to go to Nobu Malibu. By the third week of November, my mania had spun out of control, and I trashed M’s apartment. He brought me back to my mother’s, where they awkwardly met for the first time.
After being led away in handcuffs by Culver City police when a friend’s boyfriend, concerned about my online ranting, called for a “wellness check,” I would spend Thanksgiving and my 23rd birthday at Pacifica Hospital of the Valley–a Medi-Cal patient, in fact, after my father’s health insurance had kicked me off, and the only option my below-poverty line individual income allowed according to Covered California. At this point, of course, my family was heavily drawn into my psychiatric saga. Though compliant with the antipsychotic medication at this point, if only because I knew I had no other recourse and the looming possibility of conservatorship, I devised ways to get access to my laptop, phone, and car back, angry at my limited ability to contact M., my friends, and the outside world.
The third hospitalization, which lasted about a day, came about because I had trashed my parents’ house, angry about being on antipsychotic medication. “Calling in for a twenty four hour hold?” one of the cops said over the radio as I sat handcuffed in the back, again.
At Harbor-UCLA Behavioral Urgent Care, they changed my medication from Seroquel to Zyprexa, a milder, less sedating antipsychotic. Having gotten what I wanted, and finally careening from psychotic mania to a lesser hypomania, I was finally, in the larger context of what I understood was my life becoming a complete shitshow slapstick dramedy, content.
Exhausted from cleaning up the mess I’d made and talking to me when I was floridly manic, my mother and aunt sat on the couch as I sat in bed, still acutely aware of my literal insanity, yet also smug and cognizant of the fact both my family and the State of California would not let me become a homeless lunatic that somehow also had an extremely expensive out-of-pocket psychiatrist and therapist. Then came a knock at the door.
Two tall, blond, handsome all-American white men stood outside my house and produced some badges. The FBI had come to ask about M. My mother and aunt sat, gaping, open-mouthed, as I smiled, knowingly, that at least by the grace of god I was right about the government monitoring my messages. My friends, family, and therapist were completely exhausted, but I was still manically exuberant. A year later, a local police department psychologist confirmed this had occurred.
Psychosis, for me, did not end in the third psych ward, but petered out, slowly, between early December and Christmas as the Zyprexa finally hit, imparting a series of epiphanies along the way. The high drama of mania winding down, I attempted to find the new normal, settling, by way of unearthing long-buried adolescent ideals, on journalism as a new career path. Throwing out my MCAT prep books one day, I finally acknowledged that God might exist, the begrudging acceptance bringing the stretched corners of my brain a basic level of stability.
**
Wellness culture today lives at the crossroads of fantasy and reality, of wishful thinking and the faith in habits, supplements, or lifestyles heavy on anecdotal evidence and light on peer reviewed-support. I knew then, as I know now, that my psychotic bump in the road was cushioned by many uncontrollable aspects of my life: my parents’ general financial support, their rainy day fund for mental breakdowns and other family emergencies, my proximity to PCH, even M., the boyfriend who stepped in and up at the right time. My race and gender and wealth kept me from getting killed by the police who 5150’d me.
Sitting in the tatters of my life immediately post-mania, I understood there was so much work to be done, but before that, I had to get myself better. And in a state of sheer, smug ecstasy, driven by hypomanic assuredness that the bullshittery of my life was indeed absurd, from first wanting to die in Death Valley to Sydney vis-a-vis the Supreme Court to the Medi-Cal insurance hole I had paradoxically fallen into, I accepted my fate as a member of the American bourgeoisie and joined Equinox.