4. Unmedicated (from the 2017 iteration)

When I arrived in London in March 2015 to commence my graduate position at one of the world’s pre-eminent law firms, I was not taking any psychiatric medication, and had not been for some time. But after eleven consecutive and equally torturous nights of near-total sleeplessness - only one of which was caused by my supervising partner keeping me through the night to proofread last-minute changes to the transaction documents of the billion-pound deal she was closing and the remainder involving her dismissing me with an abrupt “you can go now” somewhere between 1 and 3 am, followed by me trudging back to the serviced apartment that the firm had put me up in for my first month on the job, which was located two blocks from the office and looked across a narrow lane directly into the large glass windows of the back of a similarly mammoth, top-of-the-top-tier firm, approximately 40% of the lawyers of which were still working on the nights I returned at 1am and 20% still working on the nights I came back after 3, the lights from their offices piercing through the slats of blinds on the windows of my bedroom, ensuring that the few hours I could have been sleeping before I was expected back at my desk were instead spent engaged in Hitchcock-style voyeurism - I found myself on my twelfth day without sleep (something that I did not previously think was physiologically possible) at the only National Health Service clinic within a 10 minute taxi drive of the office that was open in the evenings and was willing to squeeze me in at short notice, having snuck out of the office to make a 7.45pm Tuesday night appointment at exactly the time I would usually go down to the cafeteria to scoff down a salad and then come straight back to my desk, responding when the doctor swivelled on her chair and said, “Mr Bookatz, what can I help you with today?” by bursting into tears and exclaiming, 

“I’M DYING!!! I NEED DRUGS!!!!!!!!”

Doctor James had an accent taken straight from Eastenders and was the principal of a practice that was in a part of East London called Haggerston that looks very similar to where that show is set. She is also an angel that was sent from the heavens. On the strict proviso that I would not take more than one every two days and no more than 10 in a month, she wrote me a script for Valium and a script for the sleeping pill Zopiclone. Given that I had told her I had bipolar disorder and believed I was having some sort of mixed manic-depressive episode, something that she seemed incredulous of but took me at my word, she also wanted me to also start taking a mood stabilizer. Out of the dozen medications I had taken over the course of the medicated rollercoaster that I rode throughout my late teens and early twenties, the one that I was most confident had not caused me any harm - although I was not exactly confident in its having produced any benefit - was the epilepsy drug Lamotrigine, which was also the last medication I was taking before becoming fully unmedicated. So Dr James wrote me a script for that as well, a script that I promptly filled along with the other two more crucial little helpers, which is how I became hooked again on a drug for a condition that I never actually had, a drug which some months later began to cause me physical side effects that continue to meaningfully affect my quality of life to this day. When Doctor James asked me if it was possible for me to explore a change of employment or a return to Australia, I told her unequivocally that with respect to each of these suggestions, “it is just not an option”. Besides, the issue was not with London or with my job, it was with me and my illness, and now that I was going to be taking medication again I should be better soon. Nonetheless,  she made me promise to come back to see her every Tuesday at 8pm, after the conclusion of the last of her usual appointments “because I’m worried about you, love”. She gave me a card with various emergency contact numbers for people at risk of suicide to call so that they can be told not to kill themselves. And I did go back up to De Beauvoir Crescent, right next to where Kingsland Road crosses over the Regents Canal, every week to see Doctor James and it was thus that I made it through. God bless the NHS. 

I spent almost all of my waking hours over the next three somewhat medicated months mostly in the office that I shared with my supervising partner. She was a workhorse and a deal-junkie and also the least glamorous person with whom I have ever interacted for any length of time. The angst from the repressed lesbianism that other, more happily lesbian partners at the firm had pointed out to me in addition to the totally justified resentment towards all the well-presented men that had made her life difficult as she, against many odds, clawed her way tooth and nail to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder was projected at me in ways that were not exactly pleasant to bear during our 12 to 24 hours a day of sharing a 150 square-foot room, during which time I was treated with as much respect and dignity as would usually be afforded to a piece of office furniture and absolutely no conversation about anything other than whatever transaction we were working on was permitted. Having moved to an apartment that was a bus-ride away from the office when my firm-provided dystopian accommodation ran out, I would fantasize every morning while waiting for the 76 about one of the other red double-deckers that arrived before mine hitting me. I did not want it to hit me hard enough to irreversibly kill me but hard enough to injure me sufficiently for me to have to be taken to a hospital and kept there for at least five days off of work while I peacefully lay wrapped up in bandages, unable to speak or move my fingers. The proportion of corporate lawyers with whom I have since shared this bus incapacitation fantasy who at some point in their careers also took the bus to work and have disclosed that they had the exact same fantasy on at least one occasion is in excess of 80 percent.   

