Chapter One: Journeying Back to Self
This blog is an attempt to make sense of what brought me into the world of psychiatry as a child and of where it would take me for the next fourteen years. It is an effort to document where I go from...
View ArticleChapter Two: Opening Pandora’s Box
Soon after awakening to my crisis of ‘self’, I was sent to my first therapist. My social circles had changed, and I’d begun to spend time with a more marginalized and less straight and narrow group of...
View ArticleChapter Three: At War With A Diagnosis
Note: In this third entry, it is still early on in my story. It is the fall of my ninth grade year, I am fourteen years old, and I have just recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed...
View ArticleChapter Four: Eye of the Storm
I settled into my new life in the fall of my sophomore year at a co-ed boarding school in Western Massachusetts and was convinced that my problems would quickly resolve themselves. I was sure that it...
View ArticleChapter Five: Filling the Void
When I returned to boarding school in the fall of my junior year, I brought with me not just duffel bags of clothes, athletic equipment, and sheets and towels, but also an eating disorder. Up until a...
View ArticleChapter Six: A Disease of Dis-Ease, and New Hope for a Cure
On the day I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 2001, I dropped my belongings in my dorm room, said goodbye to my family, and realized, once alone, that I had no idea where I was. I spent...
View ArticleChapter Seven: Becoming Bipolar, Becoming Empowered
A newfound acceptance of my bipolar diagnosis during the winter of my freshman year at Harvard filled me to the brim with a sense of rejuvenation. Within the first few weeks, I’d eased into a...
View ArticleChapter Eight: “Forget Happiness . . . I’ve Got Control”
At no moment in my childhood– whether in those weekday hours after school spent exploring the woods with my dog, or on the early Sunday mornings in winter when I champed at the bit to get to center...
View ArticleChapter Nine: Is It Me Or My Meds?
Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life as sophomore year began to wind down. I was not...
View ArticleChapter Ten: A ‘Victim of Circumstance’
Upon arriving home at the end of sophomore year in college, which had been devoted to hyper-control and a carefully maintained, entirely black-and-white existence, I quickly realized, to my dismay,...
View ArticleChapter Eleven: Teetering on the Edge
Frantic, fearful, and desperate to get my life together, I returned to Cambridge in the middle of August to move into my off-campus apartment. I believed that those summer months had been a complete...
View ArticleChapter Twelve: A Gift of Desperation
By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis in crowded Harvard Square, I was more alone than I’d ever been in my...
View ArticleChapter Thirteen: In the Muck and The Mire
There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy creosote bushes, pointy ocotillo plants, and prickly pear cacti. The desert...
View ArticleChapter Fourteen: Crossing the Threshold
Although the drive to the psychiatric hospital in White Plains, New York, in September 2004 was a mere fifteen minutes from home, the trip felt like a time warp, like I was leaving the orbit of reality...
View ArticleChapter Fifteen: A Haven from Self
A Note to the Reader: Thorough searches of my memory reserves have failed to provide me with a complete and detailed account of my first inpatient stay on a locked unit in Westchester County, New York...
View ArticleChapter Sixteen: Inside a House of Cards
Dazed and confused, I was discharged from ‘The Haven’ in September of 2004 and entered an intensive outpatient day program (IOP) on the grounds of the same hospital. Before entering the hospital, I had...
View ArticleChapter Seventeen: Commencing to Self-Destruct
While my fellow ‘Class of 2006’ graduates celebrated with embraces and high-fives on Commencement Day, jumping excitedly into group photos with caps and gowns, sunglasses, cigars, and a giddy...
View ArticleChapter Eighteen: Sentenced to Life
A few weeks after my college graduation in the summer of 2006, my five-year high school reunion was upon me. I had expended a tremendous amount of emotional energy convincing myself to feel excited...
View ArticleChapter Nineteen: Playing the Part
In the months following my five-year high school reunion in the summer of 2006, I drifted about in a sea of indistinguishable days. Amidst this aimlessness, I somehow managed to find myself in a...
View ArticleChapter Twenty: Russian Roulette
After I left my research position on the acute inpatient psychiatric unit of a Boston hospital towards the end of 2006, my life started a two-year spiral downwards into the depths of a darkness unlike...
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