Read Online An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison - Free Book Online
Authors: Kay Redfield Jamison
Ads: Link
me in the distance, wiggle his ears in eager anticipation, whinny with pleasure, canter up to my side, and nuzzle my breeches for sugar or carrots. What I got instead was a wildly anxious, frequently lame, and not terribly bright creature who was terrified of snakes, people, lizards, dogs, and other horses—in short, terrified of anything that he might reasonably be expected to encounter in life—thus causing him to rear up on his hind legs and bolt madly about in completely random directions. In the clouds-and-silver-linings department, however, wheneverI rode him I was generally too terrified to be depressed, and when I was manic I had no judgment anyway, so maniacal riding was well suited to the mood.
Unfortunately, it was not only a crazy decision to buy a horse, it was also stupid. I may as well have saved myself the trouble of cashing my Public Health Service fellowship checks, and fed him the checks directly: besides shoeing him and boarding him—with veterinary requirements that he supplement his regular diet with a kind of horsey granola that cost more than a good pear brandy—I also had to buy him special orthopedic shoes to correct, or occasionally correct, his ongoing problems with lameness. These shoes left Gucci and Neiman-Marcus in the dust, and, after a painfully acquired but profound understanding of why people shoot horse traders, and horses, I had to acknowledge that I was a graduate student, not Dr. Dolittle; more to the point, I was neither a Mellon nor a Rockefeller. I sold my horse, as one passes along the queen of spades, and started showing up for my classes at UCLA.
Graduate school was the fun I missed as an undergraduate. It was a continuation, in some respects, of the Indian summer I enjoyed in St. Andrews. Looking back over those years with the cool clinical perspective acquired much later, I realize that I was experiencing what is so coldly and prosaically known as a remission—common in the early years of manic-depressive illness and a deceptive respite from the savagely recurrent course that the untreated illness ultimately takes—but I assumed I was just back to my normal self. In those days there were no words or disease names orconcepts that could give meaning to the awful swings in mood that I had known.
Graduate school was not only relative freedom for me from my illness, but it was also freedom from the highly structured existence of undergraduate studies. Although I skipped more than half of my formal lectures, it didn’t really matter; as long as one ultimately performed, the erratic ways that one took to get there were considerably less important. I was married, too, by this point, to a French artist who not only was a talented painter but an exceedingly kind and gentle person. He and I had met in the early seventies, at a brunch given by mutual friends. It was a time of long hair, social unrest, graduate school deferments, and Vietnam War protests, and I was relieved to find someone who was, for a switch, essentially apolitical, highly intelligent but unintellectual, and deeply committed to the arts. We were very different, but we liked one another immediately; we found out quickly that we shared a passionate love for painting, music, and the natural world. I was, at the time, painfully intense, rail thin, and, when not moribund, filled to the brim with a desire for an exciting life, a high-voltage academic career, and a pack of children. Photographs from that time show a tall, extraordinarily handsome, dark-haired, gentle, and brown-eyed man who, while consistent in his own appearance, is accompanied by a wildly variable woman in her midtwenties: in one picture laughing, in a floppy hat, with long hair flying; in another pensive, brooding, looking infinitely older, far more soberly and boringly dressed. My hair, like my moods, went up and down: long for a time, until an I-look-like-a-toad mood would sweep over me; thinking a radical change might help, Ithen would have it cut
Unfortunately, it was not only a crazy decision to buy a horse, it was also stupid. I may as well have saved myself the trouble of cashing my Public Health Service fellowship checks, and fed him the checks directly: besides shoeing him and boarding him—with veterinary requirements that he supplement his regular diet with a kind of horsey granola that cost more than a good pear brandy—I also had to buy him special orthopedic shoes to correct, or occasionally correct, his ongoing problems with lameness. These shoes left Gucci and Neiman-Marcus in the dust, and, after a painfully acquired but profound understanding of why people shoot horse traders, and horses, I had to acknowledge that I was a graduate student, not Dr. Dolittle; more to the point, I was neither a Mellon nor a Rockefeller. I sold my horse, as one passes along the queen of spades, and started showing up for my classes at UCLA.
Graduate school was the fun I missed as an undergraduate. It was a continuation, in some respects, of the Indian summer I enjoyed in St. Andrews. Looking back over those years with the cool clinical perspective acquired much later, I realize that I was experiencing what is so coldly and prosaically known as a remission—common in the early years of manic-depressive illness and a deceptive respite from the savagely recurrent course that the untreated illness ultimately takes—but I assumed I was just back to my normal self. In those days there were no words or disease names orconcepts that could give meaning to the awful swings in mood that I had known.
Graduate school was not only relative freedom for me from my illness, but it was also freedom from the highly structured existence of undergraduate studies. Although I skipped more than half of my formal lectures, it didn’t really matter; as long as one ultimately performed, the erratic ways that one took to get there were considerably less important. I was married, too, by this point, to a French artist who not only was a talented painter but an exceedingly kind and gentle person. He and I had met in the early seventies, at a brunch given by mutual friends. It was a time of long hair, social unrest, graduate school deferments, and Vietnam War protests, and I was relieved to find someone who was, for a switch, essentially apolitical, highly intelligent but unintellectual, and deeply committed to the arts. We were very different, but we liked one another immediately; we found out quickly that we shared a passionate love for painting, music, and the natural world. I was, at the time, painfully intense, rail thin, and, when not moribund, filled to the brim with a desire for an exciting life, a high-voltage academic career, and a pack of children. Photographs from that time show a tall, extraordinarily handsome, dark-haired, gentle, and brown-eyed man who, while consistent in his own appearance, is accompanied by a wildly variable woman in her midtwenties: in one picture laughing, in a floppy hat, with long hair flying; in another pensive, brooding, looking infinitely older, far more soberly and boringly dressed. My hair, like my moods, went up and down: long for a time, until an I-look-like-a-toad mood would sweep over me; thinking a radical change might help, Ithen would have it cut
Similar Books
