Page 8 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

We did not click. She listened to me talk about school stress and the like, but we never delved into the really deep stuff. I never told her that Dr. Howard had asked if I was bipolar. We never discussed hypergraphia. I buried all of that deeply and decided after graduating that our talk therapy lite had done no good. I was just a little depressed, and I didn’t need to pursue anything further.

Almost twenty years passed. I got the job at the community college, secured a publisher, and churned out twenty-seven books. I used a small inheritance from my grandmother to buy a little house in a lovely neighborhood. I would have felt like a star had my personal life not been a complete disaster. I bounced from woman to woman, dating badly the whole time, and defined myself by it. I weathered more intense relationships and ugly breakups than I could count and had the scars to prove it. I had a group of friends, but most of them kept me at arm’s length. Worst of all, I couldn’t stand being with myself. My mood swings were grandiose, the lows worse than they’d ever been. It was after a particularly discouraging breakup that my friend Paulie gave me Catherine’s number.

Catherine was both a therapist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner, so she could do talk therapy and prescribe. She was nothing like Nicole: she was a big girl with short dark hair, ripped jeans, and no warnings about what I could not say or do. At the beginning, we mostly talked about day-to-day things and my ex, but one weekend a few months in, I went home for my mother’s birthday and came totally unglued in my next session. My mother had been in rare form, I’d spent two days wearing my baggage, and Catherine and I went nearly an hour overtime starting to unpack it. By the end of that afternoon, I had a brand-new diagnosis of severe anxiety to go along with the depression, and a prescription to take the edge off of both. Over the next couple years, she toyed with other diagnoses. Bipolar disorder, like Dr. Howard suggested. Borderline personality disorder. I tried those on for size, let them roll around on my tongue. I didn’t really care what she called it so long as we could fix it.

A year later, life was rolling along pretty well. I still had bouts of depression and flares of anger, but they were nothing compared to what I felt unmedicated. I was still having trouble with relationships, but I was functional. Then, a couple days after tweaking one of my prescriptions, I was at my computer when I smelled a beautiful floral scent, completely out of nowhere. I went to the window to see what it was, and all at once, there was nothing. It was like the lights went out, the power went out, but it was inside of me instead of the grid. It was like a glitch in the matrix, a skip in the LP. I found myself standing in the middle of my office what could have been one second or one hour later, sweaty and weak-kneed. I caught myself on the desk and picked up my phone. I didn’t call emergency, I called Catherine.

She sent me to a neurologist, who did all kinds of tests on my brain. Nothing was invasive, but everything was unsettling. He came to the decision that I had experienced “abnormal electrical activity in the left temporal lobe,” the area between my left ear and forehead. He sent my scans and diagnosis to Catherine and suggested we discuss further medication.

Catherine sat in her big chair the next Tuesday, paging through what the doctor had sent even though I knew she’d done it several times before. I sat on the right side of the nubby sofa across from her, the throw pillow tucked under my right arm, same as every visit. The air conditioner whined outside the window.

“It’s your temporal lobe.”

I nodded. I’d read the report, too.

“Have you ever had an episode like the one you had the other day?” Barely waiting for me to shake my head, she hurried on. “I remember you telling me the other week to go check the hallway. You said the receptionist must be right outside the door.”

I didn’t know what this had to do with my head. “Yes. I smelled her perfume.”

“Does that happen to you often? I didn’t smell anything. There was nobody there.”

“Do I smell old lady perfume often?” I thought that was the weirdest question ever, but all at once, it felt like a chunk of ice had slithered down my throat. “Sometimes.”

“Where did you hit your head?”

My hand moved instinctively to my left temple, where a scar from my childhood was still visible. That in itself was an entire suitcase full, and once we’d spent a couple weeks hashing over how it had happened. “Right here.”

Catherine looked off to the window and shook her head. “Yep. It’s your temporal lobe.”

“Right, that’s where it says things are fucked up.”

“I did some research. Hypergraphia is a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy.”

I stared at her for a long time, letting those words bounce around in my head. I didn’t like how they felt, didn’t like how they tasted. Then, all at once, everything started pulling back, preparing for the tsunami. Oh. I stared up at the ceiling, ran my hands over my face and through my hair. Oh. “So you’re saying my entire career is a symptom of a disease. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I’m not. I’m saying this is beginning to make sense. You wrote before your accident, right?”

My accident. I squeezed the throw pillow next to me so I wouldn’t heave it at the window. “Yes. But not like I did afterward.”

“I really thought the writing all day and night was a manic thing, and I’m not sure it isn’t…I mean, I’m not changing your diagnosis.”

“Well, thanks for that.”

“You have these auras. The perfume. Do you see things or have déjà vu?”

I sighed and pressed on the bridge of my nose. My head was starting to hurt, what with all the spinning. “I don’t see things.”

“But déjà vu.”

“I suppose I’ve had some weird shit happen a few times but it’s not a big deal.” I tried to keep my temper in check, tried to keep my breathing steady. “This means I write because I’m sick.”

“No, you write because you have a passion for it.”

“But I write the way I write because I’m sick. Can we fix it?”

Catherine shrugged. “We need to put you on an anticonvulsant, and many of them double as a mood stabilizer, which should actually help you run a more even keel anyway.”

My chest constricted again. “Is what’s messed up in my head…The depression, the bipolar, the whatever…Is that because of…” I made a motion to my temple, not wanting to call it my accident like she had, or anybody else’s.