Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (27 page)

I won’t suggest that I was the perfect wife, or even, for a long time, a good one. No question, living with me was not a picnic. But
Happy in Galoshes
was just cruel. It was a school night and I used that excuse to drive the kids home. Once they were safely tucked in, I let the emotions come.

The name of this chapter is courtesy of my son, Noah.

I use TV’s
Law & Order
series (all of them) as an escape in much the same way that others use a bag of Cheetos. (Okay, I’ll be honest, I use the Cheetos, too.) Recently, I was left feeling sad, angry, and very frustrated at the end of an
L&O
episode. How many story lines about bipolar killers are they going to come up with? There are headlines about grim new ways to off people every
day, and this is the best they can do?
L&O
killers never take their meds, are delusional, and talk to themselves. Even during my greatest unmedicated lapse into insanity, the thought of murdering someone never crept into even the darkest part of my mind, unless you count my wanting to karate chop Dick Wolf,
Law & Order’
s producer.

Statistically, mental illness rarely equals mayhem and murder, especially when it’s diagnosed and treated. Most times, the person whose mind is wracked by the illness is far more frightened (and helpless and vulnerable to someone else’s abuse) than anyone on the outside looking in. The words
mental illness
carry a terrible weight. Lurid headlines notwithstanding, all schizophrenics do not push people off train platforms into the path of oncoming trains, all manic-depressives do not burn their husbands’ clothing, all addicts do not sleep under bridges or rob little old ladies. It’s a human truth that some people, no matter if their personality types are in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
or not, behave badly toward others. But not all of them.

We are capable of social change—we’ve done it before. Three generations ago, a dignified pregnant woman rarely even came out of her house after the fourth or fifth month; in our grandparents’ generation, few people with cancer spoke of their illness, sometimes not even to a family physician. And nobody ever acknowledged, let alone embraced, the family drunk. These days, moms-to-be walk on the beach in bikinis, showing off the baby bumps that celebrate new life. Many cancer survivors who’ve lost hair due to chemo walk baldly and proudly on the street, demonstrating a fierce, defiant courage that humbles the rest of us. Politicians, astronauts, actors, doctors, teachers, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters—these are
the people who stand up in twelve-step meetings, struggling to heal and take responsibility for their behaviors and their futures. We’ve worked hard to change our attitudes (with different degrees of success) toward Down syndrome and autistic kids, high-functioning Asperger’s professionals, and people of many different ethnicities and religious beliefs. It might take some longer than others, but people can change their minds about people who have mental illness.

I’m not equating pregnancy or cancer with addiction or bipolar disorder. I’m simply saying that knowledge and empathy can change the way we treat one another. And I’m certainly not asking that everything on television or in the movies be a very special episode in which we are “instructed” in political correctness and the happy ending is wrapped up in a big yellow bow. That would be beyond boring. But in my humble, medicated, therapized opinion, repeatedly flogging (and perpetuating) a stereotype isn’t creative, it’s just lazy. And if you’re on the receiving end of it, it eventually hurts.

As I write,
it’s been more than two years since the Great Bonfire of 2007. As time passed and my meds began kicking in, denial of my diagnosis slowly slipped away—like friends from school, I’d see it less and less. But like old friends who pop up out of nowhere and Facebook me, denial occasionally rears its ugly head. This is when people I love and trust step up and do that “ahem” thing: Mary, pay attention.

I’ve grown surprisingly comfortable with
BIPOLAR
stamped on my forehead and am committed to staying with my docs and my meds. That said, I really wish I didn’t have to down two handfuls of pills
every day. Right now I’m on Lamictal (a mood stabilizer especially for the depression cycle), Abilify (a mood stabilizer specific to the mania), Concerta (a slow-release version of Ritalin for my ADHD), and Provigil (what Dr. Pylko describes as “wakefulness-promoting agent”—it helps with the ADHD and with keeping me out of my comfy bed in the daytime). The occasional visit from denial reminds me that I was far more creative and productive without them. The darkest parts of me are gone, but so is some of the light. My mom thinks I’m not as funny as I used to be, and many days I feel like I should file for creative bankruptcy. The deciding factor is that the kids don’t give a shit whether Mommy can write poetry. They just want to know that crazy ain’t coming back.