But after three months, something shifted, and I began to see a glimmer of light at the end of a tunnel that had previously seemed to have no end. This glimmer emerged from a combination of factors that included my workload easing up a bit with the conclusion of a number of matters, the breaking of summer and my leaving London for the first time since I arrived, and the little bit of light it provided allowed me to look back and reflect on what had actually happened to me at the beginning of the year. And the conclusion I reached was that I had not actually had a manic-depressive episode. That explanationjust did not fit the facts. There was no mania. There was no detachment from reality. Despite how strung out and freaked out I had been, I had kept it together on the outside, and my brain managed to perform the complex tasks I was assigned as part of my firm’s execution of the purchase by one the largest banks in France of a portfolio of fandangled financial derivatives from a New York based manager sufficiently well, despite how little sense any aspect of my first ever M&A transaction made sense to me and how little time or inclination anyone else on the matter had to explain it to me, for neither my slavemaster nor any of my other colleagues to pick up that I was not sleeping and that it felt like I was totally falling apart on the inside. I did think of killing myself, more than once.  But was the only reason a person could feel suicdal was that they had a “biochemical imbalance”? Was it not too coincidental that I was more or less fine before commencing my current occupation, and with my current employer and having my every movement supervized and scrutinized by a draconian overlord and then I was suddenly having an “episode” for the “episode” not to have been caused by those changes in circumstances rather than some biological illness that had nothing to do with where I was, who I was around and what I was doing?   

It was such reflection that lead me to the conclusion that the “breakdown” I had experienced, which looked very similar to all my previous “breakdowns” but for the fact that I had not been admitted to a psychiatric clinic and instead had managed to just push through, had been caused by a combination of a repressed component of my psyche, which had been medically straightjacketed and mentally bullied into state of silent, seizing, submission for most my life and a unique opportunity presented by this brief interval where I was not taking any medication and the combination of destabilizing forces including a sudden change in time-zone, a general change in surroundings and the total loss of agency over how I spent any minute of any day, which totally brought down my emotional guard and left me without most of my usual mechanisms for keeping troubling feelings and troubling voices in their place. Having suddenly found the microphone attached to the PA system of my consciousness unguarded and unfiltered, and sensing the immense danger that lay ahead, this component of my psyche, which I will refer to as my intuition, picked up that microphone and in one final attempt to make itself heard had screamed with all its might. And because I had never learned how to listen to the voice of my intuition even when it was speaking at a normal volume, now that it was screaming like a raving lunatic, all I had initially been able to make out was:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!??!!!????!!!!!?????!!??!!!!!?????!??????!!!!>><<>>##@@##$$$&(+[“;/@#$%!!###$%%^&&&^%$%$!!!@@@@:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(

▄︻̷̿┻̿═━一    ▄︻̷̿┻̿═━一     ☠☠☠☠☠☠☠☠           

And since most of my life I had been conditioned to believe that any aberrant, overly-emotional or ‘self-sabotaging’ behavior I had ever exhibited was attributable to a chronic mental illness (whether that be homosexuality or ‘bipolar disorder’), the only way I could respond to this sudden and then continuous eruption of internal screaming was to completely freak out about it, conclude I had once again become really “ill”. Until I had spent three more months in the trenches thinking it over and then finally stuck my head out just as the sun was appearing, I did not have the wherewithal to consider whether something was actually wrong outside of my head. As far I was concerned, all that happened was a lifelong, incurable disease had just ‘flared up’ again. And I had taken what I thought was the sensible, responsible course of action, which was to tell as few people as I possibly could (no one at the firm that would be liable to tell on me), keep calm, and seek medical attention. I had not missed a single day of work and my “utilization level” remained above 130% for the entirety of my time with the mergers and acquisitions group, which at my firm meant an average of 13 hours billed per day, a figure that practically requires physical presence at work for an average of at least 15 hours, given the range of activities that are unavoidable to fulfil the function of a corporate lawyer but unable to be billed to a client, such as participating in compuslory internal meetings and firm activities, business development work, eating, going to the toilet and reading, digesting and implementing the advice of the first 12 articles turned up by of a google search of “how not to die from sleep deprivation”. I had not told any of my family in Australia about what happened, which meant that there was no opportunity for them to corroborate my self-diagnosis, and panic me further, and tell me how I had to immediately return to Australia and check myself into a psychiatric clinic where I would remain until I was heavily drugged and ‘safe’. Although it was painfully lonely, dealing with the inner tempest by myself in London in the little time I had to myself, far away from anyone who “knew” me be from before and without the input of psychiatrists, gave me the chance to assess what had actually happened outside the frameworks of pathologizing medical discourses and the ideas that certain people with vested interests in my failure have about who I am and what I am and am not capable of. And on a fateful bank holiday Monday in June while walking alongside the Regent’s Canal, I finally figured out what my intuition had been screaming at me in that poorly light-proofed serviced apartment over the course of those nerve-shattering sleepless nights in March. With time and after careful consideration, I came to realize that what that frantic, barely coherent voice was really trying to tell me was: 

