Memoir installment #25

Coming home

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

The situation was shaky when I returned to New York, just as summer was beginning. When you’re as messed up as I was, you don't go away for four weeks and come back all better. I was warned against returning full-time to work right away. But I had been out of the office for so long that this notion was unthinkable to me. We were about to start work on the September issue, by far the most important issue of the year, and I had to be around.  

We had moved offices, from the eighth floor of 4 Times Square to a roomer space on the sixth, and when I returned to Lucky, it was to a new office with weird feng shui—it was sort of long and narrow—filled with unpacked boxes. This alone unhinged me, and I would feel myself get agitated or excited and try to calm myself down, because those feelings always ended in a crash. The Lamictal was evening me out, but I was still capable of pretty abrupt mood swings. 

I was also, in some ways, still a bit delusional. I called the magazine's publicist to my desk to tell her—and this embarrasses me so hugely it's hard to type the words—that I should become a fashion correspondent for The Daily Show, and could she try and make that happen? It wasn't until I saw the look in her eyes that I recognized the wackadoo nature of that request.