Jet Lag

I settled into an antiseptic, oddly smelling airplane seat in Portland at 10:20 am and landed in Mumbai at 12:20am the next next morning. Having spent most of the 25 transit hours sleeping, aided by the generous gin and tonics, I was dazed and confused as I navigated immigration and baggage claim. Date of my arrival? 12^th of December, or was it the 13^th now? Date of departure? Three weeks from now, or was it two? Destinations within India – I couldn’t seem to remember the itinerary. I knew I had something exciting, something life changing ahead of me, I just couldn’t quite remember what.

Most people think stabilization, triage, crawling out from the darkness is the hard part of recovering from a mental illness. Most people think the days after you leave the hospital, the first few months adjusting to the side effects of the medication, the post-traumatic stress, are the biggest challenges. Those things are awful, but they are also simple: wake up. Go to the doctor. Don’t hurt yourself or others today. Make your connection. Have your passport ready at all times. Don’t drink so much that you’ll miss your next flight. I have come to believe that part of my brain, my psyche, and my soul slept through that part of my journey. There was nothing to feel, nothing to process, nothing to recover from: it was about survival. Not quite gin and tonics and airline movies, but you hear what I’m saying.

Then there’s the moment that you realize you are no longer in crisis mode, that you are ready to be a normal person with a normal life. You are ready to reenter. You have reached your final destination. As you pop some gum in your mouth and deplane, you realize that you’re on the other side of your world, that you don’t know what time it is, and that you don’t have a return ticket booked. You’ve landed in someone else’s mundane reality but you’ve forgotten how to move, how to breathe, how to tell time, how to kiss, how to smile.

I don’t know how long that moment lasts, but I know that it’s slow and surreal and that two years later, I wonder if I’m still in it. It’s like The Matrix gone wrong and backwards: you’re acutely aware that you are real, that your new feelings and environs are real, but you can’t quite remember if all the time, all the feelings, all the memories before your life turned upside down are real or figments of a wistful imagination. And it doesn’t matter, because you’re here now. Tell the taxi man to take you somewhere, and that’s where you’ll start.