An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [9]
Although fascinated, I was primarily frightened by the strangeness of the patients, as well as by the perceptible level of terror in the room; even stronger than the terror, however, were the expressions of pain in the eyes of the women. Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.
Throughout my adolescence, I was fortunate in being actively encouraged to pursue my medical and scientific interests, not just by my parents and the physicians at Andrews, but by many of my parents’ friends as well. Families in the Air Weather Service tended to be posted to the same military bases, and one family in particular overlapped with ours in assignments and was especially close to us. We went on picnics together, took vacations together, shared babysitters, and went as a herd of ten to movies, dinners, and parties at the Officers’ Club. As young children, my brother, sister, and I played hide-and-seek with their three sons; as we grew older, we went on to softball, dancing lessons, staid parties, slightly wilder parties, and then inevitably we grew up and went our separate ways. But we were almost inseparable as children in Washington and Tokyo, and then back together again in Washington. Their mother—a warm, funny, fiery, independent, practical, red-haired Irish Catholic—created a second home for me, and I would wander in and out of their house as I would our own, staying long enough to inhale pie and cookies and warmth and laughter and hours of talk. She and my mother were, and indeed still are, best friends, and I always was made to feel a part of her extended brood. She was a nurse, and she listened carefully to me as I went on at great length about my grand plans for medical school, writing, and research. Now and again she would break in with “Yes, yes, that’s very interesting,” “Of course you can,” or “Had you thought of …?” Never, but never, was there an “I don’t think that’s very practical” or “Why don’t you just wait and see how it goes?”
Her husband, a mathematician and meteorologist, was very much the same way. He was always careful to ask me what my latest project was, what I was reading, or what kind of animal I was dissecting and why. He talked very seriously with me about science and medicine and encouraged me to go as far as I could with my plans and dreams. He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute passion and attention. It is only now, in looking back—after deflating experiences later in life when I was told either to lower my sights or to rein in my enthusiasms—that I fully appreciate the seriousness with which my ideas were taken by my parents and their friends; and it is only now that I really begin to understand how desperately important it was to both my intellectual and emotional life to have had my thoughts and enthusiasms given not only respect but active encouragement. An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers, and I was more lucky than I knew in having been brought up around enthusiasts, and lovers of enthusiasts.
So I was almost totally content: I had great friends, a full and active life of swimming, riding, softball, parties, boyfriends, summers on the Chesapeake, and all of the other beginnings of life. But there was, in the midst of all of this, a gradual awakening to the reality of what it meant to be an intense, somewhat mercurial girl in an extremely traditional and military world. Independence, temperament, and girlhood met very uneasily in the strange land of cotillion. Navy Cotillion was where officers’ children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen