For some reason, mania comes to me around November – well, September to November. I think my first full-blown manic episode happened just before my twentieth birthday. I had gone on a teenage crash diet, which I found surprisingly easy to maintain. For days I got by on precious little food or sleep. But I baked constantly. While listening to ‘alternative’ songs on Radio Metro at 4 a.m. I mixed and muddled chocolate brownies I had no intention of eating.
I was always the life and soul of the party. I didn’t sleep around, but I was the most flirtatious, irrepressible, confident and boundlessly energetic girl standing or dancing, usually surrounded by a sea of men. I’d wake up laughing. It was as if I had X-ray vision into people’s souls. I could see through the layers of their facades, their protective devices, their pain and dreams. It was extraordinary.
I taught life skills and drama to street children at a home in Hillbrow. After teaching, I’d walk through ‘The Brow’ at night, past its trendy shopfronts. I never felt threatened by the desperate outcasts who lived there – street urchins and homeless schizophrenics. I’d stop and look down the ominous dark alleys, seeking out stoned victims, drunk criminals and corrupt policemen who seemed to whisper and whimper in a chorus. Fearless, I was ‘Little Miss S in her mini dress/Living it up to die’. In a short skirt and Doc Martens I’d stomp down to a crummy building, up a dirty staircase and into a flat, where I was greeted by the misery of a poster depicting a beaten woman, who had at her feet the words, ‘Sister, we bleed …’
Among the trampled and the battered, the feminists and the healers, I counselled at POWA (People Opposing Women Abuse). At the time, it seemed to me that when I wasn’t partying, this was a pretty normal way to spend an evening. I was tireless and unstoppable. I thought I was immortal. Boy, did I have delusions of grandeur.
Invariably, with this level of overexcitement, with this mania, came the dancing, which has always had a way of pushing me over the edge. I can never just dance as a casual hobby. It has to be an intense experience. Reflected in a studio mirror, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, I expect to see the grace of the human form lifted effortlessly in rhythmic free flight.
The sad irony is that I am not a born, or a natural, dancer. No matter how much I starve myself, my body will always be the wrong shape. Short of limb, lumpy of frame, I’ve found myself at times to be either too big of breast or too wide of girth. My brain is dyslexic, so I find myself confused, slow, and at times even dancing in the wrong direction. But I’m passionate, and passion can propel a girl into many a pirouette nature never intended her to achieve. After gruelling hours of practice I was sometimes rewarded with a fleeting moment of magnificence, when the music inhabited my clumsy human form and my body drifted and glided gloriously through the primal freedom of dance.
During that first November mania, as my body weight just about halved and my personality changed, it never occurred to me that something might be wrong. Everything felt profoundly right. I didn’t feel detached or unreal; I felt more myself than ever. It was as if, for my whole life, I’d been allowed only privileged glimpses of the real Rahla, and suddenly that was who I was all the time. I had no reason to believe the feeling would pass. It was fabulous, and I was hysterical and ecstatic with me-ness. And I kept getting thinner and thinner.
What happened next is a bit of a blur. Let’s see. I did a neurolinguistic programming workshop, which ended with a fire-walk. Perhaps that is what pushed me over the edge into a state of pure, divine mania. On the other hand, I did another fire-walk a few years later and didn’t get remotely manic. When it’s gonna come, it’s gonna come, and that’s that.
Time passed. After the long night of baking, I flew high and got dumped low. I went to insane places, but I never lived in this world. A few doctors tried to help. When I was manic, I wouldn’t eat or sleep, and so, at the age of twenty-three, a doctor diagnosed me with anorexia. Two years later, reluctantly crawling through the aftermath of mania and falling into its ensuing depression, I found myself hankering after the hollow high of mania. The next doctor diagnosed bulimia. Even with the best intentions in the world, no one could establish what was wrong with me.
