She’s Come Undone
Kristine Lloyd
Word Count 1483
Have you ever been found by a court or other lawful authority as lacking mental capacity or involuntarily committed to a mental institution?
I answered the question without much thought. Work was busy, I had a mile-long to-do list, and I needed to dash off this application for TSA pre-check, a luxury I’d chided my family members about until I started traveling so much for my job I talked myself into its necessity.
Should I lie? It seemed like a terrible idea – the stuff of dystopian novels – to lie to the government.
Yes.
Luckily, I did not need to elaborate. That’s where things get dicey. Trying to explain myself to someone else. I’m not crazy, but I have commitment papers that say otherwise. Official documents filed with the court to hospitalize me against my will. Papers crumpled up at the bottom of my underwear drawer, beneath the stray socks and hole-ridden granny panties, that I keep just in case I need reminding that I was out of my mind – pacing, eating carrots obsessively (insanity is no excuse to let yourself go!), staring at the television, trying to interpret its messages, certain I was dying or someone was trying to kill me.
In the South, people say “she had a come apart” – like something ripping at the seams, no longer held intact by the mores of polite society, as though we are all just walking around sewn up, fragile shells intact, one crisis away from disintegrating. The first time it happened, I’d just finished college, had no job prospects and a boyfriend I kept trying to convince myself I loved. I collapsed into myself under the weight of expectation and uncertainty. I came apart.
A few weeks after I filled out the online portion of the pre-check application, I went in for my interview. It was a Saturday morning, and I agonized over what to wear. If I dressed up, would that look suspicious? Like I was trying too hard. I went with the easiest option: yogurt-stained yoga pants with my oversized Schoolhouse Rocks all-purpose, sleep and errands-running t-shirt. I looked like I’d just rolled out of bed, but I reasoned this made me seem chill and so sane I had the confidence to wear my bed clothes out in the world.
I pulled into a tiny strip mall parking lot with a Starbucks and nondescript burger joint. There is no décor in the IdentoGo. It could be stripped clean and turned into another business in an afternoon. White walls, linoleum floors, hard plastic waiting room chairs. Not unlike a mental institution in its clinical blandness. A thin, tidy-looking young man in a dress shirt and tie instructed me to me follow him. He seemed absent a personality, but then I suppose those jobs attract a certain type.
“Am I going to have my photo taken? Because I didn’t really dress for this. I don’t normally dress like this, you know.” Stop talking. The more I talked, the more likely I’d say something stupid, or worse, suspicious.
“Yes. I will need to take your photo,” he said in his robot voice, focused on scanning my passport.
He asked me to verify my place of birth and then quickly clicked through a series of screens until he got to the fingerprint page.
“Wait,” he said. “I think I missed something. Did you mean to answer yes to this question?” he asked, turning the screen to me.
“Yes,” I said as calmly as possible, even though I felt shame creeping up my neck like a vine. The gravity of the question began to sink in, and I saw what he saw: an unkempt crazy woman who could have a meltdown at any moment. A volatile woman who might try to strangle a stranger if provoked.
“Hmmm, ok. So, I believe your application will probably be denied for answering yes to this question,” he said, looking towards me but not at me.
“But it was such a long time ago.”
I stopped talking. I was about to start crying and that would only confirm my mental instability. Being confronted with a stranger’s stereotype of who I might be is jarring. I’m not a violent person. I try to keep everything folded up and stored neatly inside, which is why, I guess sometimes, when that compartment gets overly full and the lid won’t close, everything comes tumbling out.
I’ve been hospitalized more than once for psychotic depression. Reading the commitment papers is like reading a novel about someone else. I am referred to as the “respondent,” as in “respondent believed people were reading her mind.” I am described as having “delayed responses.” I barely remember this person. I’d put her out of mind, sloughed her off like some alien thing, and lulled myself into thinking I was quite normal. I assimilated so seamlessly, slipped into the crowd like a double agent, that even I had been seduced into believing I had nothing to hide.
Robot Boy cleared his throat. He was waiting for me to say something.
“So does this mean my application will automatically be denied?”
“Not necessarily, but I know that does happen,” he said, nervously adjusting his wire-frame glasses.
“Well, how often?”
“I’m not sure. Do you want to continue with your application?”
“No. I think I’ll call TSA to ask them some questions.”
He wrote the number on a Post-it, and I wiped tears away while his back was to me.
Every time I got released from the hospital, I had to put my life back together as quickly as possible, like I was hurriedly trying to stuff everything back into an overfull suitcase, so I could graduate, or get back to work. I didn’t have time to grieve the fact that some decisions were made for me as a result of my breakdown.
I rarely mention having bipolar disorder or my repeated hospitalizations. When I do, people are shocked. They don’t know what to say. Or they bring up some story of a relative or friend of a friend.
“My aunt has bipolar, and she’s been arrested a bunch of times for public indecency and assault. Are you sure you’re bipolar? You just don’t seem like it,” a friend once said.
People say: my cousin had that, or my aunt, or my college roommate. It was a phase, they say. You’re not really crazy. I think they mean to reassure me, but what it sounds like is denying the truth of my experience. How can I blame them when I barely speak of or acknowledge it myself? All of those months and years of highs and lows, of trying new medications, of doctor appointments, of gaining weight, of emotional flatlining, of fatigue, of tics and tremors. I don’t want to go into it, so I let it go. I don’t tell them I punched a pregnant nurse (not that hard); that I walked barefoot through the dirt and muck of a fenced off construction site; or ran naked through the psych ward until they wrestled me to the ground and stuck a giant needle full of sedative in my ass. I have been stable for years now, and sometimes, I even have to convince myself that these things actually happened.
I forget that other people, people with access to my private information, can see it. But they only see the most basic information, which by virtue of being the only piece of information, becomes the sum of all my parts. I am stripped of my complexities and instead boiled down to my diagnosis. I think that’s what has made it so hard to accept my condition. If forced to look at it, I only ever see it the way the world does – as a disability, even a liability, rather than something inextricably linked to my creativity; a bipolarity that at its worst incapacitates me, but at its best allows me to feel as though I could take flight.
According to the TSA website, where I did a cursory check for answers to “Can a crazy person still qualify for TSA pre-check?,” an average of 17 firearms are discovered at checkpoint sites each day. I don’t even carry lip balm in my carry-on. We all think we know what crazy looks like. It’s the woman on Cops who gets arrested for walking down the street naked; the man yelling to no one in particular about Jesus and sin; the woman who tries to drown her baby or the man who shoots someone for cutting him off in traffic. We want to believe it’s someone wildly obvious and different from ourselves, so we don’t have to contemplate that it could be us. It could be any one of us. It could be the person standing in line next to you, shoes in hand, patiently waiting to get to some other place.
Kristine is a writer and librarian who recently relocated to Pittsburgh, because she owns a lot of winter coats. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Salon, and other online outlets.