“GET OUT!!!!! GET OUT NOW! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN! GO! GO NOW! DO NOT PASS ‘GO’, DO NOT COLLECT TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS ! JUST GET THE FUCKOUT OF HERE! THIS IS NOT A GOOD PLACE! THIS IS AZKABAN! Don’t believe me? Look at those human-looking organisms in the glass cells on the other side of this absurdly narrow laneway that passes for a street in London, the older ones. Look closely. Do they really look human to you? THEY ARE DEATH EATERS!! This is your soul speaking and I do not want to be eaten!! What are you doing there on the edge of that bed? Do you think you can deeply breathe your way out of apocalyptic anxiety and a nervous system that is revving up to 9,000 just because you’ve been doing yoga for - what - a year, now? FUCK YOGA!!! Yoga is not going to save you!! I am going to save you!! Because your life is at risk!!!! This is an emergency!! EMERGENCY!! EMERGECNY!! EMERGENCY!!! I know what’s going on here, what you’ve been avoiding hearing or thinking about while sleepwalking further and further into the prison that you can now clearly see for exactly what it is if you look through the slats of these cheap and ugly venetian blinds to what is on the other side of that lane! I’ve been trying to keep you away from this precipice anyway I could for the past five years, whenever I got the chance and found an opening in which to sound the alarm. Remember when you were on exchange in Hamburg and you were trying to take an 8 Euro coach to Frankfurt to visit the German office of the top-of-the-top-tier international law firm at which you had already secured a graduate position, and when it stopped halfway you felt like if you took it any further you would literally die?? That was me. I was trying to get you to stay the heck away from Frankfurt, drop out of the exchange program that was making you miserable, and drop out of the degree that was making you miserable, so you could avoid entering a profession that would only make you miserable, and maybe for the first time in your life think about what might actually make you happy. But instead you checked yourself into a psychiatric hospital. And then when you were too drugged to hear me any more, resumed the exchange program, caught a train to Frankfurt and went into the firm’s German office and finished your degree. I tried a couple more times to implore you to change course, but my intervention attempts were all in vain. Your tools of self-repression, self-denial and reality denial were too strong for me. But now that you’ve finally stuck your nose right up to the abyss, I’m just going to have to bring out every piece of heavy neurological weaponry at my disposal to stop you going any further, including NOT LETTING YOU SLEEP!!! NO SLEEP EVER AGAIN!!! You can sleep as much as you want once you are the hell away from this giant machine that will swallow you up into its squalid belly and reconfigure you as another contract laying machine like the rows of mechanical suited battery hens in their glass cages just across from your bedroom window! Just go take another look if you need proof. LOOK AT THEM!! Look at that 42 year-old woman who for some reason is wearing her crinkled Marks and Spencer blazer at her desk instead of hanging it on her chair or on one of the hooks on the door and is almost collapsing onto her keyboard at 4:32 AM on a Thursday morning. Do you know how old she actually is? TWENTY-SEVEN!!! She was also an idealistic overachiever with hopes and dreams and the potential to lead a rich, full, meaningful life and make a positive difference in the world when she thought all her dreams had come true after receiving a graduate offer at her own ‘magic circle’ law firm. And now just look at her! THAT’S SOME TYPE OF MAGIC!!!! Do you want to be her in just four years’ time, having lost both the will to live and the ability to find the exit? NO! THE ANSWER IS NO! NO! NO!!! NO!! NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SAM, GET US OUT OF THIS HELL-HOLE!!! Run while you still can!! CHOOSE LIFE! And I do not mean that expression in the ironic sense that it is used in the monologue that opens the Danny Boyle film Trainspotting. That sort of life would be the one you would be choosing by confining yourself to a cage for the upcoming decades, running on your wheel, turning your tiny little cog to keep the very large machine churning. And I am willing to use as many different but equally upsetting metaphors involving caged,  miserable animals with meaningless lives as needed until you choose ACTUAL LIFE! Real life! Beautiful life! A life that does not cause you to die a little more every day you live it. Just pack your things, leave the key under the mat, take the lift down to Ground, tip the doorman because he’s been so nice to you since you arrived and have not yet, order an Uber or even flag an unreasonably expensive black taxi and L-E-A-V-E!!!!!! NOW!! GO!!!”