I wish I’d understood early on how my dad’s struggle with addiction might have predicted my own. Maybe that knowledge would’ve made no difference at all—given my stubbornness and will, my life may well have proceeded exactly as it did. But as Dr. Pylko says, “Genes are not destiny—they’re information.” For someone who believes there’s no such thing as a stupid question, information is like oxygen.

There’s another crucial piece of information I’ve recently discovered: My grandma Rosa, hospitalized now with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, is bipolar, too. I was visiting her one day after my bonfire breakdown, and snuck a look at her chart (medical charts have become like road maps to me). Listed on that chart were all the medications she was taking; I recognized one of them immediately—Lamictal, a mood stabilizer that was in my own medicine cabinet. “Why is she taking this?” I asked her doctor.

“Because she’s bipolar,” he answered.

I found out that she’d been diagnosed well before I was. This, too, would have been helpful to know. I’m not sure what I would’ve done
with the knowledge, but I’m fairly certain I would’ve liked to have it, especially the first time a doctor said those words to me. Maybe it’s not as pretty a picture as “Oh, you have your grandmother’s eyes,” but it’s part of who I am.

Not long ago
, I asked Scott, “If you’d never gone to that barbecue in high school and seen your friends in the band—and decided you wanted to do that, too—would you still have struggled with addiction?”

“I’m pretty sure that drugs would have been over for me after high school,” he said. That’s not to say he would never have touched a drug again, and he knows drinking likely would have still posed a problem. But heroin, needles, and everything that goes with that? No way. When I heard him confirm my suspicion, for a minute I wanted to go back in time and cut him off with my bike before he could walk into that backyard barbecue. How different our life together might’ve been.

Sporadically through the years I’ve continued to take an occasional college course, first at Santa Monica College, then at San Diego City College. Just as I did with the baby books, I’ve read everything I could find about addiction and co-occurring disorders, and especially bipolar disorder.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that releases when we’re happy. It’s a major part of feeling pleasure—in babies, in sunshine, in sex, and love. With addiction, the brain becomes confused about which is the “high” reaction and which is a legitimate reaction to nice stimulus—so it stops producing dopamine on its own. Reduced dopamine can create or accelerate ADHD; at the extreme
end, it may also contribute to Parkinson’s disease. This is the kind of hangover that aspirin won’t touch.

An inability to produce dopamine is also one reason why becoming sober doesn’t ensure instant happiness—the little factory inside your head that produces happy has been shut down. It takes a lot of time to rebuild those pathways and turn on production again. For many addicts, sadness lingers for a long time after recovery begins, and that’s where the traps lie in wait. Steve Jones once said he believed Kurt Cobain could have made it into recovery and be alive today if only he’d had the help to get through the first year after he tried to quit heroin. The brain, which is so elastic in childhood, loses that ability in adulthood. We have to help it heal. We put casts on broken legs. We can do the equivalent for brains.

Some of the books that have landed on my bookshelf in the past couple of years include
An Unquiet Mind, Manic, Electroboy
, Carrie Fisher’s
Wishful Drinking
, Brooke Shields’s book about postpartum disorder,
Down Came the Rain
, and Augusten Burroughs’s
Dry
. In each of these, I’ve found parts of my story, but I haven’t found myself. So many of the popular books on bipolar disorder primarily feature mania, or manic episodes. I struggled mostly with depression, and I couldn’t find that book. The more I learn about my brain, the more I want to know. I realize I’ll never live long enough to fully understand what happened to me. But I know what I need to do to take care of myself and my children. I hope, as does almost anyone who writes a memoir detailing her struggles, that a reader may see him- or herself in these pages, and not feel as isolated or as lost as I did for so long.

The cover of Carrie Fisher’s book features the iconic image of
Princess Leia. Noah saw it one day and asked, “Is that a
Star Wars
book?” I told him no, that it was a book by the actress who played Princess Leia, who is bipolar just like Mommy. Some variety of relief passed over his face—there’s much about the past couple of years that has confused or scared him. But Princess Leia is bipolar, too? It was as though my heavy little guy got somehow lighter at the news.

