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Knowledge is Necessity

The author recounts her childhood.

"I told my friends fantastic lies, like the secret Indian burial ground I led them to on the ranch."

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More Melissa Stories

The Gautier Redemption

Insight

Little Big Man

Black Bird

Restraint!

Biological Loading

Am I Famous Yet?

Warehoused

Baby and Diamond

Seasons

My Mother's Side

 Always Bipolar

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in the hay field by the farmhouse and looking through blond hair in my eyes at white clouds on a field of blue and feeling so intensely the color blue, not just seeing it, but being it, so much that I felt like I would burst. I was probably three.

My mother says I was always bipolar. She says I was an irritable baby, moody even before I took my first step. She says I rarely slept as a toddler, but would spend the night secretly playing with my dolls and having tea parties. She says I never stopped talking, would simply talk to myself if no one would listen. And I felt everything so intensely. Stories came alive, monsters filled my closets, and when my kindergarten teacher did not seat me with my beloved cousin, I burst into tears.

We moved to DeFuniak Springs, Florida, right when I started first grade. I was stuck in the middle of two brothers, and we lived on an old cattle ranch down in the Euchee Valley, an incredibly beautiful and, to a child, poetic place. We watched the deer feed from the upstairs window and ate muscadines off the vine in an abandoned arbor. My quick mind made grade school easy. I taught myself to speed read by the time I was eight and was inhaling books as fast as I could get them, even some of my father’s old text books. I told my friends fantastic lies, like the secret Indian burial ground I led them to on the ranch, and the story of how my uncle died when he crashed his airplane nose first into the ground (he really died in a farm accident). I was the happiest I have ever been, even with the mood swings, because I felt the good things so intensely, like Jolly Rancher candy, and the sad things were delicious, like heavy blankets.

But then I became shy. Not everyone saw things the way I did, not even teachers. Out of fear I stopped giving my opinions unless asked. I began to withdraw, to spend hours exploring the woods, until I almost believed I could hear the trees whispering to me.

That’s when I began to feel like something was wrong with me. There was the old high school on our middle school campus. It was several stories high, boarded up, and used for storage. I walked past it every day, and then one day I started fantasizing about jumping off. I visualized myself, every detail, and I discovered that it made me feel good.

School became difficult, and I held myself to high standards. I found them increasingly harder to meet. In high school I began to make B’s and even a C. I was mortified and my teachers were frustrated. I would fly through difficult material and they would think I was so smart. Then I would start missing a homework assignment here or there. Then more assignments. Test scores dropped. Sometimes they would do me favors to help raise my plummeting grades, and, before they knew it, I was back on track, top of the class. Not once did they contact my parents.

As a junior, right before the Thanksgiving break, I reached the desperation point. I had no idea what was wrong with me. It was time to think about college, and I couldn’t see myself finishing high school. I took a handful of pills, about six or seven, naively thinking that would be enough. I woke up the next morning as usual. When my best friend found out about it, she told my school counselor, who in turn contacted my parents, who frantically called my family doctor, who recommended a hospital in Pensacola. By that evening I was admitted. I still didn’t know what was wrong with me.

My first interview with the psychiatrist was really my parent’s interview. I didn’t even look up. I was terrified and I couldn’t stop crying. He had on brown wing tip shoes, highly polished, not really big, black socks, black pinstriped pants. Otherwise I had no idea what he looked like.

That’s when I found out about my grandmother. My father told the doctor how she had suffered from severe recurring depressions, had gone to the hospital in New Orleans for shock treatment several times, and had a daughter who was severely mentally ill, possibly schizophrenic. That scared me even more.

They took my clothes, left my socks and underwear, and gave me two gowns to wear back to back and a robe. The gowns were incredibly soft. I wrapped myself tight with my arms and rubbed my hands against the hospital name, faded with wash after wash.

This all happened in 1988. Prozac had just entered the market, but my doctor didn’t use it on adolescents. Instead, I took Tofranil. My eyes blurred, my mouth was parched, I was constipated, and it only took a couple of weeks until it really started working. I started talking, all the time, and made some mean jokes against some staff members, things I would have never done before. I dreamed I was flying, and when I woke up, for a moment, I was sure I really could. I began entering into philosophical discussions with the doctors, which seemed to amuse him. When he said I could go home, I was ecstatic. Then, while my mother was downstairs, waiting to pick me up, I suddenly felt scared. Out of control. As if I knew something was going to happen. I began sobbing and insisted that I wasn’t ready to go. They sent me anyway. It was the weekend before Christmas.

I stopped sleeping. I threw myself into school. I was embarrassed by my absence, and felt eyes staring at me when I picked up my medicine at the pharmacy. This was a very small town, with very strict social rules that made no allowances for mental illness. Teachers dumbed down my work to make it easier for me. But they didn’t need to. My mind was flying like never before.

I began to have fantastic ideas, ideas well before the time, and I tried to explain them to my doctor. He started me on lithium. Then I began hearing the "functions" talk to me. One was bossy and mean, one was very happy, one was weak and sad, one was very smart. They fought over me, telling me what to do, how to be. And then, about two weeks after I had been discharged, less than a week after I started the lithium, I went to a special place, circled by tall pines, in the cold afternoon, with a pocketknife I had stolen from my dad, and, as the functions swirled around me, fighting over me, I started cutting.

Again I was naive, not knowing where to cut, or how. So I didn’t do much damage, but I still have a small faint scar from it. My mother slapped me when she saw the blood on my hands. Then she took me to a new hospital, a new doctor, who told her I was schizo-affective. I don’t remember much from the two months I was in his hospital, or for the rest of my junior year of school, for that matter, since I took heavy antipsychotics. I just remember it as a very sad time, a time where I was introduced to a world of an illness I couldn't correctly name for years ahead.

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Melissa's Story   All articles

Kathryn Ford (July 2, 2001):  Melissa shows a tremendous amount of courage and maturity in revealing her innermost thoughts and feelings.  I am sure that others who have suffered will find comfort in her straight-forward ability to discuss such intimate emotions.

Steve Hunstable (Aug 9, 2001): Melissa, your story was one of the most moving stories I have ever read. It made me laugh and it made me cry. You may not be published but you most certainly are a gifted writer.    thanks, Steve (S3Hunstable@aol)

Jamie (Aug 20, 2001):  Melissa, I admire you.  I have gone through similar situations.  See, I started with leaving bruises on myself.  When the thrill of leaving bruises on myself wore of and got old, I started using bic pin caps to scratch and stab my wrist till they bled.  It always made me feel better because that was something I actually could control and when things went wrong or I got scared, it seemed to be the only thing I could do to calm myself down.  Now, since I've been out of the hospital, February, I have only had one back slide.  I know I have a tough road ahead but, I'm ready for it.  Thanks for sharing!

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