Free The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks Page A

time to time I got together with another woman in the
dorms. She was from Canada, and initially our friendship looked quite
promising. But something was happening to me—something that had
begun the summer before—that short-circuited our budding
friendship: I was finding it difficult to speak. Literally, the words in my
head would not come out of my mouth. Our dinner conversations
grew increasingly one-sided, and I was reduced almost totally to
nodding in agreement, feigning a full mouth and trying to express
whatever I was thinking with my face. The friendship trickled away.
    And I couldn't speak on the phone with my family or friends in
    America, either—I'd decided that it cost too much, that it was
therefore "forbidden." By whom, I couldn't have said; there just
seemed to be some kind of vague but absolute rule against it. Of
course, my family would have gladly paid the phone bill, but my
distorted judgment told me I did not deserve to spend money on
myself, or to have others spend money on me. Besides, nothing I had
to say was worth hearing, or so said my mind. It's wrong to talk.
Talking means you have something to say. I have nothing to say. I
am nobody, a nothing. Talking takes up space and time. You don't
deserve to talk. Keep quiet. Within weeks after my arrival in Oxford,
almost everything I said came out in monosyllables.
    As I grew steadily more isolated, I began to mutter and gesticulate
to myself while walking down the street, something I had never done
on my worst days at Vanderbilt or in Miami the summer before. When
I heard the sounds I was making, I felt neither disturbed nor
surprised; for some reason, it helped me feel calmer. It seemed to
provide an arm's-length distance between me and the people who
were walking past me. Oddly, it was soothing, much like clutching a
well-worn blanket might have been to a frightened child. And so, with
no reference point outside my head (friends, familiarity, being able to
accomplish anything at school), I began to live entirely inside it.
    And the vivid fantasies had followed me across the ocean. My
doctor finds me huddled in a corner. He wants me to socialize with
other people in the program. I don't want to. They force me into a
room where there are other people. I am supposed to talk to them. A
man introduces himself, "Hi, my name is Jonathan." I do not
respond. "What's your name?" Again I do not respond. "Are you a
student here?" I mutter something to myself. My doctor comes over
and encourages me to talk to this young man. I start screaming and
run wildly about the room. Some of the attendants restrain me by
force.
    What was real, what was not? I couldn't decipher the difference,
and it was exhausting. I could not concentrate on my academic work. I
could not understand what I was reading, nor was I able to follow the
lectures. And I certainly couldn't write anything intelligible. So I
would write something unintelligible, just to have a paper to hand to
my tutor each time we met. Understandably, my tutor was
flummoxed.
    "This is not acceptable, Miss Saks," he said. He was neither angry
nor cold, but he was somewhat disbelieving. "Surely you can agree?"
he asked. "Because, you see, the work here is hard to make any sense
of."
    Dumbly, I nodded, sensing the hard wooden chair beneath and
around me. I barely squeezed out a couple of syllables. "Yes," I said.
"Yes, I know." I just didn't know what to do about it.
    Jean, my London friend who'd been a nurse, sensed from our
telephone conversations that something was going very wrong. I told
her I was just having a hard time doing the required work, but
evidently something else I said, or the way that I'd said it, let her know
I was struggling with thoughts of wanting to hurt myself. During one
phone call, Jean gently suggested that I talk to a doctor about seeing a
psychiatrist.
    "Oh, no," I said, trying to force some levity into my voice. "I'm not
crazy or anything. I'm just kind of...stuck." Inside,