“I’ve been thinking a long time now,” Coskun said one afternoon, pulling out a thick book. It was the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “You don’t have to tell me right away if you think my hunch is right. Consider it, let it sit in your heart, and see if it rings true.”
She looked tired that day. I wanted to tell her that she had appeared in my dream. In the dream, we were on a beach. I was walking, holding her in my arms. Eventually, she got too heavy for me. When I put her down to rest, she stood up and began walking and broke into a run, her footprints disappearing in the distance.
Coskun’s restricted state was new to her. She was not American, she did not expect life to be wonderful or fair; she was a practical cynic and had accepted her lot, but still, I wanted her to walk. I wanted her to run.
I looked down and read where she had opened the book.
Bipolar I Disorder is characterized by one or more Manic or Mixed Episodes, usually accompanied by Major Depressive Episodes. Bipolar II Disorder is characterized by one or more Major Depressive Episodes accompanied by at least one Hypomanic Episode.
As I read about mixed states, where manic and depressive elements coincided, my brain raced back to the past—the tail end of high school, my miserable years in college when I was either flying or in despair, my late twenties in art school when I slept too little.
I looked up from the page. I was inside a miracle, which was not the solution but just the name.
“Often antidepressants can cause people with bipolar to tip into mania,” Coskun explained. I remembered how I felt in the Stew. The excess energy, the seizures. “That is why I didn’t think to put you on antidepressants again. You are on antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, but no more antidepressants.”
She stopped typing and watched for my reaction. I started. “When I was in the hospital the first time, I was diagnosed as dysthymic. That’s mild depression.”
Coskun smiled. “You had been experiencing symptoms of sadness and emptiness persisting for almost six months before you tried to kill yourself. That’s hardly mild depression even if it’s with impulsivity. Most importantly, over the years, there are obvious major depressive episodes.”
I wondered whether the doctor at McLean had fallen into bias or whether it had been my fault for having explained myself poorly. All this time I had suffered needlessly, admonishing myself for my “mild depression.” I looked down at my hands. I was overwhelmed.
“You said the first time you experienced depression you were seventeen, correct?”
I nodded.
“Then McLean was when?”
“When I was twenty-five.”
“It is often difficult to diagnose bipolar. If you have mania, or the lesser hypomania, then there’s inevitably depression afterward. Because the illness is cyclical, the disorder typically takes about ten years to diagnose. How old are you now?” She searched my chart.
I was thirty-five. It was ten years, almost to the week, since the Stew.
4.
COSKUN’S DISCOVERY TOOK TIME TO sink in. Soon, I left the hospital and the complex and brilliant woman who’d cared for me.
I continued therapy. When I was stronger, I taught at the art college near our house. My entire life revolved around my students, as Nate’s did around his. On the weekends, he and I tried to join our parallel lives by having brunch in the Harbor area and shopping for the week’s groceries.
When his men left the house for the last time, the contractor, like an oracle, pronounced, “It’s time for you to live in this house now”—which was exactly what we tried to do. I threw dinner parties for faculty of both colleges, gave tours of the house, and fed everyone soufflés. Eventually I even made a best friend, a woman named Ana who was a graduate student at Hopkins. She was, like me, a reader and a humanist, and we often discussed her dissertation while she worked in the guest suite. I kept the house immaculate, with tulips or hydrangea clipped from the garden in the parlor.
But the more perfect the house, the more imperfect our marriage. I could see now, outside the distraction of the renovations, how I pivoted around Nate in the same compensatory way I did around my parents. When I was sick, I ballooned in importance. But once I was better, I tried to account for all the days and hours of love, and make up for his sacrifices with services rendered.
“Remember when we first started dating? I called you one day when you were upset. You said you were busy with a project. And I asked you what the project was, and you said, ‘The project called Life’?” Nate asked one Sunday morning when we were paying bills.
I placed a stamp on an envelope and rolled my eyes. “Sounds like me.”
“I laughed then, too, because you were obviously being melodramatic. But you were right. There’s only one real project, and that is, as you said, Life.”
For the first time, we were no longer living parallel lives, and when it was time to come together, I couldn’t. I wondered whether when Nate took care of me, it came out of a pure place, as I assumed it had with his parents. Did this sacrifice stem from wanting to help me because he loved me? When I asked him, he leaned on the language of obligation and duty, rather than that of desire and happiness. I turned love around in my head so many times I lost all understanding of what it was, the idea as slippery as a minnow but as fundamental as water. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that sacrifice and duty were insufficient as a foundation for our shared lives. We had loved this whole time with our minds and not our hearts.