But somehow even once I had formulated this unambiguous meaning around the message that had been emanating from the place that I have heard others refer to as their “gut” at such great volume in March, a message that was still emanating, albeit at a rather more manageable volume, as of June, I still managed to rationalize myself out of actually heading what these vibrations had been trying to tell me. I made a long list of reasons for voluntarily remaining in Azkaban, the least sexy of which was that I would have had to pay back the firm tens of thousands of pounds because of all the sweeteners they had offered as part of my sign-on package, including the costs associated with sitting the equivalent of the bar exam, a study allowance for the time I was meant to spend studying for the equivalent of the bar exam (which I instead spent on a four-month ‘final adventure’), my flight to London, the cost to transport my belongings and the rent on the serviced apartment, sweeteners which very soon after they were greedily gulped down left a too-good-to-be-true, sick-to-my-stomach feeling that made complete sense once I realized I was now somewhat financially trapped. Other reasons for staying included ‘not wanting to be a quitter’, not quite being ready to walk away from the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of a two year training contract at one of the world’s pre-eminent law firms, and desperately not wanting to go back to Australia, which despite the feeling that I was lucky to have got through those first three months in London alive seemed like an even worse hell and one that I had only just escaped from. So my internal problem-solver conjured up a convoluted plan that would allow me both to remain at what is now the job of my nightmares for the remainder of the graduate program, while mentally reconfiguring the experience into something that was both bearable and meaningful. The plan was to keep participating in the grotesque game that is the corporate world but change the nature of the experience by making everyone else play according to my own rules. I achieved this by repurporsing the remainder of my Training Contract from being a program intended to train me into becoming an effective corporate lawyer and into a ‘field research mission’ intended to produce material for the generation-defining novel I was going to write at the end, one which was going to be so profound and widely read that it was going to change the world as we know it. I told myself that I could walk away from this mission at any time, although it would be more noble and beneficial for me to see it through to its conclusion. It was thus that I was able to transform the experience I was only an eighth of the way through from being the embarkation point of a decades-long career that was only going to end when I was found dead before my time at my desk into a thrilling temporary escapade and a worthwhile sacrifice of but a small chunk of my precious youth for the sake of achieving my overdue moment of glory as well as the enrichment of my entire species.

An essential part of this fantasy was that following my two years of undercover field research, I was going to spend another two years writing in the tropical paradise of Laos, where I would resume the work I started the previous year, when I finally found a good psychiatrist under the supervision of whom I had come off all the medication I had previously been taking, of untying all my knots, healing all my wounds and working out who the I actually was aside from a big, knotty wound. Laos seemed like the place that was the farthest place in all senses from the two places I was now trying to escape. The four-month final adventure that I spent the cash component of my my sign-on bonus on that I undertook between finishing my qualification process in Sydney and arriving in London had also included two weeks in Laos, and that had been the place in which I could most clearly last remember feeling any hope or joy while I was tunneling through at the start of my time in London. Two years in paradise in which I could ‘find myself’ and also write a novel that was going to solve all of my and humanity’s problems was also the light at tunnel’s end that I had to manufacture for myself in order to keep going. And given how long and dark that tunnel seemed, that light had to be extra, extra, extra bright. But it worked. Undercover corporate enslavement proved to be much more endurable than genuine corporate enslavement. It even had its moments of fun. Not the work, though. Anyone who claims to be having fun while practising law needs to go outside. But there is a lot of meaningless, giddy fun to be had around the edges of a soulless corporate existence once you stop caring about anything and begin actively looking for it. 

