Memoir installment #23: My breakdown

In which a corner is turned

Where I was living when this all went down

If you are really, really out of your mind, you eventually do things that are so out of character, so far from who you've always believed yourself to be, that you are forced to recognize that something is pretty profoundly wrong.  

My own recognition came after having a temper tantrum in front of Conde Nast’s CEO (an event so awful and humiliating I can’t further recount it here), and after giving a wildly inappropriate toast at a dinner party thrown by the editor of the New Yorker for a friend who'd just published a book (same). 

These episodes went a long way toward convincing me I wasn't thinking clearly anymore. I went to Dr. Ward and asked him to taper me off of the Adderall, which is what everyone around me was blaming my behavior upon. But lowering the dosage only made me more depressed and tweaked and angry at everyone—in particular my family. I had infuriated all of them so many times over—starting fights, saying wildly hurtful and inappropriate things, disrupting Thanksgiving by sneaking into my mom's bathroom with a young cousin to get high—that they refused to see me until I agreed to family therapy. And there was no way I was going to let that happen, because I feared an all-against-me situation. I had been raised to believe that family is always there for you, unconditionally. And now mine was not. This left me feeling even more unbound.