I didn’t know how to change our dynamic. In a final act of recompense, I decided the best way to pay Nate back was to leave. But really, I wanted less to separate from my husband than to pursue a life I had been torn out of by my own submission and fear. If the well-intentioned house on Weston was the symbol of our marriage—once filled to the brim with baggage inherited from the people who came before us—then Nate himself had unwittingly become the symbol of my life of oughts.
Feeling me slip away, he suggested a trip to New York. In the library of a hotel in Gramercy, I told him I wanted a separation. His face went white for many moments. When he got hold of himself, he said he didn’t want this and promised to prioritize our marriage and take a step back in his career.
I shook my head. “You’re too talented not to care about what you want to care about. You wanted to make a go of it in Baltimore.” I didn’t admit how absolutely terrified I was to be the focus of his—or anyone else’s—life. In fact, I was trying to do that for myself.
Three years after we moved to Baltimore, I left the beautiful house I’d tried to make a home. I took my art supplies and a handful of clothes and returned to New York, this time to Brooklyn. For a year, Nate wrote letters. He thought the separation was a trial to see whether we could identify and repair the wounds in our marriage, but I saw it as a chance to live a life I’d never experienced before, on my own terms and without paying anyone back for love. In the end, the search to understand myself cracked everything open. I wanted not just this one thing—the artist’s life—but real, unaccounting, unconditional love, and the risk and danger that went with it. This was how I began to realize the bigness I’d always desired for my life had nothing to do with external achievement and everything to do with my self-worth.
In the second year of our separation, I returned to the house to tell Nate I wanted a divorce. I hadn’t stepped foot in Weston for a long time. There were no tulips on the parlor table. But everything else looked the same, save for a watermark on an antique piece upstairs in the master suite, which I discovered while collecting my jewelry. I started to say something to him about the housekeeper but stopped. Even though this was my table, it had been bought for the house because it fit here, to make it perfect.
We sat in the parlor, which was painted a Wedgwood gray. Nate passed over a note my friend Ana had sent on her Crane’s stationery. Her wording was florid as always. “Given the present painful circumstances, I feel it best that I should absent myself.” Ana and I had planned to teach a course at the university, but then I had left, and Nate occasionally met her for lunch on campus. She was telling us now, I love you both and I cannot take sides. I tossed the letter on the table and did not realize hers would be the first of many friendships I’d lose as the cost of divorce.
In the ledger of our marriage, I had always believed I’d been in the red and Nate in the black. It had never occurred to me that love was not compensation but something to be given and accepted freely, without relying on spreadsheets or engaging in poverty math. I had seen and been the recipient of real love so many times over the years with Nate, Macy, Eve, and yet it had taken me this long to see.
I had married someone who could not make me the focus of his life. In that sense, Nate had been perfect because I could not have withstood that level of attention. But the support he’d offered was so tangible, it opened the door to a new life that ultimately took me away from him. I wondered whether Nate would stay in this house. I hoped he wouldn’t. This house wasn’t us, it was me.
I nodded and stood up. It was time to pack the last of my things. It was then that Nate put his head back and for the first and last time in the history of us, I saw him weep. I swept over to him and knelt down. Placing my arms around his neck, I sobbed with him. “Please,” I said. “Please, Nate, I’m sorry.” He wouldn’t let me move him, nor would he move toward me and embrace me one last time.
And that was how, at the end of our life together, we did and did not come together.
5.
SIX MONTHS LATER, I WAS in a courtroom in Baltimore as our neighbor testified as a witness at our divorce hearing. As at our wedding, Nate stood on the other side of the aisle. Maryland’s divorce laws had made it difficult to return to the house, and my neighbor attested that Nate and I had not had conjugal relations during our separation, which was of course true but a strange thing for the government to want to know. Ten minutes later, we were divorced. I had not contested anything nor taken a lawyer and had refused alimony—more repayment for having caused pain. I wanted my imprint on his life to be as superficial as possible, as though I didn’t deserve to make a difference at all. When I had told Umma we weren’t splitting assets, she said she was proud of me, as if principles were more important than eating.
I didn’t have money for the Acela—and wouldn’t, for many years—so I took the bus back to New York. I was the last one on. Nate dropped me off at the stop. He stood at the door and when I went to hold him, he didn’t hug me back.
I told him, “I will always love you.” And I knew it to be completely true. To that, my ex-husband simply said, “Take care of yourself, Hyeseung.”
