Girl, Interrupted

by Susanna Kaysen

Something also was happening to my perceptions of people. When I looked at someone’s face, I often did not maintain an unbroken connection to the concept of a face. Once you start parsing a face, it’s a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. This was the reverse of my problem with patterns. Instead of seeing too much meaning, I didn’t see any meaning.

But I wasn’t simply going nuts, tumbling down a shaft into Wonderland. It was my misfortune—or salvation—to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality. I never “believed” anything I saw or thought I saw. Not only that, I correctly understood each new weird activity.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication. In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves. Naked, we needed protection, and the hospital protected us. Of course, the hospital had stripped us naked in the first place—but that just underscored its obligation to shelter us.

The question was, What could we do? Could we get up every morning and take showers and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us?

I stopped telling people. There was no advantage in telling people. The longer I didn’t say anything about it, the farther away it got, until the me who had been in the hospital was a tiny blur and the me who didn’t talk about it was big and strong and busy.

Friday I didn’t go in. I didn’t call either. I lay in bed smoking and thinking about the office. The more I thought about it the more absurd it became. I couldn’t take all those rules seriously. I started to laugh, thinking of the typists jammed into the bathroom, smoking. But it was my job. Not only that—I was the one person who had trouble with the rules. Everybody else accepted them. Was this a mark of my madness?

Whatever we call it—mind, character, soul—we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that “animates” us. A lot of mind, though, is turning out to be brain. A memory is a particular pattern of cellular changes on particular spots in our heads. A mood is a compound of neurotransmitters. Too much acetylcholine, not enough serotonin, and you’ve got a depression. So, what’s left of mind? It’s a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is “stale, flat and unprofitable”; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought. That leaves a lot of mind room. Something is interpreting the clatter of neurological activity. But is this interpreter necessarily metaphysical and unembodied? Isn’t it probably a number—an enormous number—of brain functions working in parallel? If the entire network of simultaneous tiny actions that constitute a thought were identified and mapped, then “mind” might be visible.

Sometimes its interpretations are not credible, as when you cut your finger and it starts yelling, “You’re gonna die!” Sometimes its claims are unlikely, as when it says, “Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner.”

Often, then, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And when you decide it’s wrong, who or what is making that decision? A second, superior interpreter? Why stop at two? That’s the problem with this model. It’s endless. Each interpreter needs a boss to report to. But something about this model describes the essence of our experience of consciousness. There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function. The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other’s work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.

By my senior year I didn’t even bother with excuses, let alone explanations. “Where is your term paper?” asked my history teacher. “I didn’t write it. I have nothing to say on that topic.” “You could have picked another topic.” “I have nothing to say on any historical topic.” One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.