I had a breakdown at the Charlotte airport
This post is the third in a series. Here are the first and second posts. I’ll be talking about these posts and answering your questions live on Monday at 5pm Eastern. Become a paid Substack member to receive a link to the session.
I get off the plane in Charlotte and all my money’s gone. I think: How will I get home once I land in Boston? But then I remember the last time the money was gone my kids showed me you can sneak on the train without paying.
So I call the Wisconsin Department of Revenue to see if they are the ones who took my money. I say a little prayer about being able to get my money back: Please god make it the DOR and not the oil guy who sued me.
The Wisconsin office answers. I start crying. I say, “I can’t cope anymore. I have no idea when you’ll take my money and you always take it all. This is absurd.”
My voice is getting louder so I walk toward a bathroom to yell in a stall. But there’s a line.
I yell: “Just send me to prison. It would be easier for me.”
The woman next to me asks if I’m okay.
I nod.
I keep crying to the DOR: “You can’t keep taking all my money and expect me to want to keep living. There’s no point. I want to just kill myself.”
Some airport guy taps me on the shoulder and makes me leave the bathroom.
The DOR guy is talking, but I hang up on him. I call my brother. I say, “Can you please tell the airport people I’m fine and I’m just talking to the DOR?” I tell the airport people to call my brother.
While they call my brother I call the DOR back and scream. The DOR guy sends me over the edge when he tells me he would be happy to get rid of the debt if I’d just fill out the paperwork. “Stop!” I scream. “You kill me with the paperwork. You know I can’t fill it out. Is this a recorded line? You’re torturing me.”
The airport guy tells me he talked to my brother. I tell him leave me alone I’m talking to the DOR. EMTs appear out of nowhere. With a wheel chair.
An EMT asks to see my boarding pass. I bought the ticket so late that I had to buy first class, which made me angry, but now I think first class will save me.
He gives my boarding pass a look and hands it to the police. Now I am in the wheelchair.
I call my brother: “What do I do?”
He says, “Fill out the paperwork and the DOR will leave you alone.”
I yell at my brother. “You are so arrogant. You think you know everything. If the DOR goes away it doesn’t even matter because the oil guy has a lien on my account.” I stand up to yell better and the EMT pulls me back into the wheelchair.
My brother says, “I already told you the judge threw out oil guy’s case.”
“He did?” I start to cry from relief. I sink into the chair. “You’re just telling me now?”
“No. This is the third time.”
I tell my brother, “Wait. I have to call you back.” Because somehow I’m in an elevator, in the wheelchair, next to a gurney, and there is no room to move unless I get on the gurney.
I say, “Do I have the right to refuse hospitalization?”
The EMT shakes his head no.
“Can you put me in jail? I’ll have more rights there.”
The EMT says, “I’m sorry, we can’t do that.”
I calm myself down to be cooperative. Then I say, “I can just break a law so you can take me to jail.”
Now I’m on the gurney. Rolling through the gate. The tarmac is a one-stop shop: My ambulance is right next to the plane I am missing.
In the ambulance I realize my kids will be home alone indefinitely with no money. I text Nino: “Emergency”.
He calls right away. His voice feels like it’s petting my head. I have a hard time focusing on what the kids need. Or what the EMT is saying. Why doesn’t Nino hold my hand when we sit on the sofa? Why won’t he love me?
The EMT asks if I give him permission to talk freely to my husband.
I need to start looking normal, so I don’t tell him Nino is not my husband.
In the ER a resident stops by my gurney and I’m relieved it’s a teaching hospital. He says, “Your brother calls you Adrienne and your husband calls you Penelope. What should we call you?”
I say, “You can call me either.”
“Your husband told us you have multiple personality disorder. Is this related?”
Fuck. It’s over.
I say, “No, it’s not that. Penelope is a pen name. I used to be famous.” The resident nods. I say, “Well, okay. I guess yes it’s a little related but you won’t notice me switching. I’m not disruptive.”
“Have you ever been told you have any other issues like depression or anxiety or PTSD?”
“Yes. All of those.”
“Could we see your ID?”
I have time to think while they find my backpack in the confiscated items section of the nurse’s station.
Of course they are looking for a government ID to get a handle on my names, but I dig out my Harvard ID.
They ask what I do at Harvard, and I know I’m home free: “I do research about how women with neurological differences can get better support from health care providers.”
Two hours later I’m in the Charlotte airport with a ticket back to Boston.
This racy pace is up there with No Country for Old Men. It’s like The Silence of the Lambs, but with the ‘crazy’ person (mostly) harmless. The weaving of names, and stunning Sliding Doors tarmac image, make this a razor ride. Yet despite all, a happy ending! Dialogue is meant to be murder. But while we wrestle with Gordian knots, you weave them. And now and then, a thread escapes – to the reader’s cheer. :)
I am really sorry that nobody took the time to understand you Penelope. It doesn’t make sense to me that they would put you on an ambulance because you were upset about money. Suddenly having someone take all of your money is something that anyone would panic about, even if it was tax related. Feeling powerless and fighting back is normal.
The way we as a society deal with mental health is frustrating because if someone is making us uncomfortable we take their power away. But the issue for you is that you were feeling helpless, rightly so. So taking more power away does not fix the situation, it makes it worse.
During the pandemic I felt like saying “I told you so” a lot, because everyone in the world was having their power taken away in some form at the same time. Their reactions were a lot like yours, but I guess there were not enough ambulances.
Or maybe we can just accept that what we call mental health issues are normal adaptive responses, and love and support people when they are struggling, rather than isolate them.
Sometimes I think about the pandemic and I get nostalgic. It was so slow. I was sick for half of it (Covid twice) and Z. had a head injury the whole time. So it should have been a terrible time. But I love how slow everything got. I miss that. I don’t think of it as a mental health crisis. For me, trying to keep up with the speed of the non-pandemic world is a mental health crisis.
Does the diagnosis of MPD supersede that of autism? Those are two awfully heavy diagnoses to digest and I’m sorry that you have to go through all this. Losing time is serious symptom and very inconvenient in today’s go go go society. Please let us know if there is anything that we might help with.
Sometimes a tiny support by being physically present is important.
I had a friend come sit in my easy chair and just be there while I decluttered, not actively helping me or anything, because otherwise I would not have decluttered.
When a good friend in hairdressing school spent days worrying about, but never doing, her homework, I went and sat at her place while she finally did it. The evening was a zero socially for me, because it took her the whole time, but that’s what my friend needed. … She graduated and picked me up in a limousine to go celebrate.
Compelling writing. I hope you realize that it’s best not to wonder about why other people do or don’t do something like hold our hands or love us. We can all barely understand why we do or do not do something ourselves, much less understand what is happening with someone else. I think the best thing is to act the way we find ourselves wishing other people would act. Every accusation is a confession. “You’re torturing me” “You are so arrogant. You think you know everything”