An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [11]
As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself. The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered women.
Had you told me, in those seemingly uncomplicated days of white gloves and broad-rimmed hats, that within two years I would be psychotic and want only to die, I would have laughed, wondered, and moved on. But mostly I would have laughed.
And then, in the midst of my getting used to these changes and paradoxes, and for the first time feeling firmly rooted in Washington, my father retired from the Air Force and took a job as a scientist at the Rand Corporation in California. It was 1961, I was fifteen years old, and everything in my world began to fall apart.
My first day at Pacific Palisades High School—which, par for the course for a military child, was months after the beginning of everyone else’s school year—provided me with my opening clues that life was going to be terribly different. It started with the usual changing-of-the-schools ritual chant—that is, standing up in front of a classroom full of complete strangers and summing up one’s life in an agonizing three minutes. This was hard enough to do in a school full of military children, but it was absolutely ridiculous in front of a group of wealthy and blasé southern Californians. As soon as I announced that my father had been an Air Force officer, I realized I could have just as easily have said he was a black-footed ferret or a Carolinian newt. There was dead silence. The only parental species recognized in Pacific Palisades were those in “the industry” (that is, in the film business), rich people, corporate attorneys, businessmen, or highly successful physicians. My understanding of the phrase “civilian school” was sharpened by the peals of laughter that followed quick on the heels of my “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to the teachers.
For a long time I felt totally adrift. I missed Washington terribly. I had left behind a boyfriend, without whom I was desperately unhappy; he was blond, blue-eyed, funny, loved to dance, and we were seldom apart during the months before I left Washington. He was my introduction to independence from my family, and I believed, like most fifteen-year-olds, that our love would last forever. I also had left behind a life that had been filled with good friends, family closeness, great quantities of warmth and laughter, traditions I knew and loved, and a city that was home. More important, I had left behind a conservative military lifestyle that I had known for as long as I could remember. I had gone to nursery school, kindergarten, and most of elementary school on Air Force or Army bases; my junior and senior high schools in Maryland, while not actually on bases, were attended primarily by children from military, federal government, or diplomatic families. It was a small, warm, unthreatening, and cloistered world. California, or at least Pacific Palisades, seemed to me to be rather cold and flashy. I lost my moorings almost entirely, and despite ostensibly adjusting rapidly to a new school and acquiring new friends—both of which were made relatively easy by countless previous changes in schools that had, in turn, bred a hail-fellow-well-met sort of outgoingness—I was deeply unhappy. I spent much of my time in tears or writing letters to my boyfriend. I was furious with my father for having taken a job in California instead of staying in Washington, and I waited anxiously for telephone calls and letters from my friends. In Washington, I had been a school leader and captain of all of my teams; there had been next