I saw my neighbors falling to their lawns in agony, their flesh melting in the torrid acid rain. The scent was overpowering, a foul, blackening smell that gripped my stomach and threatened to slide through my chest and percolate from my mouth. I slammed my bedroom window to shut out the stench and backed away from it, as if that would do any good. I knew the rain would penetrate my house, burning through any place I hoped to hide.
“It’s killing everyone in the neighborhood,” I screamed. “It’s killing all the animals.” My mother came into my room, confused and worried, wanting to know what was wrong. I forced her to the window so she could see for herself.
“You see? We have to get out of here. We need to retreat, get everyone from the neighborhood so we can move to another planet. There’s only horrible death here for us.” And then it started raining frogs; huge green toads that hit the ground, bursting and scattering like water balloons upon contact. “It’s too late.” I sobbed.
“Sylvia, something is wrong with you. What is it?” I couldn’t answer. I felt numb and dropped to my pink shag rug, sitting there withdrawn and lost. My mother called our family doctor, who phoned in a prescription for Valium at a nearby pharmacy. She also called my boyfriend at the time, Tom. He was a big, six-foot-two man in his late twenties who knew how to stay calm in bad situations, a skill he’d learned as a corrections officer. He tried to console me as he scooped me up off the pink shag, took me outside, and put me in his car. My mother got in the back with me, and we drove off.
By the time we got to the drugstore, my terror had morphed into euphoria. I insisted on going inside, where I danced and twirled and sang in the aisles, then pulled down a metal shelf full of seaweed soap. At the time, it was the most important thing in the world. I had to have it. My mom and Tom quickly deduced that a little Valium wasn’t going to help. Tom whisked me out of the store, back into the car, and straight to a local hospital, Oakcrest, a facility that specialized in mental illnesses. Once there, the nurses listened to my ramblings. I told them about the “voices” I was hearing, and that I was the messenger for the forthcoming holocaust. I told them I hadn’t slept in four days and had been encoding messages to abandon the planet immediately.
The nurses, angels when I look back now, seemed grateful I’d told them of the impending doom. They kept telling me I was tired and needed rest. They gently helped me lie down on a gurney and then gave me a couple of injections that lulled me to sleep. As the nurses left, I heard a loud click as they locked the heavy door. I woke up the next day feeling more like my old self. The doctor at Oakcrest didn’t seem overly concerned. He never used the words “mania,” “bipolar,” or “manic-depressive.” His diagnosis: a temporary breakdown because of my father leaving. But it was just the beginning, as I struck out on a path that would take me from sweet little all-American Sylvia to nut-case Sylvia. It was 1986; I was nineteen.
I became a regular at Oakcrest. My problems became a part of my identity. I had been a burgeoning track star, known as the fastest girl in the county; now I was the crazy girl who was caught in the revolving door at Oakcrest. After each hospitalization, I was determined to reclaim my normal life, often working two or three jobs at a time and taking classes to better myself. A person with a mental illness shouldn’t be able to do that, right? At least, that’s what I told myself. So I enrolled in a beauty college and became an aerobics instructor.
My family had learned how to cope—Dad, by not being around; Mom, by taking me to Oakcrest when I got weird. My brother, Edward Jr., just kind of watched the Sylvia show. Poor kid, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t talk about it. None of us would talk about it. Somehow, we managed to play “happy family” while living in our own private hell.
Even my best friend Gigi didn’t know the extent of my condition; I hadn’t told any of my friends what happened that first night I went to Oakcrest. I also never really explained my subsequent visits. If I had to, I would pass it off as a trip to the hospital because of some bug I had caught. I wanted to believe the doctor’s diagnosis that it was a passing condition, and because my mother rarely talked about it, I thought it best to be quiet. There was, and still is, a stigma attached to serious mental health problems, and I didn’t want to be thought of as a mental case by my friends.
Even now, I’m always in constant fear of not appearing normal. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to recognize an oncoming episode. The fear or anger that can be an ordinary response to events can feel like being manic to me too. I can’t tell if a burst of creative energy is real or a misfiring in my brain. At times, it’s almost impossible for me to tell when I’m manic. The change can be so gradual that the choices I make seem perfectly normal. But the result may be far from it.
This was especially true when, in early 1987, after beginning to feel better—almost normal, I thought—I visited clubs with my girl Gigi. We were two hot girls: Ebony and Ivory. We’d get dressed up and tried to act like a couple of seasoned rocker chicks. This required us to play more mature. When manic, I played it to the hilt.
One night we hit a popular club, and I was feeling a surge of energy. That night the stars seemed brighter, the air crisper. It had been two years since my first episode, and I still wasn’t sure what was happening to me as I flowed in and out of moods. But that night I was having fun and feeling pretty, wearing a flower in my hair the way Diana Ross did when she played Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. Toward the end of the night I spotted, across the room, what I knew was my own Billy Dee Williams, except he was Irish, tall and broad-shouldered, with deep, rich green eyes and a long ponytail. He moved with a confidence I found sexy. Immediately, I felt we were destined to be together.
I made my way over to him and asked him to dance. Amused, he agreed. As I led him to the dance floor, my girlfriend whispered, “Watch out. He’s trouble.” So what, I thought. I’m crazy.
He wasn’t much of a dancer, but I didn’t care. His name was Riley McKnight, and I was hypnotized by those green eyes. That night we made plans to see more of each other, which quickly became a frequent occurrence. For weeks it was heaven. He drove a TR6 convertible, wore the best clothes, always had a roll of bills in his pocket, and took me to the best restaurants from Santa Rosa to San Francisco.
We spent every day and every night together. I loved his house. It was warm and homey. He was a gifted painter, with his own art decorating the walls. His passion was rock and roll, and he was a wannabe musician who didn’t quite have the talent. Still, he did his best to be around music, and many of his friends were musicians. They would often come by his house and jam, with Riley shaking a tambourine as he attempted to be a part of the “band.”
When he told me all of his secrets, I didn’t blink. I had my own secret, which I was hesitant to mention. My bizarre behavior had eventually sent my previous boyfriend Tom packing, and I believed my mother’s illness had a lot to do with Dad leaving. It seemed to me that if you’re sick and want to keep your man around, the best thing to do is to keep quiet about your illness. So I talked about art and music, asked questions about what Ireland was like. I never told him about my problem.
We were having a wonderful time with weekend trips to San Francisco and Napa Valley. We even went to Hawaii for a week. The weeks together quickly turned into months and despite having my own apartment, I was practically living at Riley’s. By the fall, my brother was off to college and, with me hardly ever around, my mother decided to move to Seattle to be near family and friends. It was just Riley and me. My behavior would get erratic at times, but Riley just considered me to be fun-loving and overly energetic; over time, though, it wasn’t easy to hide my true condition.
My mania finally showed up during a party one night at Riley’s house. His musician friends would come over to buy and smoke weed, then cover the songs of the day. Riley was on a beer run when it happened. I was sitting there, watching the fun. I didn’t smoke weed because I was afraid it might trigger an episode. But it might not have mattered that night. I was on a high of my own and had been cycling for days. A tweaking, rising energy kept surging through my body, making me feel as if I were about to burst. Then a voice whispered to me, but there was no one