Even though our knowledge of the human mind and body has increased a thousandfold over time, and miraculous breakthroughs of understanding do occur, many of the mysteries of existence remain beyond our grasp. We’re constantly revising what we know about what we don’t know. All throughout history, scientists have said, “We’ve got it! We’ve figured it out!” Then a few years go by, and it turns out everyone’s assumptions were wrong. We grew up thinking that dinosaurs were these enormous reptiles. Then one day all the paleontologists said, “Well, it turns out they were more like enormous chickens.” Nowhere is this truer than with mental health.
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Mental illness is a subject that we don’t talk about enough, that we don’t understand enough, that we’re scared to confront. In many cases, we’re so ignorant we don’t even know how much we don’t know. My friends knew I was struggling, but they didn’t fully grasp the depths of what I was struggling with. They wanted to help me and support me, but most of what I heard from them was “You seem unhappy.” And I was unhappy, deeply unhappy. But none of them could put a finger on why, and neither could I. I’d been in and out of therapy a few times in my life, addressing symptoms here and there, doing little hit-and-runs—as they call them—on my various issues. But I’d never fully digested and metabolized what I needed to know in order to cope with all my pain and sadness and anger.
When I arrived in Connecticut, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I was going to get out of it, and I didn’t know who I was going to be on the other side of it. I was afraid I would turn into a version of myself that I didn’t like. Part of me was afraid that because this wasn’t a spiritual facility, I would come out of my experience with even less faith and less spirit than when I went in. I was so lost, all I knew for certain was that I wanted someone to tell me what the fuck was going on, to give me an answer, a capital-D diagnosis.
That is what many of us, wrongly, have come to expect from medicine and science. The truth, especially with mental health, is that there are still so many big questions to be answered—questions that get harder to address the more hubris we have in believing we understand them. We started out in a world where mental conditions like depression and schizophrenia were chalked up to sorcery and demons and witchcraft. Then it was Freud, and everything was about dreams and wanting to sleep with your mother. Then it was B. F. Skinner and behaviorism, where there’s no free will and no human soul and we’re all bodies with nerve endings driven by stimulus-response mechanisms that seek to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. For me, the most important and influential of these figures is Carl Jung, whom I consider the originator of the idea of radical acceptance—recognizing the darkness in yourself in order to understand the darkness in others. But the reality is that everyone is making their best guess. Nobody knows everything for sure. All of us should put our hands in the air and say, “We’ve been so fuckin’ wrong about so many things, and all we want is to learn more to get closer to the truth.” Ideally, we should want to know everything that affects us in every possible way. We should want to be the healthiest, strongest version of ourselves and go make the world a better place, and to do that, it’s important to use the mental and spiritual and emotional exercises we need to dig into that stuff. Too often in life we pick a point on the horizon and say, “That’s where I need to be, and all I need is the shortest route between here and there.” But that’s wrong. We have to accept that we don’t always know where we’re going and that we don’t even know how to get there. We have to be open to the journey. We have to be open to discovery. We have to radically accept where we are in life right now.
My first morning in Connecticut, I was still struggling to do that. I woke up, got dressed, and walked downstairs, and a woman was there, sitting at a table and having a cup of coffee, waiting for me. She looked to be in her early fifties, petite and fair-skinned with shortish blonde hair. I sat down with her and we started chatting a bit, getting to know each other. Her name was Beth, and she was going to be my companion for the day. It was her job to escort me through all my various appointments.
This place I’d checked into worked like a kind of umbrella organization, bringing together different therapists, psychiatrists, doctors, and other mental health and wellness professionals. They all worked in their own private practices, but they coordinated together through this central agency to provide a holistic course of treatment.
When my sister and I first looked at the whole range of services and treatments they offered, I told the administrator I wanted all of them. “Throw the kitchen sink at me,” I said. “‘Let’s pull out all the stops. Let’s leave no stone unturned.” What I ended up paying for was three weeks of intensive therapy, plus a fourth week of final, circle-up appointments with all the therapists where they’d give me their assessments, assign me homework, and send me on my way. The specialists I was scheduled to see included a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, a dialectical behavioral therapist, a meditation therapist, an art therapist, a life coach, a nutritionist, and a trainer at the gym four days a week, plus Pilates and yoga twice a week.
