Living & Arts

Part IV: what I talk about when I talk about Sharples

In print | February 19, 2009

Disclaimer: This column is part four of a ten part series, dealing with the author’s experiences with mental illness. As it contains explicit subject matter, sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

You know the jokes about this place and so do I. People are very smart. People are awkward. There is too much work: “anywhere else it would have been an A”, yes? And the food, they say, is terrible.

These are not profound observations. Yet I have spent the past three years embellishing them to the point of self-parody. Swarthmore jokes are easy and they are safe, because malice towards Swarthmore is the foundation of the Swarthmore cult. The atom of Swarthmore, the fundamental particle from which all our social interactions are constructed, is this: two students approaching one another and each describing their ordeals and then both falling into mutual embarrassed silence. What I am trying to say is that I am sick of writing about this place. I imagine you are sick of reading about it Yet unfortunately my experiences here are inextricable from the development of my disorder. So once more, with feeling, and also this time with swearing. Like a veteran criminal comfortably retired, I am called back one last time for a final lucrative heist, and it occurs to me not for the last time that I am getting too old for this shit. I will not again attempt broad campus satire, but rather a personal record of my experiences relevant to the disorder. Of course, this will also provide attentive readers the opportunity to scan my writing for thinly disguised references to past and present Swarthmore students. Log on to Facebook, beloved readers, and follow along.

My initial reaction to this place was disappointment. College was supposed to be my Valhalla, my Elysium Fields; my arrival should have been a divine homecoming, a triumphant ascent to the halls of the gods after years of purgative pubescent trial. I would take classes that engaged and challenged me. I would socialize not with preppy assholes but the intellectual asshole elite, and I would complete my first five novels and meet my future wife. My mother’s minivan, valkyrie-like, deposited me on the threshold of my new residence. I had left my troubles behind like so many discarded SAT prep books. Here I would begin a golden glorious future.

But something was off. The courses were engaging, but difficult. My classmates were intelligent and friendly and within three weeks I was determined to hate all of them. And, not to belabor a point, but no one here was really as attractive as I’d hoped, which sort of undeniably limited the pool of applicants within which I could search for my eternal soul mate. Still I remained confident. I had overcome my problems through persistence and sheer force of will, and enough anti-depressants to kill a rhinocerous. This school was the perfect place for me, and no amount of contradictory evidence could convince me otherwise.

If nothing else, Swarthmore’s lenient standards of attractiveness and charm allowed me to climb several links up the social food chain. Girls, inconceivably, had begun to respond to my person with neither pity nor contempt. I attribute this entirely to the desolation of the Swarthmore singles scene; my confidence was still crippled by my disorder, I held doors at keggers and cried after making love, but at Swarthmore I was a positive badass. I can still remember my first Paces party with really inexplicable clarity. I had a Coke-and-possibly-rum (drinks at Swarthmore parties are like Schrödinger’s Cat: the alcohol exists in a state of quantum flux, simultaneously proof and nonproof) and that seemed to go okay so I had a second and a third. This was not an overwhelming amount of alcohol, but the frankly stupid quantities of anti-depressants in my bloodstream increased its power exponentially, and things proceeded predictably from there. This first romantic encounter was to set the stage for many of my freshman year relationships; shame, social ineptitude, meaningfully nongratifying attempts at meaningless physical gratification. Eventually I decided that, instead of pursuing an actual relationship, I would rather be in tragic and unrequited love. The object of my devotion was a friend, already dating an older guy, which conveniently excused me from actually asking her out; instead I learned to brood and wilt silently, dismissing any possibility for an actual relationship as a distraction, while simultaneously pursuing as many superficial encounters as possible. Pity our incompetent, overly-sensitive Lothario, in his noble but doomed attempt at idiot hedonism.

Chief among my extracurriculars that year were regular appointments with a therapist. She was pleasant, gentle and sympathetic, and like all of my previous counselors somehow oblivious to my disorder. Over months of painfully superficial analysis we explored the shallowest reaches of my psyche. Warning, readers! Spoiler Alert! My problems were apparently as follows: 1.) I had unresolved issues with my parents and with authority. 2.) I had unresolved issues with relationships, especially those that were romantic or sexual. 3.) I had unresolved issues with being too hard on myself. She was content to review these points once a week, and by way of guiding counsel she reminded me at intervals to 1.) stop caring so much, 2.) relax, and 3.) stop having unresolved issues with being too hard on myself. This was as true as it was simplistic, but it was insufficient to overwrite the cognitive mechanisms I had developed over nineteen years of mental illness; the psychological equivalent of offering a Snoopy bandage to a guillotine victim.

Swarthmore is not a place, I quickly learned, where one does things halfway. An assigned text should be completed weeks in advance, or given a cursory glance minutes before class. A body should subsist on either spartan vegan fare or fried egg sandwiches and midnight pizza. Tipsy is never preferable to wasted, or to self-righteous sobriety. No matter how much you do it is never enough; you must always study more, self-deprecate and -flagellate more, party and drink and fornicate more, work more so that you can complain more. Do enough and whine enough and you can beat your friends, you can win Swarthmore, and you will earn from your peers sympathy and accolades and silent, seething contempt. This is a place of uncompromising, delirious extremes. It takes intelligent young people at the cusp of adulthood, by their nature often sensitive and self-denying, and demands from them performance beyond any reasonable standard. It isolates our worst qualities (self-abuse, introversion, passivity, inappropriate intellectualization) and encourages them, it convinces us to nurture them and chuckle fondly at them. Adulthood, to say nothing of an education, cannot be attained under such circumstances. We learn, with Skinnerian efficiency, to be pointlessly cruel to ourselves, and to be proud of it.

Some of you will suggest that I am projecting my own neurosis onto the institution. Perhaps you are right; there are obvious reasons to doubt my capacity for clear and objective thinking. But I don’t think so.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy aspects of my freshman year. I did respectably in my classes. I joined a sketch comedy performance troupe, with whom I developed an unbreakable, ever-creepier bond. I half-assed several minor community service projects and hosted a weekend radio show with audience: my mom. Although not spectacularly happy I was generally satisfied with my circumstances, and at the end of the semester I told the pill-vending golem that was my hypothetical home psychiatrist that I was ready to stop the medication. There was a brief meeting, a gesture of mechanical assent, and I was given a timetable over which to intermittently decrease my intake of Effexor.

The symptoms had not disappeared entirely. The thoughts recurred sporadically, like heat lightning against a summer sky, like a flash of roughness and then a thread of crimson beneath still water. There were signs and omens and I cheerfully ignored them. Each time the symptoms returned I suffered, but when they again subsided I told myself that they had gone permanently, that I had turned a corner and that I could finally enjoy the gilded future I had promised myself. My decision to drop the medication was a final demonstration of my certainty in my absolute recovery. I had experienced minor turbulence adjusting to college, of course, but this was to be expected, and as a wise and world-weary sophomore I expected my next year to be triumphant.
I had no idea. I had absolutely no idea.

Next installment: The poor F———r falls in love

Hamlet is a senior. You can reach him at hamletwrenncroft@gmail.com. The next installment of “Trigger” will be published in two weeks.