A Bipolar Drunk in the Streets

“A prisoner within four walls,” that’s how I felt when I got back to Paris.  I no longer had a student visa, and couldn’t get a work visa since we weren’t married yet.  Loïc was extremely stingy, so it was rare that I had a dollar’s worth of change in my pocket.  That meant I couldn’t go out to coffee with the few people I knew who were still in Paris, so soon they stopped inviting me, and I became quite isolated.  I couldn’t even sit reading for long in the parks on sunny days, because I couldn’t afford to use the public toilets.  So I stayed inside, bored out of my mind.  I looked forward to 5 p:m each day, when Walker Texas Ranger came on, because watching daytime TV was atrocious.  Walker Texas Ranger sustained me.  That’s how small my life had become.  My social life consisted of the 15 minutes a month that I saw my doctor.  Loïc wouldn’t even pay for the visits to the doctor, which were about $18.  So without my having asked, my doctor saw me for free and gave me sample medications.

After the first year back, colleagues and friends of Loïc strongly urged him to marry me, adding that this time while I wasn’t working would be a good time to start a family.  Although he’d agreed to marriage before my return to Paris, he dragged his feet, insisting that I could work under the table.   He wanted me to follow him around the world without any commitment.  So I was trapped, unable to earn the money to return to the US, and unable to work and become independent in France.  

I’d gotten into the habit of going out to bum cigarettes, since I didn’t have pocket money for them.  We lived in a quarter with a lively nightlife, there were throngs of people in the streets in the evening, and there were always some young people panhandling.  I first got the idea to go out and panhandle myself after Loïc had agreed to buy the photo supplies I needed for a shoot, and then retracted his offer at the last minute, when I’d already organized a model, clothing, a hair stylist, and make up artist, which is difficult to organize.  I looked the part for begging, my clothes and shoes were ratty, and it went well.  Imagine the dismay of those who gave me spare change for food and shelter had they learned how much of it I spent on creating the photos that got me into my galleries!  Little did they know that their spare change was nourishing me with the hope of having a future, it gave me a reason to live.  It was exciting being in the street, I was outside of the four walls of my prison, not participating in life, but at least able to observe it go by.  I enjoyed seeing people smiling and hearing their laughter.  It was a strange life, living in a nice apartment, preparing dinner, eating with Loïc, and then hitting the streets nightly.  Whereas in the past he’d kept a tight lid on my drinking, he now said nothing, not once did he say a word about where I was going and what I was doing.  I imagine he felt defeated by my destructive drinking.  



During the period when I was begging, my depression shifted, I went into what I didn’t know was a long mixed state of mania and depression at the same time--which is extremely confusing.  I knew something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn’t say what.  To make matters worse,I I had severe migraines on a daily basis, which I didn’t recognise as being triggered by the drinking, because I’d first begun suffering from them years before I began drinking.  The migraines kept me in bed.  I’d lie there day and night, unable to sleep at all, sometimes for a week at a time.  Vivid and beautiful hallucinations kept me entertained, they waxed and waned with the cycles of the migraines.  Manic, my thoughts raced through my mind at lightning speed, so fast that words couldn’t even keep up with them.  I would get amazing insights and be unable to keep them in my mind--one insight would eclipse another.  Weekends, when Loïc was home, he’d put soothing music on for me, and come into the bedroom at times to show me beautiful and interesting photos that he’d come across in books.  He’d warn me  to close my eyes when he turned the pages, because seeing the movement of the turning pages triggered excruciating pain.  I could no longer read.  I’d try focusing on each word in a sentence in order to put it together, and then go from one sentence to the next, but by the time I’d get to the end of a paragraph, I couldn’t put together what it said.  So I couldn’t escape into books.  



One night when I was begging in the street, I looked up it as if I was looking up a long dark tunnel, and told myself: “There are only two ways out of this, death or the psychiatric hospital.”  I knew I was an alcoholic although I knew nothing about alcoholism or where to get help, and my mental problems while fascinating were frightening.  When people on the streets would tell me to get a job, I wanted to say I couldn’t, but I couldn’t explain why I couldn’t work.  For some reason the thought of going to a psych ward in France terrified me.  but I began mentally preparing myself for landing in a psych ward, hoping that it would be during a visit to the US.