Then, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, after the fun and games of another manic episode, I finally agreed to see a highly thought-of doctor to get a professional opinion on my state of mind. I felt there was nothing he could tell me that I didn’t already know. Here I was, I told myself, serenely enlightened and conscientisised. All my life I’d been prodded and studied, analysed and paralysed. I’d been a hyperactive child, dyslexic, remedial, anorexic, bulimic. I’d been a rebel and a late bloomer. I’d had attention deficit disorder and I’d had depression. What was this doctor going to tell me that could possibly add to that list?
I sat in his waiting room and watched children play while their dysfunctional mothers consulted the great doctor. I flipped casually through outdated magazines. I was way cool, so much cleverer than all this. I’d already told my darkest secrets to dotty dopeheads in candlelit rooms. I’d done Eastern healing, Western healing; I’d stood on my head and leapt off my toes.
But the truth was that nothing had really helped. I knew something else was wrong with me, something that did not seem to have a name. Secretly, I dreaded the idea of telling this strange doctor my diary of disorders. I was funny and irreverent about it, but it was still painful. And for all the witty labels I gave myself, it was also embarrassing.
I picked up another magazine. Boring. Then I read a paragraph of the book I took from my handbag, but couldn’t concentrate, so I put it back. I went to the bathroom and reapplied my lipstick, slowly, with a miniature gold brush and lipliner. Still no sign of the famous doctor; where was the man? Again I opened my bag, taking out my miniature diary and gazing at the empty little pages, pretending to write down appointments with my miniature pen.
Waiting, agitating, I started to get annoyed; I had to go home and rearrange the flowers, make dinner. Who did he think he was to keep me waiting so long? I thought about leaving, simply walking out and going home. Then he came smiling down the corridor, looking like a cheerful Teletubby. He guided me to his disordered office, filled with opened books, closed books and photographs that faced away from me. He sat down. On his crowded desk was a prescription pad and jars of pens and pencils, and paperweights advertising drug companies. I nervously leant over, picking up a Montblanc pen. It didn’t work. As if from far away, I heard his words. They fell out of his mouth with random matter-of-factness. ‘You’re bipolar and you have obsessive–compulsive tendencies. But you know that, of course.’
I baulked. Obviously the man was mad. Who did he think he was, flippantly announcing such a dramatic diagnosis? I wanted a CAT scan. I wanted proof, pictures. For the love of God, I’m a product of the age of proof, not the age of instinct!
‘What is “bipolar” anyway?’ I wondered, not sure I wanted to know. ‘Does that mean I’m a polar Eskimo who sleeps with both men and women?’ Facetious. Was he telling me I was insane? Did he think I’d murder my family in their sleep? Did he want to have me institutionalised? I pictured myself as Frances Farmer; could I insist on a Gucci straightjacket? Did Gucci make a straightjacket?
Images of Jeff Levy flashed before me, the local lunatic of my childhood who had always been in love with my sister Gigi and who, after burning down his family home and being placed in an asylum, woke up every Sunday at 5 a.m. to make the hour-and-a-half trek, barefoot and insane, all the way to our family home to see her. He’d been diagnosed schizophrenic.
I’d never met anyone who was bipolar (what they used to call manic depressive) or who had obsessive–compulsive disorder or obsessive–compulsive personality disorder. At least, not that I knew of. None of my boyfriends had casually slipped the words, ‘PS. I’m certifiably insane,’ into my mouth with the first kiss.
This was silly. Sure, I’m somewhat hither and thither; some days I wake up inside out and go to sleep upside down, but heavens, surely he wasn’t saying I was barking mad?
I swallowed back the vomit suddenly in my mouth. Consternation. All of the pens suddenly leapt from their jars. Some were in my mouth, in my hands, behind my ear, drawing on a notepad in front of me. Oh, for goodness sake, I wasn’t mad. I just had curly hair.
I looked up and noticed that this doctor had kind, perhaps even intelligent, eyes. He started explaining things, asking pertinent questions and offering behavioural descriptions. I started wondering about my ‘eccentric’ obsession with miniaturising my world. Very much against my will, I began to recognise aspects of what he was saying. Maybe there was some truth in this new diagnosis.
I’d always had what I thought of as my little ‘idiosyncracies’. People used to laugh at my cupboards, for instance. Rows upon rows of white and gold Chanel boxes (bought during manic shopping binges) categorised into little families. Hosiery, for example. Box one: dancing. Box two: laddered. Box three: black, thick. Box four: pantyhose. Box five: stockings and suspenders. Box six: coloured. ‘Boxing’, so to speak, gave me a sense of order. All my clothing, down to my underwear, was colour-coordinated.
I also had a thing about physical symmetry. Sensations had to be duplicated on both sides of my body, so if someone squeezed my right hand, I had to have my left hand squeezed in precisely the same way. Dancing could drive me mad – step-ball-change and spin to the right; I’d have to pinch my left leg to stop it from leaping step-ball-change and spin to the left.
And there was more. My universe had to be miniaturised. All meals were served out of a christening set. I ate breakfast from a little teething cup with two quaint handles, dinner on a little-bitty plate. My tiny clutch bag contained a small Filofax in which I wrote microscopic words with a baby pen. I’d thought this penchant for small things, neatness and symmetry was cute, slightly odd, nothing more. The doctor thought otherwise.
Cringing, reluctantly, I recalled the malicious laughing voice I’d never told anyone about, that of an imagined phantasm, an old man, whose presence had terrified me since childhood. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ Maybe the term bipolar explained certain things, like those times of invincible euphoria that would later crumble into a despair so deep that no one could reach me. I was trying to force myself to listen to the doctor. I wanted to know more; I didn’t want to know another thing.
He was saying that there was something really wrong with me, but he hadn’t carried out any tests, so how could he be sure? No! I couldn’t stay, I wouldn’t listen, and I wouldn’t accept any of it. I was out of there.
In an enraged fury I drove to my parents’ house. I drove badly. The sound of cars hooting followed me all the way home. My parents were in the study, reading. I stormed in, complaining, crying with rage. ‘I hate the doctor. He’s a buffoon! He didn’t even talk to me, didn’t treat me as a whole person. Just threw a diagnosis at me. He probably calls all of his patients bipolar! It must be a trendy new illness.’
I was beside myself with rage and in total denial. I insisted that my father complain on my behalf. The doctor was too modern, too chemical, not holistic, really not a legitimate psychiatrist at all; in fact, more of a carpenter. He treated me like a block of wood to be chopped up or carved into pieces; he should be struck off the medical roll. My voice rose in indignation.
This wasn’t the way I wanted my life to go. I was in love and I wanted my boyfriend Jason to marry me. I wanted to have babies and live happily ever after. How could I lead any kind of meaningful or enjoyable life if I took on this exotic diagnosis? It was a witch-hunt, a conspiracy. Sure, I’d done some pretty dippy things in my life, but I was an ordinary girl, ordinary girl, ordinary girl.
My mother and father appeared calm. Everything stayed in its place. Rows and rows of books wallpapered the room. The side tables were stained with the rings of coffee cups, as they had been since my childhood. I escaped into the comfort of our domestic worker Melita’s room. She was knitting, as she always had since I was small. I climbed up onto her bed, which was raised with bricks to keep away the tokoloshe. The room smelt of wool, of the jerseys Melita had made for me all my life – wool and Nivea cream, little blue jars of Nivea cream that she used lovingly to apply to my face when I was a child.
In the enveloping familiarity and comfort of her smell, I finally took a deep breath and quietly admitted to myself that maybe the doctor was right. I was bipolar and, undoubtedly, I had obsessive–compulsive tendencies. I was with the right doctor, the Happy Potter doctor – thus named for his magic abilities, his mysterious insight and his wand of psychotropic miracles.