But all that unhealthy, unsustainable fun started coming to an end when I left London, walking away after eighteen months because I just did not have the stamina to make it through two years of being even a pretend corporate lawyer. When I got off the ride I had turned my life into, the firm agreed to let me off the hook for my  contractual debt because I effectively said to them, “I’m a mentally ill person and you do not want me here”, although they still made me work 12 hour days and gave me significant responsibility on important matters, including the Brexit strategy planning of a major US bank, right up until the last two weeks of my notice period, which I took off sick after staging a more convincing nervous breakdown (over email, and then telephone) so that I could spend that time tying up loose ends while still being paid. After selling or giving away my worldly possessions and cutting the lease on my apartment in Dalston, I embarked on another ‘farewell tour’, this time just of Europe, visiting one friend in Berlin, another in Paris and another in a picturesque village in the North of France called Gerberoy, which does not make much sense in hindsight, given that between deciding that I did not actually care about losing my job and finally leaving it I had taken over thirty short trips within Europe (including four prior ones to Paris and one to Berlin) and I had to somehow make the 6,000 pounds I had in my bank account on my last day last the two years it would take me to write a generational level. After returning to London and picking up my stuff from a friend’s place, I flew to Bangkok on a one-way ticket, a destination I had to pass through to reach Laos, although I did not have to stay in a five-star hotel in the Thai Capital for five nights and spend most of that time drinking gins and tonic and smoking Marlboro Lights while gazing wistfully at the Chao Phraya. But I did anyway, because I felt I deserved a last little bit of indulgent urbanity before secluding myself from the world and embracing an ascetic lifestyle, and I still felt this was part of the material-gathering stage and not a decision I had to be accountable for.

It was only when I arrived in Luang Prabang to commence a two year metamorphosis into a ball of light and the concurrent writing of the greatest novel that anyone has ever written or read that I decided that my research mission into life was over and real life could now begin. And one of the precursors to real life beginning was withdrawing from the medication that at one point I had genuinely believed was the only thing holding me together for the previous 18 months, the epileptic drug and purported mood stabilizer Lamotrigine. I was not concerned about coming off Lamotrigine in the slightest, even though I could remember how difficult withdrawing from that particular medication had been the previous times I had attempted it, most of which had ended in me being admitted to a psychiatric clinic and going straight back onto the epilepsy pills for my bipolar disorder. This time was going to be different! All I had been doing wrong before was not listening to my intuition, and now I could hear my intuition loud and clear and was doing exactly what it was telling me to, what did I have to fear? What did I have to fear about anything, really? There was nothing to fear but fear itself! I was liberated, I was free! I had created my own Ten Plagues and emancipated myself from bondage. So buoyed was I by my own self-emancipation that four days after arriving in Laos and after having not done a single bit of long-distance running since I left Sydney for my first final adventure two years prior, I ran the Luang Prabang Half-Marathon in under two hours, despite having to carry with me over the course of those 21 kilometers through the Laotian jungle the weight of a not insignificant hangover. I was invincible! What could I possibly have to worry about withdrawal symptoms for? What could I possibly have to worry about anything for?

It was after three unmedicated months in Laos, during which time I wrote absolutely nothing that I would ever want anyone else to read, that the internal screaming that had previously kept me up in London over the course of those first few torturous weeks came back. The screaming was of the same value and urgency, and this time it kept me awake for the three nerve-shattering nights leading up to New Year’s Eve 2017. Once again, all I could hear at the time was raving indecipherable screaming, and immediately forgetting everything I had subsequently figured out about what that screaming meant, concluded that I was having a nervous breakdown. Another nervous breakdown. It’s once again taken me three months to realize that there was meaning in that screaming, and that meaning was something along the lines of: 

“Listen here, you COMPLETE AND UTTER DIPSHIT! I’m pretty sure the last time we had a chat, what I had to say to you was not, “there’s no real hurry to escape this voluntary gulag, so please put me back into a coma and then find a way to remain in your soul-destroying job until you literally cannot bear it for a single additional minute, and then move by yourself to a developing nation not known for its hospitality to foreign nationals without a visa”. And I’m also pretty sure that when you stopped taking those intuition-silencing pills in November and I found myself able to speak again, the messages I was trying to send were not, “this was a really great idea. Being in Laos is turning out really well for you. It is such a great idea that I think you should not only rent a lonely house on the river surrounded by villagers who have every incentive to send their children to your lovely wraparound deck every morning to silently extort you  but also agree to pay the entire lease’s rent upfront with the very last remaining pounds that you had when you left London”. That is NOT what I was trying to communicate when I was trying to tell you that there is SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE AND YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

