Tag: Prozac

Umpteen Nervous Breakdowns

Umpteen Nervous Breakdowns

fullsizeoutput_31ecI’m not exactly sure what a nervous breakdown is. Is it the same as a mental breakdown? Emotional breakdown? Whatever it’s called, I’ve had a few of them. Like in every job I’ve ever had. And with every man I’ve ever loved.

When I was hired to work in the Clinton Administration I walked in the door of the U.S. Department of Education knowing it was the best job I would ever have. I worked for Secretary of Education Richard Riley, one of God’s greatest manifestations of His image and likeness. Surely this was a good sign.th

The previous year I’d been working at the Cook County Clerk’s Office. I’d landed a job there after cracking up in the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. In that grueling 16-hour-a-day job as Clinton’s scheduler, sleep was constantly interrupted by phone calls from Clinton friends who questioned my every decision—everything from who would be introducing Clinton onstage to what sandwiches would be in his holding room. When I returned to Chicago from Little Rock I blamed my getting canned on sleep deprivation rather than a frazzled emotional state. I didn’t want to look weak.
At the Cook County Clerk’s Office, I tucked the shirt tail of my mental collapse into my suit skirt and presented myself as an emotionally stable, confident, experienced political operative. At about the 11-month mark as Director of Communications I took an extended sick leave and started Prozac. That’s when I received a call from a campaign friend who worked in the White House Personnel Office inquiring about my availability to move to Washington. I accepted without deliberation, convinced it was a sign of better days ahead.

A friend keeping watch over my umpteenth nervous breakdown tried to warn me. He said moving to Washington was not a sign from God. He told me it was not a good move. But my default modus operandi is self-sufficiency. Deep inside my soul grows a bed of weeds whose dandelions of reason attract me like bees to nectar. They tell me I am my own master gardener. I provide my own seeds, water, nutrients and sun to my life. Reason tells me it’s unnatural to ask for help or accept advice from others. Whatever my spiritual condition is, at any given moment, Reason proclaims, “You are your own god. Be perfect.”

All spiritual teachers say a life lived on reason leads to despair. And so it did. By the end of the Clinton Administration I was seeing a psychiatrist every day. On weekends I feared I’d drive across the Potomac and buy a gun at a Virginia Wall Mart and blow my brains out.

When I returned to Chicago in 2001 I sought help, as I’ve always done when hitting a spiritual bottom. There’s been no loss of despair but I’ve learned to let hope live next to it—not hope in imaginary perfection but hope in the unknowable.

When James Carville Tried to Save Me

 

James Carville called in early March 1992.

“This is not your fault,” he said in that red-hot Cajun voice of his, ”I take full responsibility.”

I knew right then that the campaign advisors on the road with Bill Clinton were blaming me.

A few days earlier, Carville, chief strategist for the campaign, had directed me to schedule Clinton at a correctional facility in Georgia reasoning that a picture of Clinton strolling with black inmates and Georgia’s all-white male politicians would cinch Clinton’s appeal to the state’s voters.

It did.th

Clinton won the Georgia primary, but not without a price. The national press and the other candidates excoriated Clinton for his racial insensitivity. Jerry Brown said Clinton and the other politicians looked “like colonial masters” trying to tell white voters “Don’t worry, we’ll keep them in their place.”

And that was all my fault.

Five months earlier I’d been asked to give up my job in Chicago and relocate to Little Rock to be Clinton’s Director of Scheduling and Advance.  “You already know this, Regan,” Campaign Manager David Wilhelm reminded me, “the scheduler in any campaign has the worst job.”

It’s true. The person who plans the candidate’s calendar has an enviable yet risky position. An unplanned photo with an unscrupulous politician? Protesters blocking the entrance to an event? A rained out rally? It’s all the scheduler’s fault.

Campaign operations temporarily moved from Little Rock to the Palmer House in Chicago just before the Illinois-Michigan primaries in 1992. The extensive Chicago staff in Little Rock wanted to celebrate Clinton’s St. Patrick’s Day victories that would clinch

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March 17, 1992 Palmer House Chicago

the nomination.

An old friend of mine, a Chicago policeman, volunteered to be Clinton’s driver. He called me around 2:00 am the morning before the Primary.

“Regan, that Greek guy, George, and Bruce someone were in the car telling Clinton you have to go.”

“What?”

“Yep. But Clinton said he wants to be sure you have another high-level job in the campaign.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! Dees guys are strategists? Der talkin’ ‘bout firin’ you in your hometown — and your buddy drivin’?”

We howled at the strategic error.

I was offered a job that was already filled. Wilhelm shrugged when I asked if I was fired. The New York Times reported I’d been replaced by Bruce’s wife.

I took a trip to the Bahamas, became achingly lonely and came home early. Herb and Vivienne Sirott got me into a rental apartment across the hall from them.  Cook County Clerk David Orr hired me as Deputy Director of Elections. We worked hard that year to pass the National Motor Voter Act. A young community organizer, Barack Obama, walked into my office to plan a large-scale voter registration project.

Things looked good from the outside, but inside ego-busting despair maintained constant watch over my soul. Depression, sick leave, isolation, shame, all led to suicidal thoughts. Vivienne brought a psychiatrist to my apartment. That’s when I started Prozac, my first legal anti-depressant.