Girl, Interrupted: List 4

I began to feel revulsion too. Insane people: I had a good nose for them and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.

I didn't like her because she didn't understand that this was me, and I was going to be a writer, I was not going to type term bills or sell au gratin bowls or do any other stupid things.

But is this interpreter necessarily metaphysical and unembodied? Isn't it probably a number—an enormous number—of brain functions working in parallel?

If the entire network of simultaneous tiny actions that constitute a thought were identified and mapped, then "mind" might be visible.

"I'm your mind," it claims. "You can't parse me into dendrites and synapses."

An exemplary piece of confusion:
INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger—that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!

An optical illusion does contain two realities. It's not that the vase is wrong and the faces are right; both are right, and the brain moves between two existing patterns that it recognizes as different. Although you can make yourself dizzy going from vase to faces and back again, you can't undermine your sense of reality in quite such a visceral way as you can with the train.

Sometimes, when you've realized that your train is not really moving, you can spend another half a minute suspended between two realms of consciousness: the one that knows you aren't moving and the one that feels you are. You can flit back and forth between these perceptions and experience a sort of mental vertigo.

The patient must lay out the often fantastic assertions of the first interpreter and scrutinize them with the second.

Depression, manic-depression, schizophrenia: All that stuff they always had trouble treating they now treat chemically. Take two Lithium and don't call me in the morning because there's nothing to say; it's innate.

Schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type (borderline)—currently in remission.

An essential feature of this disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships, and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.

A marked and persistent identity disturbance is almost invariably present.

This is often pervasive, and is manifested by uncertainty about several life issues, such as self-image, sexual orientation, long-term goals or career choice, types of friends or lovers to have, and which values to adopt.

Affective instability is common. This may be evidenced by marked mood shifts from baseline mood to depression, irritability, or anxiety, usually lasting a few hours or, only rarely, more than a few days.

In addition, these people often have inappropriately intense anger with frequent displays of temper or recurrent physical fights.

Frequently this disorder is accompanied by many features of other Personality Disorders, such as Schizotypal, Histrionic, Narcissistic, and Antisocial Personality Disorders.

During periods of extreme stress, transient psychotic symptoms may occur, but they are generally of insufficient severity or duration to warrant an additional diagnosis.

In Identity Disorder there is a similar clinical picture, but Borderline Personality Disorder preempts the diagnosis of Identity Disorder if the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder are met, the disturbance is sufficiently pervasive and persistent, and it is unlikely that it will be limited to a developmental stage....

It's a fairly accurate picture of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound. Of course, it doesn't aim to be profound. It's not even a case study. It's a set of guidelines, a generalization.

I relish that last phrase. Its awkwardness (the "to have" seems superfluous) gives it substance and heft.

"[I]nstability of self-image, interpersonal relationships, and mood...uncertainty about...long-term goals or career choice..." Isn't this a good description of adolescence? Moody, fickle, faddish, insecure: in short, impossible.

Wrist-banging—slow, steady, mindless—was a better solution. It was cumulative injury, so each bang was tolerable.

Part of the point was that nobody knew about my suffering. If people knew and admired—or abominated—me, something important would be lost.

My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it; even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself ("counteract feelings of 'numbness'"). I was demonstrating, externally and irrefutably, an inward condition.

Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of the normal?

"In Identity Disorder there is a similar clinical picture, but Borderline Personality...preempts the diagnosis...if the disturbance is sufficiently pervasive and...it is unlikely that it will be limited to a developmental stage."

One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have. The result was chronic emptiness and boredom. There were more pernicious results as well: self-loathing, alternating with "inappropriately intense anger with frequent displays of temper…”

Quite often now, people say to me, when I tell them I didn't go to college, "Oh, how marvelous!" They wouldn't have thought it was so marvelous back then. They didn't; my classmates were just the sorts of people who now tell me how marvelous I am. In 1966, I was a pariah.

They were all seventeen and miserable, just like me. They didn't have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most. Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.

After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity.

Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward.

I have a few more annotations to my diagnosis.

I'd think about it and make myself sad over my premature death, and then I'd feel better. The idea of suicide worked on me like a purgative or a cathartic.

I could see that Georgina had a certain cachet because of her craziness; somehow, this cachet did not apply to me.

"I want—" Lisa faltered. I'd never before seen her at a loss for words.

"Oh, well," she said rather jauntily.

My favorite part was gene-recession charts. I liked working out the sequence of blue eyes in families that had no characteristics except blue eyes and brown eyes. My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me.

The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.