“Born to Cry”
Oh no! I could feel the molecules titrate from my monthly antipsychotic injection. Some kind of elation was overtaking me entirely! There I was, standing at the local Target ogling a prized accessory, inspiration firing my beating heart. I’ve always wanted a big floppy hat, the kind of vintage treasure you see in glamour shots with a breezy shoreline in the background. The vision of the hat was heightening the effect of the injection! This month, May, marked two months into the world-wide COVID pandemic of 2020, and apparently I needed a really big blue hat.
Not just thanks to the virus, my health has been at the forefront of my priorities for nearly a decade now. I am bipolar, and I live in negotiation with my “health” day in and day out.
“I just bought the biggest floppy hat. And I look so totally really good walking my dog in the neighborhood right now,” I gushed to my best friend, Jacquie, skipping to the park with my Maltese. We were in the middle of a really great phone conversation, until my twitching second personality came to surface, causing me to whisper conspiratorially (stage whisper) as follows: “I have a secret to tell. Jacquie, do not tell anyone—and I mean no one, Jacquie!” The phone line remained quiet as I gathered my thoughts to formulate what I really needed to get off my chest.
“Jacquie, I’m the real Lana Del Rey.”
Lana Del Rey is my alter ego—of all people on this planet. I do not actually follow or listen to her (unless I am in the midst of psychosis), but I suffer from delusions that prompt me to believe that I am her. I don’t believe I’m living as her in the flesh; I believe that I am a victim of fraud, and feel that I am some kind of lovelorn and more authentic LDR, made out of pure Italian gangster vignettes and tiramisu daydreams.
Is this my mind’s way of telling me that I need to come to terms with never having gone to music school? That a teenage pregnancy derailed my dreams? Who can tell?
After a pause, Jacquie started clapping.
Ah, well.
It’s a fact that I struggle with delusions and flashbacks beyond the mental state of psychosis.
I know, it’s tragic.
I have a very fragile heart after living through a series of unfortunate events, and at the age of twenty-one, I was diagnosed “perhaps” with the condition I live with today. “Perhaps” not a bad call considering that I’ve experienced nine psychiatric hospitalizations. Honestly, with that record, I could have been diagnosed with anything.
With a definite yes, I can confidently say that the big blue floppy hat made me feel a certain way that I hadn’t felt since the pandemic began. I needed a boost in confidence and God forbid something to help me feel pretty after months just sitting on the couch tending to whatever I was preoccupied with at the time (eating food, duh!). I mean, we’ve all been busy spinning our wheels trying to stay busy since the shelter-in-place began. All the ways the internet has kept me entertained! For example, as exciting as laying eyes on that special hat, was this: near the end April, just before the Target hat event, I Google-searched who would’ve been performing at the Bakersfield Fox Theatre had not the plague descended: Lana Del Rey (postponed).
I wanted to die.
Before this, I had been celebrating seven months of strength and recovery from the last psychotic-like event that had occurred in September 2019. Then, while living in a very fancy residential treatment program in the quaint hills of Calabasas, my alter ego made an appearance. I started prancing around and playing the guitar. It was the kind of place where no one with the exception of my psychiatrist could tell that I was actually in distress.
Here’s the thing. It’s not so much that I think I’m a singer when I have these delusions, but I believe that I wrote the sad-core music and lyrics. I believe that I’m the real songwriter and that I created the name Lana Del Rey, inspired by my great-grandmother’s beach house in Marina Del Rey. There are other reasons why I have these delusional thoughts. (I prefer to refer to these states as delusional instead of psychotic because I’m very passive and harmless when suffering.)
“You are not bipolar, Dana. You live with the condition that is bipolar. That’s all it really is. Tell Lana to leave you alone.” My therapist has a miraculous way of turning things around, but after this episode nothing could really cool the itch. Like, nothing soothed me. I just kept listening to the albums on heavy rotation as if that were an okay thing to do, and just imagined myself singing the (my) songs on a stage in front of thousands of people. And this mania is like pursuing some sort of spiritual liberation. Another totally intriguing aspect of the last delusional event is the amount of confidence I had in myself and in the delusion itself. On a video conference call with my psychiatrist I explained that my health was tiptop and that I was all ready to go ahead with a lawsuit against Del Rey (the “fraud,” as I referred to her).