I never got the chance to be a full-time college student and I never will. But I can see myself still taking classes at eighty, and perhaps someday working in the field of addiction recovery. Addiction and mental disorders isolate us—we need one another. I’d like to help, as I have been helped. As I’m helped every day. Maybe I could be a sober companion to a woman who’s beginning sobriety. And it doesn’t matter to me if an addict is ready to get better or isn’t quite there yet—I’ve been both and received guidance at every step. No one made my character or morality or worth a condition of helping me. They just kept reaching out. I fell, got up, fell down again—and still they reached out. I have seen some of the worst in human behavior, but I have also been blessed to see, and be healed by, some of the best. Hope is a key word when you are feeling helpless.

Guilt leads to relapse, so I work hard not to make guilt a traveling partner. Through it all, I never lost the sense of right and wrong I was raised with—it was simply buried temporarily and I couldn’t hear it. Regardless of where I am now and what I’ve learned, my parents will always have a former junkie for a daughter, and because I married a public figure, there is no place to hide from that. Gratitude rolls over me when I realize I’ve been blessed with parents who don’t engage in denial. We are a family that finds humor in everything, no matter how crappy and embarrassing the topic may be. We
don’t hide behind forced smiles and consistent good moods. It boils down to anything from “Eh, what are you gonna do?” to “Sweet Jesus, this is a load of shit!” In fact, a friend gave me a pen called the Sweet Jesus pen. The first time I tried to write with it, it didn’t work. I looked at it and said, “Sweet Jesus, will you work?” and it did. A lesson in “ask for what you need.”

It’s amazing how it feels to finally let go of resentments. I’m not going to toot my grown-up horn and tell you that I’ve mastered this, but I’m getting better at it. I can almost guarantee my progress in this department comes from laziness—it requires too much energy to hold on to negative feelings. Dealing with depression, mania, and addiction has made me a more compassionate person. Everyone has a sadness. I try to forgive based on that.

I have bad days and good days, but everybody does. There is no such thing as happily ever after, or riding into the sunset—that’s not a life, that’s a romantic comedy, and it’s fiction. I continue to see Bernie Fried and Dr. Timothy Pylko. I suppose there will come a day when I no longer do, but I can’t imagine my life without their wisdom and counsel in it. And I go to AA meetings, two years after giving up wine-thirty, although I don’t go every day, and I don’t go as often as I should. It helps that I’ve made sober friends. Addicts are knee-deep in negative thoughts, which is why I try to go to meetings where the speakers are funny. Living in L.A., many times I get lucky and get an actual comedian. By and large (in my opinion), comedians are a mess. Every time I crack a joke, I think, No wonder I’m a disaster—I’m a comedian. Humor is the only way I can work through the basic bad day or even a tragedy. Ever since I torched Scott’s wardrobe, I have friends who call every time there’s a California wildfire to ask me if I was responsible. If I took that personally, I’d collapse like a cheap umbrella.

Anonymity in a twelve-step meeting has never been an issue for me. I’m not a celebrity and I don’t hold much back. Writing this book is the opposite of anonymity, though, so maybe that will change. I have great compassion for people who are well known and struggle for their sobriety in public. There is so much pain, shame, and recrimination involved in the beginning days of sobriety, and most of us would rather not have witnesses for a while. While it’s not required, it’s suggested that if you are in your first thirty days, you stand and identify yourself. It’s not to embarrass you—it’s just so people can get to know you. This is so difficult, and for repeat “beginners,” it feels like an admission of yet another failure. Fortunately, I never cared much what anyone thought about my failures. I think that attitude helps me stay sober.

There are so many reasons
why couples divorce, and there are so many ways to bring a marriage to an end. I’m not sure there is any one right way, but there are an infinite number of wrong ways. It turns out divorce isn’t fair—as children of divorce ourselves, I guess Scott and I should’ve known that.

I cannot deny that we’ve changed the course of Noah’s and Lucy’s lives. I’m hoping, with the passage of time and greater health for both of us, we will come to a truce that we all can live with. We go to Legoland together, we try to have dinner together, we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and holidays together, we’ve spent the kids’ school vacations together. We fired our first round of divorce attorneys, because we figured out one day that they were talking to, and dealing with, only each other—neither one of them was paying attention to us. After a marriage is over, a family still
remains. It would be nice if divorce attorneys remembered that more often.