“The Lure of Divorce: 7 Years into My Marriage, I Hit a Breaking Point—And Had to Decide Whether Life Would Be Better without My Husband in It”, 2024-02-15 ():
[writer mood disorders] In the summer of 2022, I [author, editor, blogger, co-owner of “independent e-bookstore Emily Books”] lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to—had every right to—blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. [Note: antidepressants meant for simple major depression sometimes seem to backfire on bipolar.] Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.
I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an [alcohol] Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? [bipolar correlate] The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl—I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. [bipolar correlate] When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years…I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month.
…I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food—it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. [Celiac/IBD/related digestive disorders correlate with many psychiatric disorders, including bipolar.]
…A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way—I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last non-institutional food I would eat for a long time—and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.
I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had 3 days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back—it would soon be revoked again, wisely—but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet.