After I left the UCLA psychiatric hospital, after I retrieved the notes I’d left in Haines Hall, I went back to my apartment in Palms. In the two weeks that I had been hospitalized, my roommate had moved out, returned to her home in South Korea. I told myself she had been motivated to leave because of the Coronavirus pandemic, but a small part of me wondered if I had scared her too badly. I would never know.
The next day, I turned twenty-six. A cookie, a tart, a cannoli, a tiramisu arranged in a neat circle on my favorite plate. I stuck two candles into the tiramisu and lit them. A glass of champagne in hand, I sang happy birthday, my off-key notes echoing round the lonely apartment. As I blew out the candles, I could feel the world slipping out from under me. I had bipolar disorder with psychotic features. Nothing was ever going to be the same.
For one thing, I found I couldn’t get my body to relax at all. My chest was tight. My breathing was shallow. Metal cords tied my heart up in knots. I was scared of everything. I didn’t know what my diagnosis meant. Had my illness eaten away my higher decision-making functions? Would the medications turn me into a completely different person? Would I ever be able to lead a normal life? And oh, oh, oh, the awful shame of what had happened between Kannan and me. How could I have imagined all that in my head? How could I have scared him like that? How could I ever trust my own mind again?
As part of my discharge, I was enrolled in an Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) offered through UCLA. Four days a week, I had to take the bus to a building that sat right across from the UCLA psychiatric hospital. Every time I looked up at that chrome-lettered sign, the tinted windows, the gated area where we were taken outside for fresh air, a shiver passed through me. The specter of relapse cast a long shadow.
The days at IOP were broken up into four hour-long sessions and a lunch break. Each session was led by a rotation of licensed clinical social workers who taught us topics ranging from psychology and therapeutic approaches to mindfulness, self-compassion, and crisis management. There were worksheets and group discussions. Sometimes the sessions were dreary and intolerable. Sometimes, they were eye-opening, helpful. Breathing into my mask, I wondered at the strange places my life had taken me.
The last session of the day was reserved for group therapy. Eight to ten of us, sitting in a circle, masks on, socially distant. Every one of us, fresh from a hospitalization or a severe episode. When the session started, a hollow sadness would begin to vibrate. Group therapy was the first time I heard another person talk about psychosis. It was jarring. A thin slip of a girl with big, brown eyes, I learned that she too knew what it was like to detach from reality, to return to the devastation that your mind had wrought. Before I met her, it had never occurred to me that there was anyone in the world who would really understand my story. But there she was. A girl just like me. I was not so unique after all. A relief. A sorrow.
IOP kept me busy for six weeks, distracted. When it ended, anxiety over my dreaded master’s thesis rushed in to fill the void. My chest strained. My heart sat heavy. Alternating between weed and alcohol to try and relax my hypertense body, I sat in front of my laptop in one-hour stints trying to crack the damn thing. The problem was I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do the readings. I couldn’t put together the literature review or the theoretical framework. I couldn’t string more than two sentences together in an academic style. Every day, I waded through thick and murky waters only to scoop up a nonsensical hodgepodge of empty words. My paper grew to be as sickly as me.
After two months of working like this, all I had to show for my painful labor was a lean research report, a sparse summary of my fieldwork and key findings that wasn’t even close to being a piece of academic work. My ‘thesis’ was an embarrassment. I hated it. I hated looking at it. I hated thinking about it. Still, it was important to me to turn something in, to at least try and meet the basic expectations of my graduate program. So, even though I knew it didn’t meet the requirements, I submitted my pitiful excuse for a thesis to my committee. While I waited to hear back from the faculty, I tried to ignore the awful ache in my stomach. I soothed myself: it was the best I could do at the time. But my shoulders stayed hunched, waiting for the inevitable blow.
I received my feedback a week later. Just as I had suspected, my committee wanted me to rewrite the entire paper. My heart fell. I was spent. There was no way I could do this all again, not now. My body would not stand for it. A nervous wreck, I called my committee chair and gave him the briefest version of what had happened to me over the last academic year. Voice cracking, I told him that I couldn’t do a rewrite in time to meet the extension deadline. Silence. I held my breath, waiting for him to tell me to pack it all up, to leave the program if I couldn’t do the work. Instead, he suggested that I take a leave of absence for a year, spend the time recovering, work on my master’s thesis at a slower pace, try again next year. A lifeline – not an outright rejection of my work or my potential to continue on with my doctoral program. A year off. Yes, that was the only logical choice left to make.
But a leave of absence meant no income. No income meant I had to say goodbye to my beautiful apartment, to Los Angeles, to my independence. No income meant I had to move back in with my parents in Virginia. How shameful. What a privilege. It’s only for a year, I whispered to myself, I’ll be back. But even then, I knew. If I left, I was never going to return.
