Portrait: Psychosis
by Rebecca Rosoff

I felt like G-d, but I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t just feel like G-d, I knew I was G-d. I could change the weather with a slight gesture of my right hand. I could telepathically communicate with my lost loved ones. At the same instant, I could control the actions and thoughts of those around me. They had to lock me away.

The insidious trickery of my brain threw me off. I was unable to accurately assess my own behavior. What were they all talking about? I was not sick. What was this petty psychiatrist trying to tell me about a “manic episode”? He better get out of my face with his “diagnonsense”. He didn’t know my powers, and he surely couldn’t comprehend the level of enlightenment that I had gradually achieved over the past month. I was practically Siddhartha.

I threw the bottle of medication at his face. I put him in his place. I stormed out of his office, defying the pleas of my frightened mother and the doctor.

Driving along side my swift shuffle, she followed me home in her forest green Volvo. The cops were parked outside my house when I arrived. My head was raised high. Indestructible. Untouchable.

Sweat bubbles glistened on my forehead as the summer sun gazed down at me. The policeman, just like my mother and the doctor, told me that I was having a psychotic episode and that I had to go to the hospital.

I told him to go fuck himself. I was eighteen and he couldn’t lay a hand on me.

I got my rich lawyer uncle on the phone as I paced around my front lawn in loafers and boxer shorts. From my cell phone connection, my uncle Howard coached me through the confrontation. Finally, after ten minutes of attempted reasoning, the policeman submitted to a law that wouldn’t allow him to detain me without proof that I was a danger to myself or to others.

Again, I did not sleep. I spent seven dark hours hacking away at my keyboard, reading SPAM E-mail, which I believed to be messages containing the secret codes of the universe. In my twisted delusional state, I ended up ordering three credit cards from the bogus E-mails.

I was transcribing signals from prophets long gone. I was filling out the forms with other intentions. Supernatural intentions. I typed in my own codes. I typed in backwards language and I skipped vowels in words. I scribbled numbers and letters onto a legal pad by my bedside. They would be crucial bits of information in my near future.

When the sun peaked out of the east the following morning, I packed a maroon duffel bag with my laptop, a couple sweatshirts, and a hairbrush. Then I left the house. I had found a website the night before, maintained by an old friend from drama camp, who was a G-d as well. She was leading me to her palace on earth, in Malibu to be specific, through a series of secret phrases and euphemisms. I was sure of this. Clear was my destiny, understood was my purpose. But my mind was not there. There maybe, but not functioning properly.

All the while, I felt so brilliant and genius. At the pinnacle of my enlightenment, I, for the first time in my life, felt completely at one with nature and the rhythms of the birds’ chirping around me. The synchronizations between my movements and those of the squirrels verified my holiness. But even in my connection with the sky and the trees, I was somewhat scared to go outside. People were after me. They wanted to videotape me.

I lifted my bag over my shoulder and got into a gold Mercedes that pulled up down the street. A middle-aged Israeli man gripped the wheel and looked at me in wonderment. My eyes were wide with dilated pupils the size of marbles.

I’ll never know who this man was or why he let me in the car, but at the time, to me, he was my guardian angel, coming to rescue me from the perils of a family that wanted to lock me up.

He drove me around all day and took me on his errands. He guffawed at the gibberish I spoke: the broken sentences and the shrieks of delirium. He had two cellular phones and he alternated between them, speaking in English on one, and in Israeli on the other. He was letting the rest of the team know that he had successfully found me.

We passed crosswalk lights and they blinked ten times faster then they normally would. This was a sign from the heavens above and within me. I was on the right path.

He drove me to his apartment on Doheny and Sunset. We went inside. Was this a pit stop? Barefoot on the carpet, I scurried around his rooms, looking for my drama camp friend from the website. She was nowhere. I yelled at the man and he could handle my eccentricity no longer, so he dropped me off at his friend Shlomi’s apartment in North Hollywood.

Upon my entrance to his stuffy domain, Shlomi, a contractor in his late-twenties, offered me an industrial-size bottle of White Zinfandel and a loaded bong. He was coming onto me but I told him that the demon spirit inside him was playing a trick on him. This demon wanted to be with me, but Shlomi himself did not. I tried to speak to the spirit inside of him and behind his eyes. He gazed back at me in confusion.

I drank the entire bottle in five minutes and filled my lungs with the potion in the bong. It wasn’t working though. My mind wasn’t slowing down as it always had after the ingestion of these toxicants. Things were moving at a rapid speed, and my perception was so fast that everyone around me seemed to be heavily sedated. I looked at Shlomi’s DVD collection and could not read the titles. The numbers and letters scrambled around like the “codes” from the SPAM E-mails. I made sense of it though; they were special edition DVDs.

