Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Bibliophobia
It wasn’t a surprise that I ended up in the hospital. The main surprise was how long it took me to get there. I’d been wondering about it for years, even fantasizing about it occasionally. It was just another little joke I had with myself. My breakdown would be both clearly inevitable (so nobody felt bad because it would obviously only be my fault) and gradual (so nobody would suspect there was a moment when they could have stopped it), but also would contain a sudden event (so everyone would know when it had definitively happened, which would be, no doubt, a relief for us all). It would have to happen while I had good health insurance, so nobody would be put out financially. My breakdown would be perfect and considerate. My breakdown would be so lovely you’d weep with delight. It was the project I’d been working on longest and most passionately; it was my masterpiece. When its time came, my breakdown’s formal perfection would astound everyone. The reviews would be raves across the board.
The thing is, nothing really tells you when it’s time to commit to a nervous breakdown; it has to happen on its own schedule. Once every few months since I was about ten, I’d administered little check-ins, at first unconscious, then very self-conscious, to see if it was time or not. These check-ins were like the survey you get in an urgent-care waiting room, a brusquely official interrogation I conducted to see if it was finally time to start my breakdown, to just not get up one day, not go to school or work, not speak, not continue. The survey had gone through many iterations. In recent years, it looked something like this:
Is it time for your breakdown when you sob frighteningly every day when you wake up (or go to sleep, or try to have a nice lunch with an innocent friend who just wanted to have a nice lunch, or get on the train in the morning, or call a Lyft at 3:00 a.m., or turn on the computer)? Probably not, because you’re just crying, for God’s sake, and you cry all the time what with all the current apocalypses, especially if you’re not doing so well at work, or you spent too much time reading comments online, or people are moving on with their lives around you, or families are making their normal, irremediable family trouble.
Is it time for your breakdown when all your just slightly bad old habits start making cameo appearances, then quickly insinuate themselves into indispensable sidekick roles before you even know it? And suddenly, you’re a moderate smoker, a self-harm hobbyist, a casual insomniac, and a nonchalant bulimic, when you used to just cycle through those things one or two at a time? Definitely not. Surely if you had proper grown-up depression it would be more serious, like alcoholism or a sex addiction or a gambling addiction. Everything is fine because you only smoke four or five cigarettes a day and you’re a miserly, mostly celibate hypochondriac whose credit rating is GOOD approaching VERY GOOD.
Is it time for your breakdown when the people who know you best, and a startling number of people you barely know at all, have asked you gingerly if you have a good therapist? Ha! This is a trick question.
Is it time for your breakdown when you’ve had writer’s block for the last five years and when you sit down at the computer every day to accomplish your customary nothing, you hear the voice of your meanest ex in your head saying coldly, “It’s like you’re a depressed 1950s housewife who tells her husband that she’s running errands but just goes out and rides the subway all day”? Remembering that voice makes you understand more and more that this particular ex always thought you really were crazy in a boring way, and not even that smart, and that he never bothered to hide it. Then you start to think he was right; after all, you have been lying to everyone this whole time about “writing a book,” when all you’ve been doing, metaphorically but sometimes literally, is just riding the subway day after day after day. Thinking about this, you suddenly feel a tremendous guilt for lying to everyone about work, and a tremendous fear that they will all find out that you’ve been lying this whole time about being intelligent. Really, you’re very stupid, and possibly insane. But come now, there’s nothing actually wrong with you, you’re just extremely lazy.
Is it time for your breakdown when every time a train approaches, or you peer out a high open window, or you stand in front of a busy intersection, you feel a wild firecracker explode in your chest, and the force of that explosion almost pushes you forward, and as you pull yourself back you have to hold in a bark of laughter you know will be rusty and inhuman? No, no, now you’re just being histrionic. Nobody feels that, slash everybody feels that. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s fine.
It was never the right time to announce my breakdown—to let everyone know that it was about to start. I wasn’t even exactly sure what “nervous breakdown” meant these days anyway. It used to seem like a thing you could have in any number of dramatic ways, or at least that’s what the novels and movies made it out to be. It could have been the DTs, or an office meltdown (say, throwing a typewriter or jumping out a window), or not picking the kids up from school one day, or a bottle of sleeping pills that you meant or didn’t mean to take, or running away with the neighbor’s spouse, or disappearing, or appearing too much. It could have meant a psychotic break, or a suicide attempt, or catatonia. Now, it seemed a little less clear, a little more nuanced. Doctors and Netflix warnings tell us to ask for help if we indulge in suicidal ideation or dark and violent thoughts or if we don’t want to leave the house, like, ever. But surely, for me, those were not breakdown-worthy signs. I felt, indeed still feel, confident about these quotidian things. Leaving the house is overrated. Creativity is violent. Suicidal ideation is the lightest, easiest thing in the world. It’s an invisible hobby, a fun little secret you can take anywhere, like doing Kegels at brunch or doodling in a lecture.
One thing I was pretty sure about “nervous breakdown” was that it was not for people like me. Nervous breakdown was not for the children of immigrants. It was something that happened to white people in independent films or in middlebrow realist novels. Breakdown was what happened when their gorgeous shells became so brittle and delicate they could be shattered with the slightest tap of the back of a spoon—tenderly set and ready to ooze out of their gelid whites with a hot, vividly compelling, golden violence. Breakdown was for Gena Rowlands in that Cassavetes film, magnetic in her housedress, all sharp knees and elbows and that rude, sexy slash of a mouth, that scrambled bouffant; breakdown was for the unseen businessman in the ominous Hawaii ad that Don Draper pitches in season six of Mad Men (“Hawaii: The Jumping Off Point”). I had had a lot of privileges in my life so far but breakdown was not one of them. Breakdown is the final frontier of assimilation. Of course, I didn’t resent this. My breakdown was my personal hobby; it was not part of the job description for my parents’ child. Quiet desperation or silent seething anger? Yes. Showy mental collapse? No. There was no time or money or feeling allotted for my breakdown, so if I really had to have it, I had to work hard and save for it myself.
Given all of this, I was certain that it would never be time. Other things happened while I pondered this problem over the years. I was depressed, I was not depressed, then I was depressed again. I attempted suicide three times between ten and eighteen, but to my eye those attempts did not look like good enough reasons to have my official breakdown, so I went on. I went to school, then more school, I got a job. So, why was this time different, after all those years? Why did my breakdown finally arrive?