Moving again for the second time in eight months. There was so much I had to get done before I could leave. I had to sell off the furniture, the bed I loved curling up in, the grey couch I adored with its sinking cushions, the white desk with hairpin legs that I had toiled over the past two years. I had to give away all the trinkets, the dishware, the art supplies I had bought thinking I’d be in Los Angeles for the next four years. Whatever I couldn’t donate, I had to throw out. For a week, I whittled down my belongings until they fit into two suitcases. Despite the dull dread that pressed down on my shoulders, I got everything done in record time. A faint phantom of my first manic episode floated above me.
Five days left in Los Angeles. Nothing else to do, I smoked weed and watched tv all day. I ordered from my favorite takeout places and went to Venice Beach, Koreatown, Echo Park. The few friends I had left invited me over for dinner and I pressed their palms in gratitude. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
On my way to the airport, I kept my eyes on the palm trees that dotted the horizon. There was so much of Los Angeles that reminded me of Thiruvananthapuram. The breeze from the sea, the explosion of humanity, but most of all the palm trees. I would miss the city. Though I had found a great darkness while walking its streets, I had also been happy here.
As the plane tilted away and the ground fell out from under me, I leaned my forehead against the window, looking out at the vast sprawl of Los Angeles, the glittering ocean, the concrete blocks, the thick ribbons of highways. My home for two years, a place where I’d blossomed and suffered, the city had forever changed the way I saw myself. Oh, Los Angeles, teeming with lush flowers and bright flavors, heady hedonism and impeccable aesthetics, cheery sunshine and rolling hills – what rich texture it had brought to my life. I pressed a hand to my heart in gratitude.
One final glimpse, and then it too was gone.
Coming home was the right decision. My family, my friends, my people were there to catch me while I collapsed into grief.
In a year, I had lost so much of what had mattered to me – my independence, my purpose, my drive. Now, I was the loser who couldn’t hack graduate school, who had to move back in with her parents, who had no source of income, who had no real plan for her life. Worse than that, I was certifiably crazy. In a year, I had become all that I had feared.
For months, I cried every single day.
No graduate school, no job, there was so much time to fill. Twice, I tried writing my master’s thesis, but I couldn’t get past the introduction. I had nothing to say and even if I did, I didn’t have the skills to write it. After the second attempt, I put it aside for good. Another failure I would have to learn to live with. I was devastated.
At that inflection point, Ellen, my therapist, suggested that I take a month or two to focus on my recovery, to embrace the downtime that my leave of absence afforded me. Join a course on self-compassion, she said, find a support group. Take it easy, Anjana. I promise, you are not running out of time.
I didn’t believe her, but I was desperate for any help, anything that would relieve me of the anxiety and depression that hung onto me. So, I signed up for the self-compassion course Ellen recommended. I found a support group. I bought a workbook on bipolar disorder. I checked out books from the library on bipolar disorder and mental illness. I started running every other day. I asked my father to teach me meditation. I sat with my mother as she prayed.
And even though none of it ever felt like enough, slowly but surely, the depression began to lift. As I read more, I began to understand my mental health condition. I began to accept it, even if I didn’t like it. The folks I met at the support group were warm and encouraging. Like the group therapy sessions at IOP, communing with other people who dealt with mental health conditions normalized my experiences. But most important of all, sitting with my father to meditate helped me become friends with my mind once again. Meditation cleared away the rubble that had been left behind, so that I could finally begin to heal.
So, here we are now, friends. We have caught up to the present moment. I am now halfway through my leave of absence from graduate school. I am still attending support group, running, meditating, sitting with my mother for prayer. In the past seven months, since returning to Virginia, I have changed a lot. Recovery has been a frustratingly slow, steady, sometimes imperceptible process, but growth has occurred, nonetheless. For one, I no longer think of myself as a crazy loser, rather a resilient human being who is taking the time to figure life out. I am proud of the progress I have made.
I still do not know what the future holds for me. Even though I haven’t yet closed the door, I do not think I will complete my master’s thesis or return to UCLA. I must take a different path, one I have yet to discover, but one I now believe exists. It makes me nervous, the not knowing, but I am learning to sit with the uncomfortable. I hate it, but I’m doing it.
Even though it has been incredibly hard at times, writing these blog posts has been therapeutic for me. To explain what happened to me, I had to look at the events of the past year and a half with some measure of objectivity, with distance. In drafting each blog post, I was able to put to rest a different phase of my mental illness. As a result, this process has given me much peace.
Mental illness is real. It is complex. It affects us all, whether we live with it or are somehow related to someone who lives with it. So, be kind, even when things get scary, especially when things get scary. It can save a life.
Thank you for joining me on this journey.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Originally posted on a now defunct personal blogging website.
