Essayist: Missing woman finds herself a decade later

At the library, I searched for a Facebook message containing J’s phone number. I borrowed a student’s phone. J answered after a few rings, his voice thick with sleep.

“Who is this?” he said.

“It’s me, baby. You know we’re traveling back and forth in time, right?”

“What? Do you realize it’s 4 a.m.? Where are you?”

“I’m at the college library. Can you come pick me up?”

“Well, no, I have to go to work in a couple hours.”

“Can you meet me after work?”

“I guess so. How about Michelangelo’s around 4 p.m.?”

“OK,” I said, and we hung up.

Our reunion on State Street never occurred. For the next few hours, I apparently conversed on Facebook with a detective posing as my sister. Later I learned while she was on my parents’ computer, police dogs searched my yard for a trace of my scent. News crews were at my house, and my photo was broadcast along with alerts about a missing woman. I knew none of that as I typed — who knows what? — on the library computer, lost in the vivid visions in my mind.

When two uniformed police officers showed up at the library, I was escorted to their vehicle and driven to the UW Hospital ER for psychiatric evaluation. The missing woman had been found.

What led up to my disappearance? There are many blank spaces in my memory, but I know that my life had started to unravel over the Christmas break from what was supposed to be my final semester at Lake Forest College. An honors student, I had planned to complete my bachelor’s degree with a double major in English and history, a minor in African American studies, a thesis on leprosy in medieval literature, a job at the Lake Forest College Writing Center and great expectations for the future.

But home in Madison, my life transformed from black and white to technicolor. Every sensation was heightened. J’s criminal background intrigued me as I was plunging into mania. In his presence, I felt like I was tasting words and eating colors and feeling thoughts.

Back at Lake Forest in early January, I got my days and nights mixed up and stopped attending class. Thinking students around me were impoverished rather than privileged, I offered them money and dumped out random merchandise from multiple bags I had purchased. They contacted security, and I brandished my keys and swore at the guards.

Days after returning from Christmas break to Lake Forest, I was handcuffed, rushed to the ER in nearby Highland Park and expelled from college. I can only imagine how surreal it must have been for my parents, a UW Hospital pulmonologist and a UW literature professor, to receive a phone call that their straight-A and even somewhat straight-edged daughter could not return to campus and that they needed to empty her dorm room immediately.

Tests revealed no drugs or alcohol in my system. There was nothing physiologically wrong with me. I had lost my mind. I felt as though there was a permanent halo around my head. The golden, gleaming light of my divinity had to be hidden under hoodies so that the mere mortals around me would not see it.

Instead of forcing me to remain at an Illinois ER on a 72-hour hold, my parents got permission to take me home to the psych ward in Madison. I was dressed bizarrely, wearing multiple belts and sporting classic manic hair, strewn like a mermaid on cocaine. I believed I was Jesus Christ and that J was God. I thought my relatives included Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur and Assata Shakur.

These thoughts may seem comedic, but I was as convinced of their reality as I was of my own name and age.

Believing the UW Hospital’s B6-5 psych ward to be a jail, I put “shanks” in my hair — weapons I created out of shards of combs and CD cases, caked into my long locks with toothpaste and shampoo. When the nurses insisted on cutting my sticky, tangled hair, I yelled at them that they had no legal right to do so.

My hair was mostly gone, leaving some parts of my scalp barely covered or completely bald. I felt as though I’d suffered multiple bullet wounds in my ears and head.

For four months after my release from UW Hospital, I remained psychotic. “Let her rediscover her gifts,” a psychiatrist suggested. When I auditioned for a community theater production of “The Crucible,” I ironically was cast as Mary Warren, a woman whose bizarre behavior led to her being charged with witchcraft. I relished having one of the leading parts, but everything went horribly wrong. I would show up at rehearsals unfocused, thinking I had a photographic memory and that I did not need to study my lines or blocking. I had laughing and crying fits during rehearsals. Eventually, I wound up back on B6-5.

I was so far gone that it wasn’t until later that I would mourn the loss of my dramatic role or even the loss of my long, beloved, honey-colored hair. Only when I was forced through a court commitment to take antipsychotic medications did I recognize just how much of myself had gone missing. Sluicing through my veins, the court-ordered medications brought not only a brutal awareness of reality but also extreme side effects, such as weight gain, a flattened affect, elevated glucose and a sedative stupor. I felt allergic to myself, like I was wearing a wool sweater on the inside.

But the medications saved my life.

I completed not only my bachelor’s degree but an MFA in creative writing as well, and I became a mother. Nothing could have meant more to me than the miraculous experience of childbirth and of assuming the role and responsibility of “Mama.”

When I went off medications to protect fetal development and make breastfeeding possible, I experienced another nightmarish descent into psychosis. For six months, I was too ill to be the primary caregiver of my daughter. I was present yet missing. I thought my parents, who were lovingly caring for her, were abusive strangers. Mania returned.

Now that I am medicated again, I have returned to a version of my authentic self — a loving mother who will do everything in her power to keep her bright-eyed, exuberant daughter safe. I care for my daughter with ample family support but worry the psychosis will return. At times, the world through the haze of psychiatric medications is flat, liver-colored, watered down — like one of those tasteless wafers they hand out at communion. On meds, my affect seems blunted and flat, and people tell me I look “zoned out.”

Even now, 12 years after my initial psychotic break on my college campus, I know there will be nights when I will wake up with my nightgown soaked to my ribs, heart pounding — nights when I dream that white-robed voices glide in a sterile hospital room as I lie in amber light on a hard, beige-colored cot.

Any day I could wake up and find that my mind has once again started to go missing. But as my daughter rises from her nap after my Google search, I hug her passionately, inhaling the coconut scent of her curls. My love for her is feral, visceral. She represents my hope for the future — a hope that the halo will not return, that I will never be missing from her, or from myself, again.

Melanie Meyer has an MFA in creative writing and is a guest essayist to Madison Magazine.

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