if you start to get scared, stop listening
torso, which was a dead weight, but my arms and legs no longer felt a part of me, and seemed instead to be oddly stuck-on appendages that my brain was able to command to locomotion only through tremendous effort. As the doctors had desired, my mind was stilled by the drug. But because it was stilled, my brain perceived things differently. Everything I had known and come to trust about my body was gone. My body—that body—was now foreign territory. I felt awkward all my waking hours because I couldn’t lie down during the day. I don’t remember whether this was because the rules denied me naps, or whether I denied myself so I would not seem entirely pathetic. I hated Haldol. And yet, my brain was functioning better. No longer subject to unknown terrors, I was able to focus on the real world: life on MU 10-9, my fellow patients. I have far more memory of my life during those last six weeks than I have of my life during the first ten days. The second week in February I was home. And depressed. I continued to feel wooden and out of sorts. I could feel no pleasure, could not engage or indulge in laughter. My principal emotion was a deep, though muted sorrow. I had lost vast and essential parts of myself: creativity, focus, fluidity, silliness, ambition. On Haldol I could find no joy in anything. It might have been there, but on Haldol I couldn’t find it. I felt like a piece of heavy rubber with a heart and soul of wood that was going through the motions of being human. Just getting through each day without succumbing to despair was a struggle. Over time, things got better. While I was still in the hospital I had met with Ann Weiss, a social worker, to talk about next steps. A job was vitally important: being out of the house and contributing to our income would help lift the depression. Immediately on leaving Yale-New Haven Hospital, I applied to Yale Temps. My first assignment was doing research for a Yale sociology professor. Then I went to the publications office at the Yale School of Management and was subsequently hired as an editorial assistant. Bill and I became a part of the circle of assistant editors and design staff at American Scientist magazine. They were incredibly kind, supportive, and forgiving of my hospitalization. And they embraced Bill and me as friends. And then in September
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