The thirteen years
I want to be clear that I tried.
I won’t catalog those years here — the book does that, one chapter at a time. What I’ll say is that I lost more than time. I lost jobs, apartments, cars, and most of my friends. I got kicked out of college and withdrew from two more semesters. I went from someone who organized the parties and the basketball tournaments to someone who skipped weddings.
The inflection went out of my voice. I stopped listening to music. I lost the ability to laugh. I’d sit in the same chair looking at the same screens, falling asleep at five in the morning and getting up at two in the afternoon. At thirty-three I was single, unemployed, deep in debt, and living with my parents.
I was not gentle about any of it, and the people who got the worst of me were the ones who kept showing up. I lied to my family and I stole from them. Whether they should have forgiven me is a fair question. That they did is a fact I don’t take lightly.
But here is the part I most want people to hear. I did not dismiss treatment and pray instead. I have a master’s degree in medicinal chemistry — I spent three years in a doctoral program studying how molecules act on the human body. I tried medication, most of the major ones. I tried psychologists. I tried transcranial magnetic stimulation. I was in and out of hospitals for over a decade. None of it gave me back the person I had been.
If anything, the training made it worse. Every time I was about to come apart I told myself the same thing: I know my body better than anyone. I’m a chemist. I understand what this is doing to my brain. I was lying to myself in the only vocabulary I had.