Wait a second….wait….what’s that strange sound I hear? Is that woman speaking Afrikaans? That’s not…? Oh my God, it is. It’s her. You invited your MOTHER to LAOS?  The woman who is too scared to drive on a road with more than one lane in each direction or stand on her own sixth-floro balcony because to visit you in the 126th least corrupt country in the world? And offered to take her on a tour of Vietnam as well? And it’s just the two of you going? Why would you devote the past decade of your life to trying to permanently rid yourself of someone and then invite that very same person to join you at the place at the ends of the earth that you found to hide in? Jesus. Christ. I’m not even going to waste my breath. I’m just going to repeatedly smack you in the face until you somehow figure out a way to get us out of this one. Good fucking luck, mate.”

The solution I came up with was to tell my mother, five days into her first ever trip to the continent of Asia, that I had not slept since I had picked her up at Luang Prabang Airport, that I was sure that it was because I was “sick” again and that I needed to go to a hospital as soon as possible. I told her I did not think I could make it all the way back to Australia and had found a psychiatric hospital in Bangkok that was only 400 USD per night. On the one hand, she agreed that I was sick and needed to go to a hospital. On the other hand, she had already paid for all the non-refundable flights and non-refundable hotel rooms I had booked for us between and in the tourist-friendly destinations that run from the north to the south of Vietnam and did not want to pay for a psychiatric hospital in Thailand when I could go to one in Australia for free. So her preference was for us to follow through with the full itinerary of our trip and then instead of coming back to Luang Prabang as originally planned, I would go back with her on her flight to Sydney, and then be promptly checked into a psychiatric hospital. My mother asked if there was any way of getting psychiatric medication in Laos, to which I responded that one could obtain 10 milligram tablets of Valium (twice the strength of a standard Valium in the West) for 1 USD each without a prescription. So we bought fifty, and I packed as much of my stuff as would fit in a large suitcase and a carry-on bag, abandoned everything else at the big lonely house I had rented on the Mekong river (with falang literally meaning “French” in Laotian but now being used to mean “whitie”) that still had 11 months left to run on its fully paid for lease before boarding the Vietnam Airlines flight to Hanoi the next day, without telling any of the friends I had made in Luang Parabang over my short time in there, of which there were nearly twenty in number, including an American yoga teacher, a Swiss hotelier, a Dutch photographer, a Korean chef, a Chinese antique dealer and a member of one of the illustrious Laotian “high-so” families that own and control everything in the country, all of whom had attended the combined housewarming for the lovely falang house and birthday party for my mother that I had thrown on December 28th, right before the “nervous breakdown” set in, and none of whom I ever saw or spoke to again.

Despite the intermittent but enduring internal screaming, my mother and I managed to get through nine days in Hanoi, Lao Long Bay, Hoi An, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City without any mishaps, or even external screaming. After mornings and afternoons wracked with anxiety, I woud take a BiValium every evening and my mother would rub my arm until I fell asleep like the sick child I was absolutely certain at the time I was, despite the fact that in 100% of our interactions with the outside world I was very much the competent adult, and I’m quite certain if at any point in Vietnam or in the Kuala Lumpur airport during our layover my mother would have lost me, she would have stood frozen in the exact spot in which she realized I was no longer there and started turning around and around in a circle while looking forlorn until I found her again, like a lost child in a park. When we did eventually get back to Sydney, a place I had pledged to never, ever return to for as long as I lived when I left only two years prior, I did not go to a hospital. But I did go back to my old psychiatrist and tell him that I definitely had bipolar disorder and I needed to take epilepsy pills to make me better again. Even though he did not share this view, he did not argue with me, and gave me a script for the Lamotrigine. But after three months of staying at my mother’s apartment in boring but safe Sydney and taking pills for a medical condition I definitely did not have and thinking about things, the internal screaming calmed down enough for me to remember everything that I had begun to figure out before its return, including that I do not actually have bipolar disorder and that the epilepsy pills were not actually doing anything for me, or at least not anything helpful. 

