Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen

What if, instead of being diagnosed—being called mentally ill—what if I had been able to receive care for its own sake. To be in distress, to ask for care, to receive it. What if there were space in this world for care.

A book is a way to speak to someone, across time and space.

I may have said: it is the perfect escape, isn’t it? To lose your mind. To go mad. To fall apart, go crazy, all of it. To become a patient. To need help and to receive help. To be cared for. I would have added: the perfect escape becomes a trap. You learn this soon enough. You escape and then you begin to play the part, people respond to you that way, the role you are in. And there you are, trapped. It might become your life.

We felt helpless, and yet this wasn't linked to the growing inequality and social isolation of the 1980s postwelfare state. The aggressive backlash to the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements of the sixties. We needed help and felt shame for asking. We had failed in some sense of an American individualist imperative. We had an obligation to recover. The narrative of progression. This was not only for the medical-pharmaceutical establishment which required our before and after stories, but also for a culture that locates mental illness in the self and not the society. If it doesn't quite work this way, there was no acknowledgment of that. There weren't stories of the ones who don't recover, or get better and worse over and over again.

I did not know what to do with all that twenty-year old want, and who ever does?

Is Hamlet mad or is he acting madness? How can anyone know the difference?

These moments of remaining alone in my apartment, of not going to asylum, were minor victories, even if the thought of keeping myself alive was worse than the thought of death.

If I could explain my madness, it would be the persistence of a certain feeling--I remember the feeling but I can no longer feel it--the memory of it is vivid, and enough. It came over me around twilight. The intensity of a great, irrevocable loss would wash over me and with it, the absolute certainty that I would not survive it. Strange you can remember the texture of a feeling without feeling it. With this as measure, I know I got better. But I also grew up, and no feeling is final, and I came to understand the waves of feeling, to know this too shall pass. Every once in a while I'll feel a sadness or a loneliness that will remind me of the mad feeling, but it is nowhere as strong, and more importantly, it is never concomitant with the belief that it will last forever.

The Yellow Wallpaper" seemed to me now to be the story of what can happen when you listen to a doctor-when you buy into your "case-history construction." When you don't listen to yourself, when you place your trust and authority elsewhere. The narrator loses her mind completely, becomes the madwoman, the identity they've given her. The "rationale" for their treatment of her is now confirmed; she is sick, indeed. This is what can happen: You are seen as mad, you begin acting mad.

It was one of those decisions you make only to yourself, quietly, the kind of New Year's resolution you aren't sure you'll keep. I could only claim it as a choice years later, after it became part of me. It wasn't triumphant or bold; I was fragile and terrified. But I saw my life as the dead end it was. I had wasted too many years. Living the rest of my life as a career patient scared me, but so did the fate of the women in my college, reading The Wall Street Journal, getting internships or going to graduate school. It felt like a betrayal. I mourned my illness, the hospital. I grieved the years I spent in that system. It was something like being in a relationship--and then realizing that it was false or full of holes. There was nothing more to do. Once you saw through it, you had to leave. Either that, or accept the lack.

Telling these stories, I think now, was a way of not mourning. Remembering my mother in these moments of conflict or disappointment--this allowed me to keep our fights going. Fighting is a way to refuse to lose someone. If you keep the fight alive, you might never deal with the loss, the vulnerability of it, the deep sadness, the irrevocable and baffling fact of a total loss.

I became a writer because I believe in that part of me who is not limited by age or gender or time or disability - yet still I am afraid to say it. Yes, I was ill.

Only in retrospect might I say I loved it there. I didn't love it. It became familiar. I got used to it. I became dependent upon it. This is not love.

Getting older, which isn’t a decision so much as inevitable, if you stick around to find out. This isn’t transcendence but it is committing to life and sticking with it. It’s far more tedious than climactic…I did get better, in many large and small ways, and it is the reading and writing that sustained me, gave me another life. It is my life…All this thinking about books had made me into a person, an artist. This was real life, and I’d worked so long to make it real, more real than any diagnosis had ever been...

I myself have internalized the self-loathing that at times can make me feel ashamed to be writing this book. But I also believe that, as my heroes have shown me, this is where a writer must go.