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There was one thing I was very sure of in early sobriety, and that was that I shouldn’t talk to the woman who casually complimented my haircut one day. I knew that my friend Max knew her phone number—he owned the apartment she was living in—and I didn’t want not having her phone number to be the reason I wasn’t calling her. You have to wake up very early if you want to try to outthink me.

We had had a few tentative dates after we were recruited to help out an underpowered softball team. I think it was the IT-support department of Boston University. I was coaching first base, and she hit a solid line drive in the gap between right and center field, so when she got to first I told her to go to second. She stopped dead in her tracks, turned to me, and said, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

We were married six years later.

——

It hasn’t escaped Barb that I go to my psychiatrist mostly to see how he’s doing. She’s not sure I shouldn’t see someone else.

“They’d have problems too,” I point out. “Then I’d have two psychiatrists to worry about.”

The difference between me and crazy people who have not done well is not much. Melville Weston Fuller Wallace III was one of my mother’s favorite friends of mine. We met working together at a restaurant when we were both seventeen. He lived mostly at our house one summer, and one of my sisters had a crush on him. One Fourth of July when I was nineteen I was visiting with him at his parents’ New York apartment. I had had too much to drink, and he was shushing me and taking care of me. He was no more or less schizophrenic than I was, but that’s his current diagnosis. He was a pretty good painter and a pretty good musician. I had my first episode three years later. He had his a year after that, when he was twenty-three. He and I have both been married twice. He’s homeless now and writes me heartbreakingly difficult-to-decipher letters and sends me beautiful geometric watercolors.

I went looking for him once in L.A., along the Santa Monica boardwalk. It had been so long since I had seen Fuller that I had no idea what he might look like. I talked to about twenty people who might have been Fuller, and many of them thought they probably knew who I was talking about, but no one was sure. I showed them his paintings and said that he played the flute.

Things do not even out.

There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

The bad behavior of others constitutes an attractive nuisance to someone recovering from mental illness. You need all your energy and wits for things that matter. Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one’s family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious.

If recovery from mental illness depended on the goodness, mercy, and rational behavior of others, we’d all be screwed. Peace of mind is inversely proportional to expectations.

It’s possible within any given moment of any given day to choose between self and sickness. Rarely are there big heroic choices that will settle matters once and for all. The smallest positive step is probably the right one. Try not to argue. If you’re right, you don’t need to argue. If you’re wrong, it won’t help. If you’re okay, things will be okay. If you’re not okay, nothing else matters.

A world without prejudice, stigma, and discrimination against those who have or who are thought to have mental illness would be a better world for everyone. What so-called normal people are doing when they define disease like manic depression or schizophrenia is reassuring themselves that they don’t have a thought disorder or affective disorder, that their thoughts and feelings make perfect sense.

There’s a Path, 1999

(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)

Honeymoon