It’s kind of a skeleton in my family’s closet. I think I might be the first one to come out of that closet. Looking at just the history of my own life and the people that I was close to, I entered into a phase where it just became too clear to ignore. I was like, “Oh, shoot, I’ve been really depressed.”
I always knew that I was depressed and I’d been on antidepressants for many years at that point, but I was like, “Gee, this is wild, because last week I was the saddest, mopeyest guy in the world and now I stay up all night every night and I never stop talking. Isn’t that a little strange that just so recently I was this way and now I’m this way?”
It came to be too much to ignore and then I was like, “Okay, so I’m a manic-depressive. This is going to be a hell of a ride. Let’s do it.” At the height of my mania I ripped my entire life apart and I did everything that I could to destroy every institution in my life and several of them I destroyed irreparably. I could look back on it now as saying it was my mania that gave me the strength to destroy these walls I had built up around myself and get myself out of situations that were toxic to me, when in my depression I would be too chicken shit to do the work of it and endure the trauma of dismantling my life in that way. To look back on it now, I could have done things a lot differently and a lot of people would have been a lot happier, including and especially myself.
Anyway, the point is that it was, like, kind of a game to me at that point and I was just invulnerable and everything I was doing seemed to be brilliant to me. Then people were trying to warn me, “If you really think this is what you’re going through, you’re going to pay for this at some point.” I was like, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” I felt like I could fly.
They were right. In March of last year I hit the wall for real and basically didn’t get out of bed until December. Even when I was able to do that, I got out of bed but I could barely talk. In the trauma of going through this and the terror of not knowing what’s going on in your brain, I listened to a lot of the wrong people and I took a lot of treatment for it that I’ve come to see now was a very big mistake.
The goal of these doctors when dealing with a manic-depressive person is they feel like this person is potentially dangerous, so we’ve got to find the part of their brain that makes them dangerous and turn it off. They did it. They turned that part of my brain off in a big way. With drugs.
They didn’t electrocute me like they did to try and cure the homosexuality of the teenage Lou Reed. I asked for the meds. I was the decider ultimately, but I was so desperate for any kind of solution and they told me that they had one. What they didn’t tell me was that when they turn off the part of your brain that makes you this dangerous person, they turn off everything else about you that makes you who you are. They take your sexuality away from you. They take away your ability to generate abstractions.
The depression that I went through last year was the worst thing that I ever experienced by far. The thing that was really terrifying about it was not that I looked into the future and felt, like, an unspeakable dread because I had felt that dread my entire life. I felt the dread but I lacked the ability to articulate it.
When I was younger and I would get depressed I was still able to make my art and stuff. I could write a little poem and I could get a little bit of the bad stuff out. Encourage myself a little bit. In taking away the part of me that made all those problems for everybody when I was manic …
They killed the poet in me.
They took away my ability to make the unique connections that I can make. I’m not saying that I have this one-in-a-billion brain or anything. But people have a neuro-network, they have stored all this information and make connections between them. My brain was just like the dustiest old library. Maybe there’s all this information in there, but on the medication, it’s all in a big pile and it’s all under a foot of dust and it’s useless.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
People always talk about how women have a body clock, but I think that men have one too. When they get into their early thirties and mid-thirties, you start thinking about, “Okay, where’s the rest of my life? And why don’t I have one? Shouldn’t I have one? Haven’t I figured out all the big problems?”
That’s when you realize, when it finally lands on you, you realize, “Oh my God, I’m back to zero in this area and this has nothing to do with the craft that I have, with this fortress I have built for myself for thirty some years. In this other area, I’m completely naked in the desert. There is no fortress. It doesn’t exist.” Suddenly, when you realize that, you realize how adrift you are and you realize that life plays a nasty little joke on you in that you can become quite mature and quite successful and quite developed in one area and become completely retarded in another part of your personality.
DAVE FOLEY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I see crazy eyes now and I’m out of it immediately. I can tell if someone’s crazy from like two or three blocks away. I grew up with a father who has borderline personality disorder. The more you try, the more they hate you.
I’ve grown up watching my dad treat my mom like shit, then being like a young man who considers himself a feminist. I was the one to prove that men could be something different from what my father was. All this dynamic feeding into me, just going, “Okay, I can take it. All right, just one more day. All right, if I just figure this out, then she’ll be happy and she’ll love me and we’ll both be happy.” That transitions to “Okay, one more day and if I can just figure this out, I can leave and she won’t kill herself and I won’t be responsible for her killing herself.” Then it gets sicker and sicker, you know?
I remember driving in my car on the way to work one day and it was actually a Barenaked Ladies song that came on my stereo, a Steven Page song called, “Break Your Heart.” This song comes on and I suddenly just burst out in tears as I’m driving and I have to pull off the road and just sit at the side of the road just weeping and that’s where I go, “Okay, this is a sign, I think that I’m not happy.” I think I’m so unhappy I can’t drive safely. I got us into therapy and that eventually led to things starting to improve, which of course led to her taking off with the kids.
ROB DELANEY