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\nMe on New Years Eve, Memphis, December 31, 2012. Sitting outside of my hotel with a plastic cup of champagne. Alone.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nMe on New Years Eve, Memphis, December 31, 2012. Sitting outside of my hotel with a plastic cup of champagne. Alone.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nIt’s been 10 years since Roger Ebert died. He emailed me to ask me to write for him on the same day<\/em> I got diagnosed with bipolar. I’m sitting in the mood clinic, a wild-eyed maniac, and I get the email. He had less than two months left to live. How it all went down: He read a piece I wrote on Ben Gazzara. It wasn’t a recent piece, which suggested Roger had been scrolling around on my site. I think I wrote it when Gazzara died. Roger somehow found it. He then linked to it on Twitter, and the traffic crashed my site’s server for about an hour. I had no idea what was going on, though, since I was extremely busy acting like a lunatic in a mood disorder clinic on east 52nd street. My friend Steven Boone texted me saying “hey, congrats” and since I wasn’t on Twitter I didn’t know what had happened. So Steven was the one to inform me that Roger Ebert linked to a piece I wrote. Within a couple of hours, I got the email from Roger. Just a reminder: all of this is happening as I am going through an intake at a mood disorder clinic, yelling at the doctor “you people are just running a racket” and, my finest moment, “If anyone tells me I have to stop writing about Elvis, we are DONE here.” I’m doing THAT and texting Steven in between filling out forms – Text: “wait – what? Roger knows who I am?” – Yelling at the doctor, pacing – back to texting – back to answering questions about what the hell I was doing in Memphis all by myself for 10 days – back to my phone – back to the intake: “I sleep about 3 hours a night. Why, is that weird?” Back to my phone. Steven sending LOLs and emojis and hearts – so warm, so kind, so supportive. (Honestly, I haven’t thought about that in a long time, I haven’t thought about it at all until writing this, how Steven was there for me on that day, and he had no idea he was messaging me in the middle of a BRAIN STORM.<\/p>\n My mother came to stay with me during the crisis. I was afraid of opening mail. I was in a complete STATE, the illness had me in its grip. Wild buckling moods. A sense of crisis, of now or never, of life or death. I was committed to getting well now that I knew something was really wrong. I took time off of work. And I was freelancing, so this was a financial burden. As all of this was going on, I started writing for Roger. Literally, simultaneously. I reviewed two movies “for him”, with him editing them. My first review was of Christian Petzold’s Barbara<\/a>. Mum was there as I hit “send”. Ten minutes later I received an email from Roger. “I love how you start with the details.” I burst out sobbing, and Mum started crying, and it was this wild moment of triumph, heightened by the fact that I was now in serious treatment for a deadly ailment, as I am writing that review. Wild. It is so so special to me that Mum was THERE as I pressed “send”, that I didn’t go through that moment alone, as I have gone through everything else, alone. She was there. Next was my review of Gimme the Loot<\/i><\/a> – which ended up being quoted in the movie ad in the New York Times. (Kerry was the one who alerted me to that, via text. “You’re quoted in the Times.” Roger would send me comments, telling me what he liked about what I was doing. From his death bed. <\/p>\n Everything changed in 2013. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of separate events. It feels like all one event. I never got to meet Roger in person, but I will treasure the two months of our correspondence, and am grateful to him for recognizing something in me based on the years-old post about Ben Gazzara. He saw something of value. He had no idea he was emailing me in the middle of a mental crackup taking place in the east 50s. I of course didn’t tell him. I was so out of it, and so IN the illness, I wondered if I was making it up. But Steven was there, reminding me it was reality.<\/p>\n A month after Roger died, I flew to Champaign-Urbana to attend my first Ebertfest<\/a>. Mum came with me. Thank God. I still was far from well. We had this mother-daughter adventure. I faced doing all these new things. Appearing on panels. Attending parties. The whole thing. Nobody knew what was going on with me. It was fine they didn’t know. I was not well enough to truly appreciate how far I had already come. Getting this diagnosis, so late in life, and then immediately having to do all these new things, things I had never done before, was a LOT. My anxiety often got the better of me. I was still in serious treatment, weekly sessions with a doctor and a therapist. I had no insurance. My family pooled their money to pay for it. This was how bad it was. But I accepted the New. It seemed I had no choice. I couldn’t NOT go to Ebertfest. I HAD to do all these new things out in the world, as hard, as impossible as it seemed. I think I comported myself quite well, all things considered.<\/p>\n I have been writing for Rogerebert.com for ten years. Hundreds and hundreds of reviews<\/a>, 4 a month on average, plus interviews, some obits … and in 2017 I had the GREAT honor of screening the short film I wrote at Ebertfest. Life has a way of moving on in ways you just could never anticipate. <\/p>\n \n \nI didn’t go to film school. I didn’t study film in college. I never took a film history class. My education was Roger’s books, which I pored through as a kid. He is how I learned about Werner Herzog and John Cassavetes and Kurosawa and Bergman. He was my film education and it was a good one.