Like I said, the kitchen sink.
For my appointments I’d get driven to the different therapists’ offices in the surrounding area, scattered across quaint, picturesque New England towns. As a setting, Connecticut in October was stunning. The trees were in their full autumn blaze of red and orange and yellow. The house I stayed in was a cozy New England clapboard kind of place. It was right on Long Island Sound, and I could walk down a path to go and sit and hang out on the water and enjoy the crisp, fall air. There was a cook who’d come in to make lunch and dinner, and the companion assigned to you for the day would make your breakfast, do your laundry, take you to your appointments, and then drop you off at the end of the day back at the house. There were a number of different companions, and they would cycle through, assigned to different residents on different days. Like Beth, they were all middle-aged women, mostly wives and mothers who were semiretired. They were kind of like house moms, if you will.
As Beth and I sat chatting that first morning, she asked me what I wanted for breakfast, I asked for some bacon and eggs, and she got up to make it. It felt weird when she did. I was already uncomfortable with what I felt was the elitism and privilege of being at such an expensive place. Both in my personal life and in my career, I’ve never felt great about being waited on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m super grateful that I’ve had people helping me take care of things in my life for many years, but they are nearly always on the payroll. I’m talking about the act and spirit of service. When someone wants to take care of you. That was far more foreign to me. And while this may have been Beth’s job, she was doing it because she really wanted to. And though I’ve always felt that the reason I didn’t like being served by others is because I always strive to stay real and grounded, that’s only part of the truth. What’s also true, I’ve come to learn, is that I wasn’t comfortable with it because I didn’t really know how to receive it well. I wasn’t good at that. I didn’t know how to be healthily mothered. I didn’t have enough practice. Growing up, I never had real, consistent, healthy parenting. I’d had to learn to take care of myself, and it’s taken me a long time to learn that it’s okay to need some mothering. It’s okay to need to be taken care of sometimes. Starting that morning, and over the course of the following weeks, I started to piece together why it was so important for this place to have all these services provided, because they were taking care of people like me who can barely get out of bed, who are barely able to take care of themselves. When I relaxed and allowed myself to receive it, it felt quite warm to have somebody doing the normal, everyday things that a mom would do.
Once Beth finished making breakfast, she brought it over and sat with me while I ate. We talked some more, and there was something about her, something about her presence, that made me feel okay to unburden myself a bit. She was graceful and calm and gentle, and I could tell she was full of the deepest empathy. I started unloading about why I was there and what I’d been going through and how I was feeling. Then I mentioned that I planned on going to church while I was there, that I had seen some options of different churches in the area, and I’d decided to visit The Vineyard. Her eyes lit up. “Oh, what a small world,” she said. “That’s my church! My husband’s the pastor.”
It was, in hindsight, a truly remarkable moment. I knew that I felt an immediate connection with her, but I didn’t yet know what that connection would mean. What I didn’t know was that this kind and gentle woman sitting across the breakfast table from me would be the one to bring me back from the abyss, that God would use her to help save my life—that she was, without question, an angel sent from heaven.
Ultimately, by the time I left Connecticut, I would truly want to live again, but for the moment I was still stuck in my head. I was still coming at everything from an intellectual standpoint. I’d come to this place in search of answers, solutions, a mental health to-do list with action items that I could check off. My engineer’s mind wanted to know how things worked, what was broken, and how I could get under the hood and fix it.
One reason losing my faith in God had hit me so hard was that my whole life I’ve been adamant that there is, there has to be, some form of objective truth. Some objective truths are obvious, like gravity. Gravity doesn’t need you to believe in it in order for it to work. It’s gravity. It just works. But there are other truths, too, such as “It’s better to be kind than not be kind.” To me that’s objective truth. It’s a universal principle. The difference is you do have to believe that being kind is better than not being kind in order to see that it works. You have to manifest it in your actions. But people don’t always treat those types of truths as universal. “Everything’s relative,” they say, and everything that cannot be scientifically proven or measured gets put into this category of “Well, that’s your truth and this is my truth.” Which has always driven me completely insane, because applying subjectivity erodes the objectivity of hard, constant, actual truth.
