Wishful Drinking

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.