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

and tossed it to the floor. A third sentence, a second
paragraph, a fourth page—nothing. I could not connect the dots. A
setback that might have been only simple frustration for someone
else—a slight case of writer's block, a change of plan that might have
meant taking a day or two off, going to a movie, having a beer—made
me wild with fear. Am I going backward again? Didn't Dr. Hamilton
and I solve this, didn't the amitriptyline fix it? Had it all been some
kind of chemical trick? I wanted to hit my head with something hard.
The very thought of meeting with my tutor to discuss the paper
reduced me to uncontrollable sobs. I don't have anything to say. I am
a failure. It is only a matter of time before people see I am stupid.
And crazy.
    The Warneford staff had tried to caution me that I wasn't ready to
leave the hospital yet, but I hadn't listened to them—and now, it
seemed, all I could do was watch helplessly as once more, everything
began to slip out of my grasp. I started to lose weight again; in just a
few weeks, I was down to ninety-five pounds. I looked like a torture
victim.
    Dr. Hamilton, however, did not want to focus on my weight loss.
"It's a red herring," he said calmly. "It's not what's really going on with
you."
    I was disconsolate. "But what's wrong with me, that I can't eat? Is
this anorexia? Am I going to die?"
    He said anorexia was a grab bag term. "We're not going to focus on
symptoms and labels, Elyn. Let's focus instead on you getting your
work done. And for now, just eat more, OK?"
    His simple-sounding approach to my weight loss didn't help much,
but it didn't dampen my feelings for him, either. He was so smart, so
sensitive, so kind. He knows me like no other, I thought, and he
knows what's best. I would leave his office temporarily
reassured—well, if this is what he thinks, it must be true—but once
outside, I'd slam into the wall of the truth: It was all going badly
wrong. I started muttering again —I am a bad person, I deserve to
suffer. People are talking about me. Look at them; they're staring at
me. They're talking about me. In all likelihood, that part, at least,
wasn't paranoia. Given my appearance, it seems quite likely that
people were talking about me.
    In all this time, I'd never told my parents about my illness or
hospitalization. I didn't want them to worry; even more important, I
didn't want them to think less of me, that I was somehow a weak or
crazy failure. I wanted to fix myself, and not have my problems in any
way leak into their lives. But the time for keeping the secret was
coming to an end. They'd let me know that they were traveling to
Paris—quite naturally, they expected that I would come join them
there and we would spend some time together.
    In spite of the fact that I was thin as a rail, jumped at my own
shadow, refused to speak to virtually anyone, and went around talking
to myself, I hoped they wouldn't notice. Indeed, it was a mark of my
impaired judgment that I believed I'd actually be able to pull it off. But
as soon as we met, the stunned looks on their faces told me I wasn't
going to get away with it.
    Nevertheless, it was four or five days of phony joie de vivre before
my father finally knocked on the door of my room and said he needed
to speak with me about something.
    "Your mother and I are extremely worried about you," he said. I
could hear the intensity in his voice and see the effort he was making
to keep his face relatively calm looking. "We've tried to give you a
number of chances to tell us what's happened, but you're not saying.
We're so worried, Elyn, we're not sleeping at all. Please tell me what's
going on."
    I took a deep breath and then plunged in. "I'm sorry I didn't tell
you," I said. "I got depressed during the year."
    Was that relief on his face? It made me wonder what he and my
mother had been imagining the past few days. Had they been
discussing me each night in their room? "You're so thin," he said. "We
were convinced you had