I gasp and let out a sigh. I gaze at [him]. I adore him. He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? ... Who could? Who would? Why would they? Why does [he]?

That's what madness looks like: a small woman in baggy red pajamas sitting on a kitchen chair, her feet dangling above the ground, trying to figure out how to eat and eclair while everyone she knows and loves watches her closely, as if she's a rat in a cage, to see what will happen next...

She wouldn't understand that I am chosen to speak for all the sorrows of the world.

I come bounding up the steps in front of our house: the lilac is blooming! I rush into it, fling my arms around it, bury my face in the heavy-scented flowers. I look over at the garden: the snow is gone, and the beds are bare but for the broken gray stalks and dead leaves that fall left behind, but the lawn is green, and a few bulbs have sent up tiny shoots, barely there, and there are two absurd yellow tulips, blooms bobbing in the soft spring breeze, it's spring. And with spring comes the joy that lives beneath the difficult times. The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.

But I do my best. I go home to my empty condo, buy some real food, and eat like a normal person. I pay the bills that have piled up, return the phone calls, get back to work. I write the lectures that I'm scheduled to give at a couple universities in February and March. It's winter. Winter brings the blues. I'm afraid of them coming, and I know they will. My only hope is that I can get through the winter without going back to the hospital. If I can do this, then maybe I can stop hating myself. I think, if I just keep going, keep doing what they say, take the meds, go to sleep, use the light box, get out of the house, get some exercise, eat enough, try to avoid stress, then maybe I can do it. They don't tell you how to manage grief. And I miss Jeff so much it's killing me. But there's nothing I can do about that now. All I can do is keep going forward. Maybe this way I can make it to April. Just this once.

I don't know how long I've been in my house. It's dark. Last I checked it was day. I think I've thrown up seven times today. I'm so dehydrated I can barely walk, and I'm crawling down the hall. The eating disorder has gotten too bad. It's not working. I see it for what it is: an attempt to control a self that I felt was completely out of control, a life that was falling apart. And it has done nothing but make the bipolar worse, and ruin my body in the process.

"I'm okay," I say. "They're just thoughts. I don't have a plan." The doctors always ask if you're having suicidal ideation -thinking about death, fantasizing about killing yourself, even when you don't want to - which I am, and if so, whether or not you have a plan, which I don't. I know myself well enough to realize that if we went to the emergency room, I would miraculously get better. I would show no signs of madness. It's called plausible sanity. It's a product of what they call lack of insight: when you're very sick, you don't have any perspective. You truly believe you're well, so you report that you're well. You act cheerful, put-together, and completely sane. You're articulate and very persuasive, and you explain to them that there's been a terrible mistake - you're not really crazy, and this ridiculous trip to the hospital is just a friend over reacting, or your family trying to trap you, or your spouse trying to get back at you for something...

Soon they hypomania morphs into something dark. The eating disorder has taken hold for real. It's no longer just a few symptoms I was using to try to control the moods. It's taken on a life of its own. I am eating next to nothing, spending hours every day at the gym, standing on the scale four, five times a day, consumed with the fear of gaining weight, with the fear that the writing is going badly, with the fear that Jeff and I aren't going to make it, with the fear that I will always be alone, or go crazy again, or spend my life in an institution. So I channel all the vague, amorphous, all-encompassing fears that have come to rule my days and nights into a fierce desire to lose weight. And more weight.

The feeling of confidence I got from moving into my own place and doing everything right has been replaced with the familiar, violent self-hatred I know. I had everything, and I lost it. Instead of hating the illness, I hate myself.

Years later, after we're married, we will cry about that time. I should have seen it, he'll say, I was such an idiot, how could I not see? We will put our foreheads together, and I will tell him, again and again, that he could not have seen.

It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about our bodies. We speak as if there was one collected perfrect body, a singular entity that we're all after. The trouble is, I think we are after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of our healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look exactly like everyone else's perfect body. A clone of the shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars, Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel and dainty firm delts. As Andy Warhol wrote, "The more you look at the same exact thing... the better and emptier you feel."

I was not as I appeared. I liked that. I was a magician. No one could see what I hid underneath, and I didn't want them to, because what I hid seemed raw. Excessively hot and red.

I have had the working assumption, since I was very small, that nothing was as it appeared. Appearances were not to be trusted. In fact, nothing was to be trusted. Things existed in layers, and under the layer lay another layer... Everything was about context. Everything was costume and makeup, and the role that one played.

You can, perhaps, forsee a serious of terrifically dramatic relationships in my future, all ending with me in an Ophelian heap in my quilt. I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.

I stayed at home to read and eat, or more accurately, to be fed-passive tense-and to disappear into the world in my head, the world I read of in books. ... the kind of book that might stave off the world at large a bit longer than the others. I was perpetually grief-sticken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time.

Food has two salient qualities for all humans. First, it stirs a sense of nurturance. The physical food transubstantiates in out minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fries into your mouth on a binge, you still feel that some emptiness, if briefly, is being filled. Second, food has a simple, chemical effect of calming the brain. Food gave me a sense that things were going to be all right. That if I just ate things in a precise fashion, if I just ate special foods-mushrooms soup, toast, tortillas with cheese, scrambled eggs-my brains would stay still, the world would stop spinning, and I would have a focal point for my eyes: the book beside the plate, the food, the project at hand. Things would remain calm.