An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [12]
However bizarre this new world seemed to me, and I to it, I actually grew to cotton to its ways. Once I got over the initial shocks, I found most of my remaining experiences in high school a remarkable sort of education. Some of it was even in the classroom. I found the highly explicit conversations of my new classmates spellbinding. Everyone seemed to have at least one, sometimes two or even three, stepparents, depending on the number of household divorces. My friends’ financial resources were of astonishing proportions, and many had a familiarity with sex that was extensive enough to provide me with a very interesting groundwork. My new boyfriend, who was in college, provided the rest. He was a student at UCLA, where I worked as a volunteer on weekends in the pharmacology department. He was also everything I thought I wanted at the time: He was older, handsome, pre-med, crazy about me, had his own car, and, like my first boyfriend, loved to dance. Our relationship lasted throughout the time I was in high school, and, in looking back on it, I think it was as much a way of getting out of my house and away from the turmoil as it was any serious romantic involvement.
I also learned for the first time what a WASP was, that I was one, and that this was, on a good day, a mixed blessing. As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise—and inexplicably—to be envied. It was then, and remains, a very strange concept to me. In an immediate way all of this contributed to a certain social fragmentation within the school. One cluster, who went to the beach by day and partied by night, tended toward WASPdom; the other, slightly more casual and jaded, tended toward intellectual pursuits. I ended up drifting in and out of both worlds, for the most part comfortable in each, but for very different reasons. The WASP world provided a tenuous but important link with my past; the intellectual world, however, became the sustaining part of my existence and a strong foundation for my academic future.
The past was indeed the past. The comfortable world of the military and Washington was gone: everything had changed. My brother had gone off to college before we moved to California, leaving a large hole in my security net. My relationship with my sister, always a difficult one, had become at best fractious, often adversarial, and, more usually, simply distant. She had far more trouble than I did in adjusting to California, but we never really spoke much about it. We went almost entirely our separate ways, and, for all the difference it made, we could have been living in different houses. My parents, although still living together, were essentially estranged. My mother was busy teaching, looking after all of us, and going to graduate school; my father was caught up in his scientific work. His moods still, on occasion, soared; and, when they did, the sparkle and gaiety that flew out from them created a glow, a warmth and joy that filled all of the rooms of the house. He sailed over the cusp of reason at times, and his grandiose ideas started to push the limits of what Rand could tolerate. At one point,