“And what are your parents saying about this? What about your mother?” I informed him that my mother was all in favor of me filing the lawsuit. Naturally my mother wasn’t. That was part of the delusion and she was in fact very concerned about me.
Considering how I reacted to my Google discovery and how I react to hearing LDR songs when I’m at stores (like Target), I know that I struggle with my current medication. I receive a monthly injection to ease my spells, but I sometimes feel the medicine may be inducing them, too. Like, what are the odds that I have this delusion while the medication is titrating after having a shot? I do believe that the pandemic fueled the mental crisis I experienced in May, as the episode lasted the longest that I’ve experienced—an entire month. That’s four weeks too long of bouncing around like a sad-core musician who, in my sad world, has nothing better to do than to bother me at the Fox.
Come June, I opted to revert back to the therapist whom I was seeing when I was in high school. I feel that I have a lot of unfinished business with myself from that era, and I feel that getting in touch with someone who knew me well then will help me grow now. As for the delusions in May, they were pretty severe: I took it upon myself to write to the CEO of Universal Music Group and explain that I am the real LDR, victimized by “fraud”. This is a habit I’ve had since my first hospitalization in 2013, and I have even had a phone conversation with someone from a music label (another matter). But in 2019 I lived with the anxiety and pain that a celebrity was trying to bully me by showing up and playing a show in my own city. (By the way, the tour list I saw was Rome, Argentina, Bakersfield. A little weird?) I live with so much guilt today because of what I’ve done when I’m ill, but I must move on and not let the past get the best of me.
So, what exactly can we chalk this up to? Envy?
I think this is a grieving process.
I began having these odd LDR beliefs in 2014, a year after my initial psychiatric hospitalization (I had become preoccupied about whether or not I wrote Katy Perry’s sensational “I Kissed A Girl”). The thing with LDR started after a significant unfortunate event took place. I was trying to hitch-hike from my part of town in Bakersfield to Downtown when I happened to end up in the worst-case scenario of rides. I’d like to be reticent about what exactly occurred, but I now think that I have this belief that I am Lana Del Rey because I am triggered by her lyrics “take the body downtown,” as featured on her single, “Video Games.”
After that ride downtown, I decayed on my parents’ couch for nearly four years without a solid thought about the world around me. My toned and trim yogi body morphed into a hefty 300 pounds, I shaved my head twice like Britney Spears, and agreed to a few more hospitalizations to appease my parents so they wouldn’t send me to the homeless shelter as they threatened. It was during those years of “philosophical quietness” that I became obsessed with the problem of who the real Lana Del Rey is—the majestically tall, lean girlish-girl, with the longer than long locks of angel hair and those pouting lips in all of their depressive despairing glory.
To add insult to injury, my grandparent’s beach home is complete with “telephone wires above,” that do sizzle like a snare in Moro Bay. Maybe all this romantic drama is one of the better things about living with this very “unique” identity.
I’ve learned a lot about myself since my last incarnation as LDR. I now no longer second guess my genuine identity as Dana Eileen Lynch. I am a proud single mom, and my daughter is my top priority. I dream about healing and sharing my many misadventures with other people who thrive with a mental-emotional condition like mine, as well as with other survivors of rape and sexual assault. I can’t even tell you how embarrassed I am that I sometimes lived through these charades, but perhaps that’s neither here nor there when you’re too busy letting your freak flag fly. I truly believe that it is imperative to speak out about my experiences and have my voice heard in order to initiate awareness, as well as healing and recovery among those of us who need help in this uncertain world.
I leave you with this final gem of wisdom by Absurdist philosopher Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back.”
The voice in me honors the voice in you.
Namaste.
