Judy Bolton-Fasman

Word Count 910

The first time your mind cracks, you bolt upright in bed. Your dorm room is always chilly, but you are sweating. You have so much energy that you are ready to climb the ugly cinder block walls. The cinder blocks, thick with paint, look as if they were glued together.

***

Cracks – veiny, spreading quickly – spider through your mind. You don’t know it yet, but you will take medication that transforms your mind into beautiful kintsugi – the Japanese art of filling cracks in pottery with gold dust. But presently, this is an attack on your sanity. It happened to Grandma. And it was iñiervos for your Abuela. Their nerves, and now yours, set hearts to pounding and make breathing irregular. 

Your mother takes you to her ancient internist— the only doctor she will allow you to see. The doctor’s hands shake as he listens to your heart and inexplicably shines a light in your eyes. You try to convince him that this is the worst moment of your life. It has to be a breakdown, right? It must be a breakdown. You are shaking and certain you will never occupy your right and familiar mind again. Your life is divided into before and after. “Nervous like the mother,” the doctor mutters.

Your mother refuses to take you to a psychiatrist despite your father’s physician friend Rocky Fassanella’s recommendation. Your father cannot stand to see you suffer, so he downs a beer and calls his friend, who is an ophthalmologist. “I don’t know what to do, Rocky,” he pleads. 

As an adult, you will come to understand how Rocky, a son of Italian immigrants, anxiously lived on the margins of campus life at Yale. Your father was on the margins too, as he futilely tried to befriend the Auchinclosses and the Bundys. 

You are vaguely aware that you, too, are on the margins in this college; you are never invited to certain frat parties and feel the snubs of preppy ponytailed girls on campus. You eventually give up on the people who summer on the Vineyard, and instead go to bed early on most Friday and Saturday nights. You convince yourself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. 

Besides, you are tethered to the phone every night waiting for your boyfriend’s call. You are majoring in him instead of English. You believe your love is meaningful because it is dramatic. You believe you need him to survive. And maybe you do. After college you will follow him to New York City and, not necessarily your choice, come to live so much life without him.   

Years later, you are grateful he is gone when you learn the term “gaslighting.” You will immediately recognize that was what this boyfriend did to you – your first love, whom you could not leave until you left your mother’s house.

***

You wish your grandmas were alive to tell you how they had children and made a home even as they battled their anxiety and depression. Evil spirits, your Jewish Connecticut grandma might say as she spits at them. Babanjiniji — the Turkish bogeyman who is really your Turkish grandfather -- your Greek Sephardic grandma might chime in. They don’t tell you about their long hospital stays and the cold showers they were thrown into to snap them out of their torpor. You hear about this cruelty as if it is casual, but you know it is a cautionary tale your mother gleefully tells you as she is ordering you to get a hold of yourself. 

 History – theirs and now yours. You are of one mind with your grandmothers. 

***

The night your nerves first go amok, you run into the dorm’s hallway looking for help.  You are so hot you are sure you will spontaneously combust. Your hands are over your ears — an instinct you hope might tamp down the electronic snow from an old television buzzing loudly in your head. You see the girl next door in the hallway and tell her you need to go to the emergency room. It is the first time you speak to her. Call Security, she tells you as she floats away. How you wish you were as light as she is. How you wish you were anyone else. 

You go back to your room, hands still over your ears, and you rock back and forth on your bed. It is after 11 now, and the telephone rings. It is your boyfriend. It is always your boyfriend. You do not dare tell him how frightened you are that you are going crazy. 

***

You’re always keeping time — and this first panic of yours is an endless ten minutes. Ten minutes — you’re surprised. Your alarm clock’s brightly lit digits must be lying. A decade later, when you finally find a kind doctor – after consulting a psychiatrist who tells you that if you lived a hundred years ago, you would be committed to an asylum – he will tell you that panic attacks feel deceptively and harshly long. “Panic is a devil trying to convince you that you are crazy,” he says. When he tells you that, you feel so close to your grandmothers. 

 When you ask him to commit to you, he leans forward and gently assures you, you are not insane, just tired. Understandably so. That’s the first explanation of your runaway mind that resonates with you. You’re on your way to a vestige of the sanity you once knew – sanity that will be mended and kintsugi-beautiful. 

Judy is the author of ASYLUM: A Memoir of Family Secrets from Mandel Vilar Press. Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers such as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, essay anthologies, and literary magazines She is the recipient of writing fellowships from Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Mineral School. Judy is a three-time Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and BAE nominee.