< previous · next >
table of contents
My mother got me into Four Winds Hospital—a long-term residential treatment center in Katonah, New York. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t spiral. She just handled it.
This was where she shined.
In crisis, in emotional upheaval—she became the ground beneath us.
She had done it when my father was dying.
She did it again now.
The place looked more like a ski resort than a psychiatric hospital: manicured lawns, winding paths, cedar-shake buildings nestled in rolling hills. There was even a tennis court.
It was beautiful in the way expensive places often are. But the beauty was a kind of lie. The exterior whispered wellness. Inside was brittle.
It looked like healing. It felt like a sentence.
It wasn’t where I pictured turning twenty-one.
At first, they placed me in the rehab unit while the doctors tried to figure out what had broken. It was clear the LSD played a role. But they suspected something deeper. Something endogenous. Something dangerous. Within weeks, they moved me to the adolescent ward.
I told myself I didn’t belong there. But underneath, I was afraid I did.
I kept thinking about the ocean. San Diego. Salt in my hair. Wax under my feet. The part of me that felt whole. Solid. Real.
But a darker thought had started to form—
What if that version of me was just a veneer?
What if this—this broken thing rising up—was the truth?
The first diagnosis was schizoaffective disorder—a hybrid of schizophrenia and mood disorder. It scared me. It scared everyone.
Eventually, they softened it to Bipolar I.
That still scared everyone.
The label came with criteria like a checklist of who I no longer got to be: elevated mood, racing thoughts, risky behavior, grandiosity. I ticked every box.
But what hit harder than the diagnosis was the shift in how I was seen. A new identity had been assigned to me—chemical imbalance, mood disorder, someone broken. Not someone who had touched the truth.
The only part of me that had ever felt whole—the glimpse, the connection, the light—was now the part I was being told to abandon.
If I wanted care, if I wanted to be accepted, to be loved—I had to disown the very thing that had made me feel true.
They started me on lithium. At first, it dulled the highs. Then it dulled everything. I began sleeping ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. When I was awake, my thoughts moved like sludge. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t hold an idea in my head for more than a few seconds. There was a weight a pressing down on me like gravity had increased.
I gained seventy pounds. My golden hair darkened. My skin turned pale. My lean surfer’s body thickened into something slow and unfamiliar.
Everything became too much. Every task, a mountain.
People who haven’t experienced depression often think it’s sadness. It’s not. It’s absence. Color drained from the world. Food that tastes like cardboard. The impossibility of joy. Sleep becomes the only escape—but even that feels thin.
Our room was at the top of the unit—a converted turn-of-the-century mansion with wide oak plank floors. The boards groaned underfoot like they were bearing the weight of the house itself. As if the floor had grown tired of holding people.
Trudging up the stairs each night at the assigned hour didn’t feel like rest. It felt like resignation. A quiet surrender. Not to stillness—but to erasure.
The building wasn’t cruel. The lighting was soft. The staff was kind enough. But none of it reached me. I was drifting—suspended in a space between selves. Disconnected. Untethered.
It wasn’t sadness. It was the absence of everything that once made me feel real.
Falling asleep wasn’t relief. It was a brief forgetting. A way to disappear for a while without having to die.
But still—somewhere beneath the chemical stillness that coated everything, a faint pull remained. A memory of sunlight. The warmth of salt water. The quiet sense that I had once belonged in a world that still held color.
I spent six months at Four Winds. The days were structured, but in the way prisons are structured. Sign-in sheets. Group therapy. Medication reviews. Everything tracked. Everything labeled. I barely remember most of it.
A long, anesthetized fog, broken only by occasional flickers of motion: a softball game, being named patient council president, a slow lap in the pool, the thud of a tennis ball echoing across an empty court.
And missing California. Missing the sun. The ocean. The version of me that still felt possible. I called Mike sometimes, trying to find the thread back. But it always felt just out of reach.
Toward the end of my stay, my mom received a letter. Insurance was pulling out—refusing to cover the extended treatment. Eventually it got sorted, but the message was clear: my time was up.
I wasn’t going home.
They placed me in a halfway house—a transitional group home for people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities. My roommates were kind, but deeply impaired. One had spina bifida. Another had the soft eyes and gentle demeanor of someone whose childhood never quite ended.
I had a twin bed. A dark room. Rotating chores.
I remember thinking: Is this who I am now?
One afternoon, Barry visited with a family friend. I felt like a ghost. Not ashamed of what I’d done. Just ashamed of what I had become.
Even simple tasks were hard. Depression was a lead blanket. I’d lie in bed, looping thoughts like rosary beads, trying to solve the puzzle of myself. But the puzzle had no edges. No picture. Just grey.
Eventually, I made a plan.
I enrolled at Stony Brook University. Took three classes: philosophy, Buddhism, and studio art. I hoped to transfer the credits back to UCSD and return to something like a life.
The campus was bleak. That winter was one of the coldest I remember. I parked in the top level of the parking garage—wind howling across black ice and slush. Grey skies pressed down like a lid.
Every morning, I crossed the freezing concrete in silence, breath clouding the air. And sometimes, when the wind cut sharp across my face and the cold pierced deep into my lungs, something stirred. Just for a second, the lithium fog would thin—and I could feel the faintest current of energy return to my chest. Not clarity. Not hope. But contact.
The classes didn’t help. Philosophy was taught like math. Buddhism like taxonomy. The kind of disembodied knowledge that made me feel even less human.
One day I carved a complaint into the desk—something about how mind-numbing the class was. A few days later, someone etched back: “Then maybe you should leave.”
It wasn’t kind. But it cut through.
A reply.
A voice, through the fog.
Art didn’t save me. But it let in a crack of light.
We worked with wood and metal—welding, grinding, shaping. Sparks. Heat. The friction of matter giving way.
It wasn’t the materials that mattered.
It was the feeling that I could still make something.
Still shape the world around me.
Still leave a mark that meant something.
For a few hours each week, I returned.
Not fully. But enough.
Presence doesn’t need to last. It just needs to be touched.
And I was touching it again.
By spring, something began to move.
I had moved back into my childhood home.
The forsythia bloomed outside my bedroom window—yellow against grey. In the corners of the yard, crocus bulbs pushed up through patches of melting snow, small and defiant.
Life, insisting.
I was making plans again. I had housing lined up in San Diego. A psychiatrist who’d help taper me off the meds. A class schedule waiting.
Sunlight, pressing through the crack.
Many readers have told me they set aside time for each chapter, letting it echo into their own lives. If the bell rings in you, consider passing it on—someone else may be listening for the same tone. And if you’d like, leave your reflections below; your voice adds another note to the resonance.
You kept moving forward through a difficult period, slowly but surely.