For a year, I’d been a different, better version of myself, comfortable in my own brain, and content for once to be where I belonged. Though I hadn’t met up with the women in my head, I’d been to the places that still held their shadows. But now that I returned to the United States, my OCD and depression slammed back into my life hard.
I missed the craziest things about England, like the indigenous orange-blue-and-yellow Wall’s Ice Cream signs, drinking orange juice at the cinema, Cadbury’s Ninety-Nines, and the way all English Kentucky Fried Chickens sold chips. I swore when I got back to Devon I was going to hug a hedgerow. But after a few years, I wasn’t even communicating with Annie and Neil anymore because my incapacitating breakdowns and the shame that accompanied them made it too difficult to maintain personal relationships, especially long-distance ones.
Even though I longed to be in England, I didn’t believe my symptoms would evaporate again the way they had when I’d lived in Exeter. I thought about the women in my head all the time, but they weren’t present in the same way they had been. After spending a year in England without finding them, I couldn’t pretend that they would suddenly appear and rescue me from myself and from being in the wrong life.
With my insomnia and noisy head, I didn’t function well enough to hold down a regular job successfully. Even on a good day, I felt like anything could topple me over the edge into another serious mental breakdown, and I didn’t know where to put myself for safe keeping. I couldn’t maintain my sanity, but I’d learned how to maintain my grade-point average. The best option for me seemed to be staying in school, as it would give me a flexible schedule and allow me to maintain my health insurance. All my instincts had boiled down to simple survival. I got into a PhD program in literature, which offered me a teaching stipend, so halfway through my twenties, I found myself driving across the country to begin a new life just outside of Washington, DC. And that’s where I stayed to save myself.