An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [28]
In an attempt to divert myself, I began pawing my way through the credit card slips. Near the top of the pile was a bill from the pharmacy where I had gotten my snakebite kits. The pharmacist, having just filled my first prescription for lithium, had smiled knowingly as he rang up the sale for my snakebite kits and the other absurd, useless, and bizarre purchases. I knew what he was thinking and, in the benevolence of my expansive mood, could appreciate the humor. He, unlike me, however, appeared to be completely unaware of the life-threatening problem created by rattlesnakes in the San Fernando Valley. God had chosen me, and apparently only me, to alert the world to the wild proliferation of killer snakes in the Promised Land. Or so I thought in my scattered delusional meanderings. In my own small way, by buying up the drugstore’s entire supply of snakebite kits, I was doing all I could do to protect myself and those I cared about. In the midst of my crazed scurryings up and down the aisles of the drugstore, I had also come up with a plan to alert the Los Angeles Times to the danger. I was, however, far too manic to tie my thoughts together into a coherent plan.
My brother, seemingly having read my mind, walked into the room with a bottle of champagne and glasses on a tray. He imagined, he said, that we would need the champagne because the whole business might be a “bit unpleasant.” My brother is not one for overstatement. Neither is he one for great wringings of hands and gnashings of teeth. He is, instead, a fair and practical man, generous, and one who, because of his own confidence, tends to inspire confidence in others. In all of these things, he is very much like our mother. During the time of my parents’ separation, and subsequent divorce, he had put his wing out and around me, protecting me to the extent that he could from life’s hurts and my own turbulent moods. His wing has been reliably available ever since. From the time I started college and then throughout my graduate and faculty days—indeed, until now, and still—whenever I have needed a respite from pain or uncertainty, or just to get away, I have found an airplane ticket in the mail, with a note suggesting I join him someplace like Boston or New York, or Colorado, or San Francisco. Often, he will be in one of these places to give a talk, consult, or take a few days off from work himself; I catch up with him in some hotel lobby or another, or in a posh restaurant, delighted to see him—tall, handsome, well dressed—walking quickly across the room. No matter my mood or problem, he always manages to make me feel that he is glad to see me. And each of the times I went abroad to live—first to Scotland as an undergraduate, then to England as a graduate student, and twice again to London on sabbatical leaves from the University of California—I always knew that it would be only a matter of weeks until he would arrive to check out where I was living, what I was up to, take me out to dinner, and suggest we rummage together through Hatchards or Dillons or some other bookstore. After my first severe manic attack, he drew his wing around me even tighter. He made it unequivocally clear that if I needed him, no matter where he was, he would