One of the issues I started to work out in Connecticut is where this rigidity of mine came from. I think in large part it has to do with my not being parented in a healthy or productive way. My mother in particular was so volatile, I was forever in a state of trying to figure out which side of her was going to be on display in any given moment and how I was supposed to relate to her. “There has to be an answer to this riddle,” young Zac would tell himself, subconsciously. “There has to be a correct way to behave that solves this problem and keeps me away from the wrath and insanity of my mom.” So I became obsessed with finding it.
Ultimately, in the absence of proper parenting, I found those rules and that truth in God, in the Bible. “This is the handbook,” I was taught. “These are God’s step-by-step instructions for living a good and worthy life.” Amazing. Wonderful. I’ll take that. And that sustained me for a long time. But now that my faith had crumbled, I was at a complete loss for how to orient myself in a world with no objective truth. Had I spent my whole life toeing the line of a Christianity that isn’t even real? And if it isn’t real, then what are the rules? What is the objective truth of how to live a good and worthy life? The thought of not knowing terrified me.
Having lost my faith, I was flying without a compass. I had lost my true north. Because of that, I was frantically looking for a new set of step-by-step instructions from medical science itself. I arrived in Connecticut with unrealistic expectations of what they could do for me. I was incredibly eager to sit down with the psychiatrist, because the job of a psychiatrist is to assess your mental health from a medical point of view. To me, he was the guy who could give me the capital-D diagnosis that nobody else had been able to provide. I was hungry for those answers. I was desperate for them.
Finding the right therapist is crucial. I would add that sometimes, sometimes, we don’t feel like a therapist is the right fit merely because they might actually be great at their job, and we don’t like how closely they might be hitting on the truth.
For that same reason, I was frustrated in my sessions with the psychotherapist. Psychotherapy is all that emotional, Kleenexy, “Tell me about your childhood” kind of stuff. Psychotherapy is where you vent. You’re dredging up all the trauma and pain and regurgitating it, puking it up, getting it all out. Hopefully, you’re having breakthroughs while you’re getting it all out. But by and large you sit there and the doctor keeps saying, “Soooo, tell me about your father . . .” and “Soooo, how did that make you feel . . . ?” Meanwhile, you’re sitting there, like, What’s the fucking point of this? When are you going to tell me what’s wrong with me?
That was my attitude, 100 percent, and from the jump, there were really only two questions I wanted answers to. The first was “How did I end up here?” and the second was “How do I never end up here again?” Specifically, I wanted to know if I had a condition. Was I just a broken, traumatized person struggling with the same shit that every broken, traumatized person goes through, or did I have an actual, diagnosable physiological condition that was ruining my life that I needed to know about?
My sisters and I had always suspected my mom might have been bipolar. Possibly our grandfather too. We were also keenly aware of the possibility that the condition could be hereditary. For a while, Shekinah had been 100 percent convinced that I was bipolar too. She’s seen a lot of my ups and downs, and she cares about me and is a bit of a worrier. When she was booking me into Connecticut and doing all the intake processing, she straight-up told them: “I think Zac may be bipolar.”
And look, I had no idea if I was bipolar or not. I knew that I had my ups and downs, and I knew that my highs could get pretty high and my lows could get really low, but I had also started reading and researching everything about mental health I could put my hands on, and by that point I’d read enough to know that my symptoms didn’t necessarily correlate with bipolarity. My ups and downs seemed to be precipitated by events, rather than randomly shifting chemicals in my brain. And the typical up-down cycle of someone who’s bipolar tends to run in relatively short spurts, super high for three weeks, then plummeting down down down for a week, and then back up again for another few weeks, and so on and so forth. My highs could last for months, and they always correlated to my feeling that other people valued me, whether it was a new girlfriend or a new job. My lows could also last for months and months, and they always correlated with not working or breaking up or an overall lack of self-confidence.
Still, there was evidence pointing the other way as well. The psychiatrist I saw briefly in Austin told me that in certain instances of bipolarity, you see the world in a different way because at times 25 percent of your brain is firing, as opposed to the 5 percent in “normal” brain activity. This seemed familiar to how I felt a lot of the time because of the way I’ve struggled with my mind feeling like it’s in hyperactive overdrive much of the time. I told myself, Hey, if you’re going to have a debilitating mental illness, at least it’s cool to be some kind of mad genius because your brain is working too well. So I was doing my best to make peace with the idea of being bipolar, if in fact that was my reality. Mostly, I just wanted to know what the fuck my reality was.
As far as ensuring that I never ended up back in this place again, I also wanted answers about medication—even though I already knew the answer I wanted to hear. I wanted them to tell me, “You don’t need it.” Because I didn’t want it. One of the few positives of my mother’s parenting was her insistence on organic foods and holistic health. Back in the eighties, there were administrators at my school who suggested that I be put on Ritalin because I was super hyperactive, bouncing off the walls and kooky all the time. My mom, to her credit, said no. I was grateful for that, and as an adult I’ve continued to be the same way. I never wanted to admit that I needed a pill to get my mind right. But then I kept running into these issues that I was having, and I’d started to face the reality that maybe I wouldn’t have a choice.
Dig in and surround yourself with people who want to dig in with you and force you to be better.
Six months before, while I was still living in LA, I had a friend with an Adderall prescription. It helped them a lot when it came to managing their life and remembering details and whatnot. I’d used it recreationally when going to parties here and there, as some people do, but never consistently for its intended purpose. So I finally decided to try it. The truth is it was one of the most fascinating things that has ever happened to me. One of my biggest problems has always been that I don’t feel capable of tackling the chaos in my life. There were too many unresolved issues floating around, too much to do, and I would always find myself paralyzed by them. But with Adderall, I found myself waking up in the morning and instead of being sluggish and overwhelmed and defeated and despondent, I felt capable and confident and optimistic about my day. It was like somebody had flipped a switch.
Which should come as no surprise, as Adderall is an amphetamine, and like all amphetamines what it does is supercharge the activity of dopamine in our system. Dopamine is our reward and encouragement hormone. Dopamine makes us feel like we can take on the next challenge, and the next, and the next, and the next. It helps us feel capable of tackling and accomplishing the little, medium, and big tasks that are in our every day. So did Adderall actually make me a better, more productive person? Was it a magic pill that made everything better? No. But it definitely helped the reward system in my body work competently enough to get me out of a rut and moving forward.
My intention was never to stay on it forever, just to see if it would help me out. I was still very much against medication as any kind of permanent crutch, and I stopped taking it before I moved to Texas. Then, after the Chi’Lantro incident, I was at my wit’s end from trying to figure out a way to not feel so sad and crazy all the time, and I finally broke down and agreed to let my local Austin psychiatrist prescribe me Lexapro, an antidepressant, and carbamazepine, which is typically used as an anti-seizure medication. Because if I were bipolar and prone to having an overactive brain, the medication would help to quell the frantic firing of my synapses.
It takes about a month for any of those drugs to start having an effect. By the time I got to Connecticut, I’d been on them a few weeks and I wasn’t sure they were even doing anything.
I didn’t want to be putting them in my body any longer than I had to, and the first thing I asked the psychiatrist when I got to Connecticut was, “Do I keep taking these drugs or not? Is this the wrong thing to be taking? Is there something else I should be taking?”
To which he replied, “We don’t know what you should be taking yet, so just keep taking it.”
Which drove me nuts, to be honest, because (a) it was not an actual answer, (b) he was the guy I was expecting to give me an actual answer, and (c) taking drugs not even knowing what kind of effect they’ll have seems . . . kind of crazy!
Because of my own fears and rigidity, I struggled in a lot of my early sessions, especially the ones like art therapy. I would get frustrated because I suck at drawing, and really, what was the point of it? What was I doing? How was this getting me any closer to the answers I was seeking? I didn’t need to be scribbling on construction paper with crayons like I was in elementary school.
In other words, I was doing it wrong. I was so fixated on what I wanted that I wasn’t being open to what I needed. Because of that my first week was incredibly difficult. Practically every session felt like a psychotherapy session, which was the opposite of what I’d had in mind. Every session was me introducing myself to this yet-again new person and having to tell them my whole life story, all the way from Grandma Pat and her butcher knife up through bawling my eyes out in the Chi’Lantro parking lot. I had to go through my crazy tale of woe with every single one of the specialists and pretty soon I felt like I had talked myself to death. It was beyond frustrating. I don’t know why there couldn’t have been one big group session where I gave everyone the same spiel at the same time, and then they could divvy it up from there. But that wasn’t how they did it. They wanted me to go from session to session and vomit up the same story over and over again.
So that’s what I did.