It was that same encumbered woman with the funny accent that triggered my sleepless spiralling in Laos and, for better or for worse, the abandoning of my plan to find nirvana and write a novel there that also induced the sheer rage and desperation to be heard that manifested in this rapidly exuded online confession concerning my history of taking psychiatric medication and explication of the reasons as to why I no longer intend to take them. The saga of its writing began four weeks ago when, with much trepidation and hesitation, I took what I thought was the sensible and respectful course of action in informing my mother that I was about to come off the epilepsy medication that I had been back on since my return to Australia at the start of this year. I reminded her that I had originally been prescribed this drug in 2010 by a psychiatrist that I only saw once because she thought he was a shonk and that the only reason I did not come off of it until 2014 was because my subsequent psychiatrists did not think it was doing any harm, and then I did finally come of it and only to go back on it in London because it was easier to tell myself I had a mental illness - for which I necessarily had to take some sort of pill - than admit I had wasted most of my youth and early adulthood burrowing myself deeper into the completely wrong life. I told her that I felt I was starting to figure out what has really been eating me this whole time and what to do about it, but this drug was actually hindering that process because whatever it was doing to my nervous system was just adding static to the messages from deep inside my unconscious that I really needed to hear. I told her that my psychiatrist supported what I was doing but there would be a difficult withdrawal period for the next couple of months, so I requested that she take it easy on me. She responded to my lengthy, considered explanation with, “I can’t listen to this now, I have to work tomorrow”. I did not hear anything more on the subject until 11.37pm on a Thursday evening a full fortnight later, when I was sunken into the sofa and reading a new Jonathan Safran Foer novel that I was not enjoying as much as I had hoped to. I heard a creak and looked up. In the doorway of my mother’s still darkened bedroom appeared a figure cloaked in a pink fluffy nightgown, with bolts of straw-like strawberry blonde hair extending in every direction from its pale round head. I dropped Mr Foer on the coffee table as a noise boomed from the shape in the doorway:

“It is not acceptable to me that you are coming off your medication!”

I gasped, but before I could respond the shape had disappeared and the door swung shut with a thud. Thirty minutes later, I tried to go to bed but could not catch a wink of sleep. By the morning the atomic explosion that had been catalyzed near the top of my left temple had spread throughout the corners of my mind and body and was demanding to be expressed. I opened my laptop and frantically began to type. Five days later, I had written a 25,000 word blog post and titled it “Unmedicated”.  If there was any doubt in my mind about publishing it publicly, it vanished two days after I had given the first draft to my mother to read, when I returned from an interview for a legal position and then burst into tears as soon as I was safely back in her apartment. I was not crying because the interview did not go well. My dazzle switch had turned on automatically as soon as I entered the meeting room and the partners had called me before I had made it back to Randwick to tell me they would love to have me. I was crying because being in that office and talking to those people reminded me just how much I truly detested being a lawyer in every conceivable way, and that I would literally rather die than go back to that life, and so I was effectively stuck. And doomed. My mother responded to my tears with, “please stop crying! Just think about something else! And you really need to take your medication again”. Fuck that, mum. I’m not avoiding my way through life. Look at where that got you. So now I’m going to say what I have to say, and because you would not listen to me in private, I’m going to broadcast my message as widely as possible, in case that helps you to be able to hear me, and in case it helps anyone else to be able to hear themselves. 

I do love my mother. I would not swap her for anyone else’s. And I know it’s not possible for a person to love another human being any more than she loves me. I know that everything she did for me growing up she thought was for the best. If I had spent most of my adult life caring for a sick and twisted husband and then one day the only good thing (or, I should say, the younger of the two good things) in my otherwise bleak and joyless life started behaving like a completely different and much more depresseed person at the age of fifteen, I would also freak the hell out and take him straight to the same doctor that had transformed my husband from an abusive maniac into a slightly less abusive zombie so that he could start drugging and neutralizing him as well. Actually, that is not what I do. But I know that she was living in a different time and under extreme pressures and had no way of knowing any better. Her intentions were good. Yet the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the word ‘hell’ sums up the world in which I’ve been living in as a result of my mother discharging her parental responsibilities by educating her son to believe that every inconvenient thought or feeling he’s ever had is part of an incurable illness and needs to be pushed down and out of sight and earshot by any means necessary.