I.

At 17, I began to flirt with madness. My bipolar disorder started to take over my mind; and my thoughts suddenly became out of line, and quicker, too. Suddenly, almost overnight, I was thinking fast, and would stay up late into the night — seldom sleeping — yet feel energized the next day. Moreover, deep down, a part of me felt like a boy, and not a girl, and that gender dysphoria added to the internal chaos stroking my neurotransmitters. 

It was important for me to write a piece on madness for the Yale Daily News and not an alternative publication, because it was my time at Yale that was riddled with bouts of madness. These bouts left me bearing the brunt of a difficult college education, one that was marked by rapid personality changes and hundreds of instances of mania combined with the ever-looming threat of full-blown psychosis. Such a tempestuous experience left it all but impossible for college to be a good thing for me, or any kind of thing at that — except for a wild roller coaster ride of feelings and delusions that my deans and professors and peers had to witness firsthand. 

I harbor three main complaints with life. The first is my various tinkerings with madness, the second is being a transgender man, and the third is troubling to find community and friends. But I tell her, rather gracefully, that only one of these things would ever cause me to want to take my life, and that is the first: namely, flirtations with madness. 

II.

At 17, I was obsessed with clocking a 10:49 two mile, I was obsessed with a 2240 on the SAT, and I was obsessed with a unique entrance essay on how the Hindu God Ganesh soaked my every presence when living from country to country. Moreover, I was obsessed that Ivy League coaches would come knocking on my door, and knock they indeed did, as Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Columbia and Yale swarmed into my inbox. Now, as a man who smokes cigars, gets tattoos and drinks too much beer, I couldn’t care less which pristine institutions pay attention to my accolades. 

I was a troubled girl, and I was unaware that bipolar was ravaging my mind. I suffered from bouts of egotistic mania, where I would stay up all night, drinking, only to run 10 miles the next day. I was not a welcome member of the women’s cross country team: they found me a misfit, but I stayed on it because I feared what was to come — namely, reckoning with manhood. My poor first-year roommates probably thought I was some sort of runner turned lunatic turned drunkard, or some combination thereof, and had a hard time keeping up with my borderline psychotic thoughts and crazedness. In hindsight, I should have gotten on mood stabilizers and antipsychotics months in advance. 

First year was a blur of semi-unsafe hookups with members of Yale’s men’s crew team, football team, track team and some frat stars. Then 18, I was a beautiful, long-haired girl who wore pearl earrings and could score any man I wanted. But deep down, I was in love with women and wanted — quite utterly — to please a woman in bed. 

I left the first year of college 10 pounds heavier, with fewer friends and an armoire of drunken escapades to call fond memories. My mental health was at an all-time low, but the worst was yet to come. 

III.

I first came close to psychosis when the cross country women and I would aqua jog in Yale’s pool and, suddenly, I would smile out of nowhere, while our legs trampled underneath water. I further embodied mania when I yelled, at the top of my lungs, that classmates of mine were going to be president one day. 

The summer after first year, I spent time working at a startup in Cleveland and ferrying back and forth to D.C. But my mind was slowly slipping away, and suddenly, out of the blue, I started to harbor deranged thoughts about the world around me. I thought that men in my life had raped other women when they really hadn’t, and I thought that women in my family had gotten abortions when they didn’t. I would frenziedly confront these said people about their horrible trespasses, only to find them blank-faced, stupefied in terror, wanting me to get help. 

I should have been in the psych ward for weeks on end, but instead, my parents — well-meaning — left me in the grips of a single psychiatrist in McLean, Virginia, and a therapist in Alexandria, Virginia. Combined, this team of doctors somehow got me out of a psychotic funk and back into some semblance of reality. I’ll never forget the moment I woke up at 9 a.m. one morning realizing that my thoughts had been utterly psychotic, and that I was now recovered. It was a heavy feeling — but a positive one. But, it was scary. Very scary indeed. 

At the same time I was recovering from psychosis, I was also figuring out my womanhood — and how I really loved other women — and how I perhaps wanted to be a man. One evening, I asked my Mom to call me Lucas. I also took binding tape and put it across my breasts, hoping for the best. Almost immediately, I had forgotten about all of my drunken hookups with crew team members and frat stars. Now I was a revamped version of Isabel, soon to be Isaac, soon to be a burgeoned man of epic proportions. 

That year, I traveled to Peru by myself to celebrate the newer version of me. My mind felt healthy to the point where I could take a bus tour across the South American country and hike the Inca Trail. Still a runner at heart, I climbed the Colca Canyon and Machu Picchu at breakneck speed, making friends with other tourists along the way. We saw each other at different stopover points across the country, and stayed in the same hostels as well. I coached cross country at a private school in D.C., and became friends with the lovely women there. On top of this, I was working for a newspaper and on a congressional political campaign. 

No longer psychotic, the world was my oyster again. 

IV.

Sophomore year of Yale was not tinged by hints of madness. I was able to coast on by, work at a startup that defeated ISIS propaganda and kiss a few girls along the way. But I felt, deep down, that I was deeply not a girl and that manhood pushed at my skin like a tsunami waiting to unleash itself on every bone, spine, muscle and vertebrae. 

I spent the summer between sophomore and junior year traveling to Jordan and living with ROTC students in off campus housing. I worked at a startup called Prologue Strategies that created a Facebook page to counter ISIS videos and announcements. We assembled a team of Sunni and Shia muslims in New Haven, including Iraqi refugees. The madness that I experienced both during and immediately after freshman year seemed subdued. 

