Crash and Burn
© John McManamy
This is the fourth of five articles that chronicle my lifelong struggles with depression and mania:
If you have ever read news accounts of airlines that crashed, you will inevitably find they were doomed to crash. Sleet build-up on the wings, a five-cent bolt that worked its way loose, a runway that was too short for the conditions at hand - you get the picture. The pilot taxies into position, gets the all-clear from the control tower, and races down the strip, fully expecting to become airborne, taking comfort in the roar of four Pratt and Whitney engines outside his cockpit, blithely ignorant of the fatal defect that will put him and his passengers in the bottom of a swamp.
So it was with my first college experience. I had no study habits to speak of, and I was subject to depressions that I thought everyone experienced as a matter of course. On top of that I suffered bouts of mild mania that I mistook for normal moods. I entered my first year full of bright hope and promise only to crash and burn my second year, with no hope of putting the pieces back together.
It was the late sixties, and everyone seemed to be enjoying it except me. I should have been fitting right in, but some hidden malfunction inside my brain seemed to reach out and warn away all those who should have been my companions. Inevitably my thoughts turned to suicide or of speculating what it would be like if I cryogenically froze myself and woke up say around the turn of the century.
Would the world be ready to accept me by then?
In the meantime, of course, I was seeing the world with different eyes. I would go to the art galleries in Washington DC where I was living at the time, and at the National Gallery I would inevitably find myself in front of Vermeer's "Woman Weighing Gold." Perhaps it was the painting's overall sense of stillness and balance that intrigued me, qualities I could only experience vicariously.
I tried my hand at various jobs, driving taxis, picking up garbage in a suburban department store, and playing trombone in a soul band. Fortunately the army wouldn't have me. My pathetically skinny frame that made me the object of so much ridicule in my youth turned out to be my life-saver when so many my age were needlessly dying in a stupid war.
