Page 2 of 3
So It’s Officially Offensive to Call You “Crazy” …
When I first went to college, I suffered the worst depression of my life up to that point. I was constantly without energy, and everything I did seemed purposeless. Some might chalk that up to the freshman blues, but the feeling persisted for months—and even into the summer.
I went to my family doctor, who prescribed me Lexapro, a fairly common antidepressant. After about a month, I went back for a checkup.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“About the same,” I answered.
“OK.”
So he doubled my dose.
That worked for about a year and a half. I still had my bouts of loneliness and despair, but they were muted. I thought persistent sadness was pretty normal.
I felt the most pain in those times after elation. When you get up high, you have to come back down, and I hated coming back down. So my solution was to stop getting up high.
Most people in the self-discovery stages of bipolar disorder would probably try to stay high by engaging in increasingly risky behavior. Call it self-control, call it martyrdom, call it spending my college years in Logan; my journey to bipolar diagnosis is mostly landscaped with staying at home and avoiding the unpredictability of humans.
But then I made the life-changing decision to study abroad in the Netherlands for my junior year of college, and I had a pretty damned good time. And that was the problem: Every high in my life has been followed closely by a debilitating crash. This was no different.
After a couple of dark weeks, I found myself standing by a ledge seven stories above the ground.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live anymore—I just didn’t think I could tolerate the pain I felt without being so profoundly damaged by it. Imagine falling into the bubbling, lava-filled caldera of a volcano and feeling your body melt into the molten rock around you. Do you want to die, or do you want your body to stop melting?
Some good friends watched over me until I was sent back home for hospitalization, diagnosis and treatment. I didn’t finish the semester. Not even three years into college, I was finding out that my journey to adulthood would be saddled with unique challenges.
So You Hate Everyone as Much as You Hate Yourself …
A lot has happened to me since I came back from Amsterdam. There’s been a lot of pain—some mental and emotional, some self-inflicted with knives and flames. I tried to kill myself once. I’ve been hospitalized a few times, and I’ve been treated with electroconvulsive therapy, Kitty Dukakis-style. My editors would love for me to recount some of the more outrageous, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-esque details formative to me as a patient of mental illness. I’d love to talk about it, too. I wish I could wear every horrific incident as a merit badge on a Boy Scout’s uniform. But I didn’t write this particular piece to win you over with the shock-and-awe of my cranial diseases. If you knew and understood absolutely everything I’ve been through since Amsterdam—since college, since high school, since I was a toddler—there wouldn’t be much to explain. Everyone wants to be understood. Realizing no one would ever fully understand what I had been through was one of the hardest—and most important—realizations I ever made.
I made that realization at a desperate moment in life, at the tail-end of my most recent shock-and-awe era. I was living in my friends’ attic, unemployed, unmotivated and pissed off at humanity for not having a whole lot of sympathy for my invisible problems. After pushing my way through every episode of Battlestar Galactica, I had come to recognize that bitterness had gotten me no closer to a new life.
After a series of odd jobs (some of them pretty goddamned shitty) I re-enrolled at Utah State University in summer 2012. In fall 2012, I got a full-time news internship with Utah Public Radio for the semester.
I had always liked radio as a medium for storytelling, Ã la This American Life, Radiolab and The Moth, and it was at UPR that I learned how to put together a news story for the radio. And not only did I learn that I loved it, but I also learned that I could get pretty good at it if I practiced enough.
By December 2012, I was finally a college graduate. Two months later, I had a job as a technical writer for American Express—just two years after holing up in my friends’ attic, watching hours of Battlestar Galactica.
So You Think Reading
the News is Easy ….
If you need further proof that defeating bitterness is the righteous path, six months after starting at Amex, Salt Lake City public-radio station KCPW hired me to do what I love: the news.
Oh, and by the way, KCPW does news. When I tell people around here which radio station I work for, occasionally there’s that glazed-over look that tells me they’re probably sorting out in their heads what the difference between AM and FM is. We’re not the one that plays music, and we’re not the one that’s papally blessed by NPR. We’re KCPW, and you’ve listened to us, even if you can’t remember.
With me included, about eight people work at KCPW. The expression we use is that we all wear multiple hats. I work as the social-media manager, fill-in on-air host and reporter, which is my primary role.
At heart, I want to be every part of a radio reporter. And I can do all of it really well when I need to. But when one aspect of the job is a little beyond my reach on some days, I can do another—the part when the humans are no longer required—really well. I love sound. I love collecting sound. Some of my favorite moments of being a radio reporter have been walking through a crowd of people with a live microphone, no one knowing or caring that I was there recording their every giggle and footstep. And after that, I love throwing on headphones and putting all the sound together on my computer.
I’m the only reporter at the station that contributes on a daily, full-time basis, so I cover just about everything: education, politics, health care, environment, culture, etc. A curious thing about my reports: If you listen to them closely enough (I guarantee no one except myself does), you can hear very subtle variations in my delivery. Sometimes I sound very suave and newsy. Other times I sound meek and tired. There’s a lot to which I could attribute those slight variations, but it’s possible I’m sharing the state of my mental health with the Salt Lake City radio market in a very intimate way.
Few people at the station know about my mental illness. No one knows the extent to which I’m affected on a day-to-day basis. Of all the things I do, reading live on-air is the hardest, especially in terms of anxiety-inducing tasks. The first time I did it, I had the simple task of reading some Associated Press stories during our pledge drive. It was supposed to take about three minutes, but for some reason I only brought about 15 seconds of oxygen with me. Put more bluntly, I couldn’t breathe. I had a panic attack live on the radio during a peak hour with perhaps thousands of people listening, and there was nothing I could do. Seeing as I had both been on the radio before and read aloud before, I thought it would be a cakewalk. What I failed to remember was that anxiety just kind of does whatever the hell it wants whenever it wants, and there’s no prevention mechanism for that. It’s as if my brain is a murderous psychopath hiding behind any corner, ready to jump out and swing a knife at me.
After I was done “reading” the news, I stepped outside of the studio and was silently met by all the pledge-drive volunteers. Attempting to lighten the mood (because I was accustomed to this kind of brutal humiliation as someone with both anxiety and an acute tendency to fail), I quoted Gladiator, the Russell Crowe classic: “Are you not entertained?!” I exclaimed. No one responded. They were not entertained. Sometimes grace is only warmly received when it’s not directly preceded by embarrassment.
