Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [121]
A middle-aged woman moderated the group sessions, and she’d call on us like we were shy schoolchildren, urging us to talk. One woman talked about having been molested; one man talked about his mother, who didn’t love him; another woman talked about her husband, who had cheated on her with her best friend. At first, I didn’t want to hear their pathetic stories, and I didn’t want to tell them mine. But gradually the stories didn’t seem so pathetic. I started to understand where they came from and how they got where they were. They were normal, intelligent people who had been pushed over the edge, one way or another, just like me. All seemed fragile. They had reached a point where the pressures of daily living had become too difficult to bear.
I could relate to that.
It was at least a couple of weeks before I could muster the presence to say anything when called upon. Finally, when I decided to speak, I blurted out, “My husband said maybe a breakdown would be good for me. But I think I’d rather have gone to Disneyland.” There were a few empathetic chuckles. We were all in the same boat, and the biggest wall that could be broken down between people was judgment. “Well, I got what he wanted.” There was some more sympathetic giggling. “And I feel like I’ve been wandering through the scariest funhouse ever created. I see myself in all these different mirrors, I can’t tell whether I’m eight feet tall and six inches wide, or six feet wide and eight inches tall.”
“What do you think he meant when he said a breakdown would be good for you?” the moderator asked.
“You know, I think there was a part of me he would never be able to control, and he couldn’t stand that. But now that I am broken, who’s going to put me back together again?”
“Do you really think you’re broken?” the moderator asked, prodding me.
“No,” I said, though my answer truly surprised me. “I think I’m badly bent.”
The group laughed, and as the session went on, a few other people who had never shared before opened their mouths for the first time.
The afternoon was playtime—board games, cards—just like kindergarten for loonies. Or we were allowed to go back to our rooms and enjoy a little solitude, which is what I usually chose. Then we had dinner and watched television. One evening, we were watching a rerun of 77 Sunset Strip. I was drowsy and hadn’t tuned in to the fact that it was an episode of the show that I’d been in. One of the other patients recognized me. “Look,” she said. “That’s you!”
I started to freeze in embarrassment, but I thought, Isn’t this just what you always wanted, Dyan? To be known for your acting? So what if I was in the nuthouse? That was only an image of me on television, one that had nothing to do with who I really was.
“That’s me all right,” I said, mustering a fairly sincere laugh.
“You’re an actress!” one lady exclaimed.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “I’m really just here to research my next role as a patient in a mental ward.”
They laughed with me, not at me. “Well, you know where to find extras!” one man said.
I smiled at the idea of making my own movie with my fellow patients as extras. In a way, this whole thing—my whole life, in fact—seemed like a movie. But from where did the movie of my life originate? You can’t change what’s happening in a movie by going up to the screen, reaching into it, and changing what the characters are saying and doing. So what could I do to change it?
It occurred to me that what I was seeing in the movie of my life came from a projector of some sort—just like all movies did. And I thought, Well, if I don’t like the movie, why not change the reel?
I stayed with that thought for a while. I was tired of watching the movie about Dyan being heartbroken, miserable, and crazy as a cage full of howler monkeys. I wanted a change. I wanted to watch the movie about Dyan restored to full strength and vitality, full of energy, love, and mirth.
Coming off the pills, I had many sleepless nights with too much time to think, and I had no appetite. But gradually, my appetite started to come back, and when it did,