They found me and took me to Cedar Sinai hospital. My family did. I thought I was getting checked into the emergency room, in order to be rescued by a team of guardian angels that had been expecting my arrival upstairs. A divine right of passage, my hospital check-in was a prelude to my empire of fellow demigods.

After a physical check up, a six-foot, obese black nurse named Tina forced me to swallow a plastic cup full of colorful capsules. I slept that night in a “unit”. It was practically a cell. It was the first night of my court-ordered seventy-two hour hold.

I will never forget my buddy Gwen, an older African woman who rolled her own cigarettes. She affirmed that we, in the ward, were the chosen ones. She would always roll me an extra cigarette, and with each inhale, I felt as though I was getting stoned. In a whisper, I commended her for having smuggled weed into the ward. She laughed, patted my head, and told me that it was just “special tobacco.” Another code that I had cracked!

We communicated with the dead together. If I closed my eyes and stopped moving, I could hear the voices of my father, and my friends who had died. Gwen spoke to her grandmother, but most often she spoke to G-d. I was a G-d too, I told her. I heard the voices clearly.

While I was manic, I could not gain weight. My metabolism sped up with the psychotic activity of my brain. I ate three hot dogs every night and remained stick thin. This shift in my metabolism could also be accredited to my ritualistic pop dance routines, which I showcased for the other patients, in front of the television, in the “main room” everyday.

Seventy-two hours had long ago expired and I was still instructed to sleep on my hospital cot. The next day, my visiting mother told me that my case had gone before a judge, and he had decided to put me on an additional three-week hold, until I stabilized.

I didn’t like sleeping on that cot, on that wood floor, with another stranger separated from me by a loose curtain that only extended halfway through the room. I didn’t like having to shave my legs in front of Nadia, the wicked witch nurse of the ward. I liked the comfortable scrubs though (I still wear them today).

Infuriated, I screamed at my mother. The glass bubble of my fantasy world had been smashed by a mallet, which I had no control over. My divine destiny had been scrutinized by outside, evil forces. They would pay. My army of spirits would make them pay. But although I felt angry at that moment, my rage soon dissipated, as the chemical in-balance in my brain would not allow me to experience negative emotions for an extended period of time.

My friends would come see me during visiting hours and cry after they left my presence. To them, Rebecca was gone forever. The words that shot from the mouth on my excited face made no sense. They almost knew that I would never make sense again; I was far too gone to be retrieved.

Over the next three weeks I became more manic. I was not on planet earth. All of the medication could not stabilize my mind. I heard things, saw things, and said things that had no ration behind them. I was projecting the internal movie theater of my mind onto the world around me. I got my daily instruction through messages from television shows and the songs that played on my iPod, which I had on the “random” setting.

After three and a half weeks at Cedar Sinai, I was transferred to a world-renowned hospital/rehabilitation center in Houston, Texas. I spent three months there, “leveling out.” This leveling would have been impossible without the right dose and mixture of medication. It took them many tries to get it right.

When I understood that I was sick, and that most of what I had seen and believed were hallucinations, I could work to get myself back into reality. I would recycle mantras in my head, rationalizing coincidences as ironic events rather than signs from spirits. Eventually, I began to get better. Realizing I was human, I tried to make sense of why I had believed otherwise. This was to no avail of course. My episode remains far outside of my understanding.

Before I left Houston, my primary clinician, Susan Romanelli, a tough-skinned former family therapist from Manhattan, sat me down in her office. She had grown to care about me deeply over the course of the last few months that she had spent observing me. She wanted me to know that what I had experienced may not have been a one-time thing. Sternly, she said that with my diagnosis, bipolar with psychotic features, I would possibly end up in the hospital again, up to six times, if I did not stay on my medication and away from illegal drugs for the rest of my life.

She relayed a story of a former patient she had in Manhattan. A beautiful young woman who refused to stay on her psych meds believed that she was Mother Theresa. Barefoot, she went around lower Manhattan blessing random people on the forehead with a makeshift fairy wand. I giggled. I was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t funny. I was scared. I am still scared.

I left Houston for Los Angeles in early November of 2003.

The four-month excursion had permanently reconstructed the face of my life. Today, I am not the same person. My breath has a whole new value, for I have seen the bounds of its fragility. I have walked on a side of my mind that most people never encounter. Maybe that’s a good thing, for I surely have a wider variety of experiences to draw from when exploring my art, music, and writing. Maybe it’s a bad thing, for I might live my life in fear of a relapse. Maybe it’s just what it is and that has to be ok for now. Whatever I conclude, I know that I need to be careful. I never want to experience the effects of a manic episode again.

Rebecca Rosoff is a West Hollywood sophomore at Pitzer College majoring in Studio Art.  She wrote a lot of pieces for publication at Brentwood High School, but this is her first in college.  She works as a waitress and a camp counselor in the summer.