Wishful Drinking

Because I have to admit (well, I don’t have to), periodically I have had drug slips. All in, I’ve had about four or five slips since I first started going to twelve-step support groups at the age of twenty-eight. Making that four or five slips in twenty-three years, which is not great. I mean, I’m not proud that I wasn’t able to remain sober that entire time—especially in terms of my daughter, who has had to suffer the most from these largely inexcusable forays back down the dark path that is drug use. The most painful thing about returning to this dark planet is seeing the look of disappointment and hurt that these forays invariably put in the eyes of your loved ones. But ultimately you could say that I don’t have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety. And it wasn’t Alcoholics Anonymous that failed me—it’s that I have, on occasions, failed them by not working what they call a good program. But I keep going back. I’m as addicted to all the things A.A. has to offer as I am to the things that made me need those groups in the first place.

But when I first got to twelve-step land—after my stomach pumping incident—I thought, Okay, fine then, this is what the matter is with me. I’m not going to shrinks anymore. My best shrinking and thinking got me into emergency rooms all over Southern California. So I planned to be an all-meeting-all-the-time gal. Psychiatrists were a thing of the past. Why, they hadn’t even told me I was an alcoholic! So screw them—especially the doctor who tried to convince me I was hypomanic. Huh! Fat lot he knew. Well, as it turned out, what he knew was an extremely fat lot after all because over the next year of getting and staying clean and sober all the people I’d come into the program with were calming down and leveling out while I seemed to be doing just the opposite. Quick to excite, to agitate, to engage, to anger—I was heading straight up into the rafters of my overly good or bad time.

In short—okay, fine, yes, I know it’s far too late for that—I was manic, the monster was out of the box, the cat was out of the bag, and it appeared after a year of erratic sobriety that I was en route back to the shrinks and psychopharmacologists I imagined myself not needing anymore. Without the substances, I had used to distort and mask my symptoms, it was now all too clear that I was a bona fide, wild-ride manic-depressive. And this initially dismaying discovery led me to my third and best shrink, Beatriz Foster, who turned out to be the psychiatrist who finally got me to address my manic-depression.

And I ultimately not only addressed it, I named my two moods Roy and Pam. Roy is Rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood, and Pam is Sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs. (Pam stands for “piss and moan.”) One mood is the meal, and the next mood is the check.

There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I’m not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense of being in control of the craziness. Now this is a delusion, but it’s my delusion and I’m sticking with it. It’s sort of like: I have problems but problems don’t have me.

Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of people are totally batshit.

But having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you’re manic depressive, OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I’m surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I’ve taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I’d share with you.

So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you’re mentally disordered. If you say yes to any number of these questions, you, too, could be insane.

1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable?

2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight?

3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people?

4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to?

5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued?

6. Do you think about sex a lot?

If you don’t say yes to any of these questions either you’re lying, or you don’t speak English, or you’re illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you quite a few chapters ago.

9 AN ALTERED, FALTERING SELF

Now, come back with me to when I was first told that I was an alcoholic—which greatly relieved me by the way, because I knew something was the matter with me, so I thought, “Great! That’s it—that’s what I’ve been struggling with (and enjoying) all this time! Fantastic!”