<\/p>\n My posts round these here parts in 2012 – September to December – are extremely alarming. I posted all through it. I was suicidal in November. My birthday month. Historically a terrible month for me. I was all alone. My friend David told me he was trying to come to peace with the fact that I probably wasn’t going to make it. I remember feeling very alarmed but I also felt the same way. He was letting me go. I was almost relieved. I went to Memphis after Christmas, 2012. While I was there, my family orchestrated an intervention<\/a>. When I came back to New York, everything was different. My entire life was in crisis mode. All out in the open. I had to go see doctors and specialists. It was being paid for, so I couldn’t blow it off. I was obligated to other people. I couldn’t have afforded any of it. I recognize how lucky I am. This shit is expensive and not covered by insurance. I wasn’t insured anyway. I wasn’t allowed to be alone. I thought this was over-kill. Now I understand. <\/p>\n So I’m dealing with all of this and then Roger emails me. <\/p>\n I honestly don’t know if I would be here now if I hadn’t gotten the diagnosis and help from what basically was a fully-loaded care team. I just wanted the doctor to give me a shot and put me out of my misery. Keats called melancholy “wakeful anguish”: there are few phrases which capture the feeling better (although Gerard Manley Hopkins, who loved Keats, comes close in his so-called “dark sonnets”). David Foster Wallace called the experience “lurid”. “Lurid” is so right on, chillingly right on. Only a person who KNOWS would use the word “lurid”. The experience is not sadness. It’s lurid agony. Words don’t do it justice. It’s impossible to convey what it’s like. The crisis was – as I can see now – extreme and I am lucky I am alive. My doctor told me much later that the first time he met me he said I was like a “wild stallion” in his office. I just wanted to be strapped to a bed and drugged until I emerged feeling better. <\/p>\n I described above the day I got the diagnosis. I left his office, buzzing with the texts from Steven about Roger, and buzzing from the diagnosis handed down. I felt like a burden was lifted. IT had a name. I don’t know why I didn’t clock it earlier. After going through this intense intake process, where I had to talk about every single day I’d ever lived in my whole life, he guessed my first crackup was when I was 12, a year I remember well. I cried every day for four months<\/em>. I was in so much agony I wanted to die. I was a cutter, too. Before there was even a word for it. I wore long sleeves. I was in seventh grade. Just one year before, I was this child: <\/p>\n \n I got my period for the first time and bipolar slipped through the door. This is how it often happens for girls, I was told by my doctor. Puberty hit me like a Mack truck. The happy flamboyant tomboy child I was vanished almost overnight. I would bind my budding wee breasts to keep them from growing in, wrapping T-shirts and Ace bandages around myself until I couldn’t breathe. This makes me so so sad to think about now. In my 20s I grew to love my boobs and wore low-cut cleavage even in inappropriate settings because fuck it I was young and I had a rack and I loved it and so did the boys who loved me. I embraced it all. I wore combat boots and shaved my head but I still embraced my stacked figure. But when I was 12, boobs were the end of the world. I felt a sense of total dread at what was happening. I wanted to go backwards. Lost Eden just behind me. An Eden where I was free. And yeah, there was also that hidden enemy bipolar, ravaging my mind as my body started to develop. Good times.<\/p>\n I had been walking around with this thing forever. It was totally normal for me to go periodically insane, and the doctor created a chart showing me the cycles, the ups, the downs. Every four years I would lose it. I could almost set my watch by it. I just somehow didn’t perceive the pattern. It always was connected to an event, some disappointment, and my reaction would be this outsized THING that took over half a year. I just didn’t think I was sick. I thought life was just like that. <\/p>\n I walked across town after receiving the diagnosis at the mood disorder clinic, headed for the bus station. I felt this weird lightness. I knew I had a long hard road ahead of me to try to course-correct, my moods were still a buckling jump-rope, completely out of my control. It was a spring-like night and I walked by Rockefeller Center and 30 Rock, my old stomping grounds when I worked at the Today Show<\/a>. The trees around the ice rink were strung with blue lights. It was so beautiful. Magical.<\/p>\n I went to take a picture and a voice came, not one of the bad voices, this was a good voice, saying: “Put the camera down for a second. Just look. Just be.’ So I did. For a while I let my brain empty out, and stood there looking up at those whimsical fairy-blue lights. <\/p>\n Then I took a picture because I did feel – I couldn’t help it, the thought WOULD come – that maybe my life was about to change and maybe I should take a picture to have a record of it.<\/p>\n \n \n \n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Me on New Years Eve, Memphis, December 31, 2012. Sitting outside of my hotel with a plastic cup of champagne. Alone. It’s been 10 years since Roger Ebert died. He emailed me to ask me to write for him on … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/34177535862_ecc843a0b2_z.jpg\")
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