3: A Disastrous Move

Now is as good a time as any to admit that I’m bipolar. I do my best to manage my illness through emotional hygiene and a medication regimen but as you’ll see throughout these posts this endeavor was rarely successful. I won’t bother you with all of the specifics of my condition in this particular post but I will make sure to point out when I was affected by it in my recounting.

All of this is to say that for about a year and a half before moving to The University I had been having intermittent trouble driving long distances, though it would be much later that I connected the issue with my medications. At times, I would have episodes of being unable to focus on the road directly in front of me. My vision would shift slightly out of focus and I would have to shake my head or put all of my effort into forcing the road in front of me to be clear again. Throughout the process of finishing undergrad and applying to grad schools I attributed these symptoms to stress, anxiety, and exhaustion. My cure for these episodes was to pull off at the nearest gas station and over-caffeinate myself. This seemed to work, if only temporarily. 

With the break between our first two weeks of training my plan was to load up two cars and make the trip to Brooklyn (false name) with my father to move into my new apartment, a lease which was signed sight unseen. 

On Saturday morning everything started off great. We left early with no trouble, ready for the ten hours drive ahead of us. Our plan was to drive down that day, spend the night at a hotel, and then spend Sunday moving into my new place. However, about two hours into the drive I began to have one of my de-focusing episodes. I tried everything I could think of to pull the road ahead of me back into sharp, sustained clarity: blasting music, running cold air, rolling down the windows, and over caffeinating. None of this worked.

So, three and a half hours in, having decided that my continued presence on the road was an extreme danger, I pulled off at a rest stop and made a series of panicked and emotional calls to both of my parents, assessing myself as too anxious to drive. I was convinced that I was too stressed out to safely make the trip to Brooklyn. Fortunately, my mother immediately decided to come meet me at the rest stop and drive me the rest of the way down. I grabbed something to eat and a bottle of water from the decrepit vending machines and popped a few klonopin in order to take a nap to try and rest up to see if that would help my situation any. 

I woke up a few hours later, met my mother at the rest stop and continued the drive uneventfully to the hotel in Brooklyn to meet my father. Luckily, there were two beds in the room and by the time I arrived I was so manically agitated with myself-my skin ceaselessly crawling-that I took my nighttime medications and knocked myself out with some more klonopin, determined to have Sunday go well with no hiccups. 

At the mercy of circumstances beyond my control I was frustrated and sincerely humbled. I was also eternally grateful that my loving parents supported me enough to drop everything and help me get through this trying day. Tomorrow would be a better one, or so I hoped.