Towards the end of the summer, I confessed to my then-girlfriend that I was secretly a transgender man. She paid no attention to it, and because we were breaking up, didn’t seem to care. At the beginning of junior year, I came out to my residential college, Timothy Dwight, as a man, and went by Izzy, and then Isaac. I put a binder across my chest and felt, for the first time, like I was free in this godforsaken world. Even after confessing to being Lucas to Mom, I still didn’t feel ready to tackle manhood, so it took several more months to arrive at a different Jewish moniker as my first name. 

But eventually, towards the end of junior year, the madness had a way of coming back. I very narrowly escaped a nervous breakdown around winter when I flew to Amman, Jordan, and was trans in the Bedouin desert. I was anxious the entire time, hating the prospect of having to pee in a Middle Eastern men’s bathroom and walking the streets of Amman in nonbinary appearance. For what it’s worth, I was protected by a legion of bodyguards, but on outings by myself I wasn’t sure if Jordanians construed me as a man or woman or, even more dangerously, something in between. 

Later that year, I witnessed my grandfather pass away on an island off the coast of Seattle, and vied to go on testosterone. As the hormone lapsed into my body, it interacted with my bipolar disorder in a crazened way, to the point where I became so anxiety ridden that I was yelling platitudes into thin air, with strangers terrified to watch on. That summer — the summer approaching senior year of undergrad — I changed my body and personality drastically to fit the appearance of a cigar smoking, deep voiced man. My nights were ravaged with intense dreams about my newfound personality and the antipsychotic Risperdal was touching my brain, working wonders to stabilize it beyond belief. 

I was entering a new era: the era of Isaac. 

V.

Nothing could have prepared me for being Isaac. While most of sophomore and junior year my madness felt subdued, senior year was consumed by daily bouts of mania, drunkenness and flirtations with borderline psychosis. I had a muscular stature and could project sentences in an authoritative, deep voice. Still, the madness was on full display. 

While I was tinkering with madness again, though, I was also gaining status on campus, writing eye-opening opinion columns and featuring in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary, hosted by Katie Couric. The stint on national television — paired with a fancy premiere in New York City — earned me many groupies. I was also a member of Elihu, one of Yale’s most sought after secret societies. I found, however, that as somewhat of a lunatic, I was making very few friends, both in the society’s ranks and beyond. 

As a rigorous intellectual, I wish with every bone in my body that Yale could have worked out well. When thinking back to my college experience, I have an exact plan of action for how I could have had a good time. First, I would have stopped drinking. Secondly, I would have stabilized on lithium, and much of the mania and borderline psychotic state would have faded into the ether. Third, I would have gotten top surgery and started dating women and sleeping with some new queer friendly men. Fourthly, I would have lived off campus and not made a reputation as a mad man inside of Timothy Dwight. Fifthly, I would have taken some of my classes seriously, attended job fairs and planned a company to start. Sixth, I would have, without a doubt, worked at the YUAG, and enmeshed myself in the cacophony of visual arts that run abound on campus. And seventh, but certainly not least, I would have spent much time smoking cigars and socializing at The Owl Shop, wishing that they would import Cubans and becoming friends with the townies. 

If I had done all of these things, my experience at Yale — and beyond in the greater wide world — would have been vastly different, and much more positive. But I wasn’t ready as a man, and as a human being, to put the bottle down, and my long history of alcoholism — starting at the ripe age of 12 when I would sneak wine bottles into my room in Moscow, Russia — was devastating for my mental health and reputation on campus. In fact, alcoholism took over my life so much that it actually governed it, dictating which Master’s Teas I would attend, which lectures offered free beer and which bars to frequent with off campus folk, instead of studying, properly, for tests. My life, essentially, was planned around which college event had unlimited Stella’s or Heinekens. 

Today, as I have reached 30, I am grappling, yet again, with the madness that lives inside of my brain. I am convinced, after going on lithium, that I spent every day of my Yale experience manic and drunk, and that I was living, back then, in some sort of parapsychotic state — a state of mind where I was not fully psychotic but also not fully in touch with reality either. Trying to get through an Ivy League in a parapsychotic state while drunk and manic and changing genders at the same time is a feat I would not bestow on anyone, let alone an enemy. I am lucky that I graduated, and graduated with a 3.16. My GPA should have been lower — perhaps anywhere from a 2.5 to a 3.0. 

Now, I like to reflect on the madness that lives within. I believe there are five things that make me more unusual than most: an inability to decipher reality, very heightened anxiety, abnormal sensitivity, internal chaos and, to a lesser extent, a lack of desire to follow a clear life path or plan. “An inability to decipher reality” I can directly blame bipolar — for bipolar can leave the mind in a state of psychosis or half-psychosis that renders it all but impossible to know what’s really going on around you. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, a heightened state of anxiety is directly tied to the third ingredient: abnormal sensitivity. Let me describe it this way, an abnormal sensitivity to objects, sights, sounds and people around you leaves one so flabbergasted and not-in-control that they become, as I have stated numerous times, inordinately anxious. “Internal chaos” and “lack of a life plan” are also closely tied together. Internal chaos — chaos that ruptures and parades from within — ensures that the beholder of said chaos rarely follows a set path, instead living their life second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, betting happiness on alcohol benders and parties with cocaine. The chaos has a way of festering underneath the surface, making sure that its “wearer” appears kooky in career meetings and unbound by any set of normal rules in real life.  

Putting all of these together, a recipe for “crazy” comes into the mix. And crazy I am indeed. 

I can’t take back the madness that dominated my Yale experience. Nor can I take back the fact that I was a girl for two years of it, and someone in-between for another year too. But what I can do is take ownership of my madness — pluck it from thin air and lock it up in a box, and then decipher it and manage it at every turn. And what I can do is write for papers, and then write some more, and write on into the horizon until my words become bent with the colors of the fading sun — hues of pink and orange and disappearing blue making way to adjectives and proper nouns and adverbs that will change the course of history for years to come.