Whatever...Love Is Love (12 page)

On the last day of the season, I left the set quickly and jumped in my Jeep in the middle of the day and started to cry. My eyes poured big, huge tears of rage. I didn't know where I was going. I just remember being stuck in traffic during a thunderstorm and seeing a man doing push-ups in the rain beside his stalled clunker. Hours later I was on a desert road. I remember the light was a vivid blue even in the middle of the night. I had stopped crying and began saying the Hail Mary over and over again.

I finally ended up at a motel at a truck stop in Arizona. I wasn't sure how I was going to kill myself, but I knew that the time had come. As I lay curled up on the floor, wrapped in an orange-and-brown comforter, my mind cleared for a minute. This was not me, I thought. There is something wrong. Don't listen to yourself. Then I called my best friend and she called my therapist. Soon people arrived to take me home.

The next day, a kind psychiatrist in LA said, “Maria, if you are nearsighted, you need glasses to see. You have a chemical imbalance and taking medicine is like having glasses.” I was quickly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It is hereditary in some circumstances and so was true with me.

Next came three painful months of trying different combinations of drugs. The first two weeks were the worst as I waited for the drugs to take effect. My mother came out to stay with me and held my feet all night, as they couldn't stop moving. Some days I could not even speak. I was nearly comatose. A psychiatric nurse stayed at our house and made me walk every day. My brother, who was living with me at the time, cooked for me and kept his promise to let no one know what had happened to me.

After three long months, I finally found the right regimen and felt like the best of me. I could walk again. I could see clearly. I worried if the drugs would dull who I really was, take away that passion and angst and everything that made me such a good actor. Funny enough, I did my best acting roles and even won awards after the medication.

I left my first big job after those three months. I told myself I needed to heal, and to learn to cope with the triggers that might send me into fight-or-flight mode again, at any time. Then and even some years later, people may have thought I had left that job because I was arrogant—that I was bored and wanted to “do more” with my career.

I have looked back on my decision many times, getting to the heart of why I really left. As I learned more about my disease, I realized that the truth is that leaving had nothing to do with arrogance or lack of humility. At the time, in the baby stages of my recovery, my illness might have driven me to suicide if I had stayed. I finally have peace about that time, knowing that I did the right thing for my health and my future.

NOW AND AGAIN OVER THE YEARS I'VE HAD TO ADJUST MY MEDS,
just like my dad and others I know who have this or similar illnesses. I am dutiful about taking my pills every day. But once every couple of years, if I am triggered in some way or the medicine stops working, I find I'm not quite myself. I know it's time to go back to the doctor. And I do. I know that without medication I would end up suicidal and eventually dead.

Of course I research constantly and read every book I can about my disease. Yes, bipolar is a disease, just like diabetes or asthma. My favorite book about depression has come to be a lifesaver when I am in my darkest days. It is William Styron's
Darkness Visible
. Styron wrote the book when he was actually in the midst of a depression and therefore captured the feeling perfectly. It is not sadness. It is not pain. It is something like a complete despair after losing your whole family in a car accident, even though the reality is that your family is just fine.

Another book that has helped me to embrace the label of bipolar was Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir
An Unquiet Mind
. In this amazing book, she writes,

Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. . . . It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.

No matter my meds, I will always have a hypersensitivity to life. The highs and lows are somehow much higher and lower for me than for some other human beings. But I have accepted that I cannot change something that will always be a part of me. I now look at it dead in the eye without shame or judgment. And I'm lucky enough to have found kind people and medicine that keep me alive and tethered to this earth.

Just recently, I admitted on an insurance claim for a film that I was on medication for bipolar disorder. I had hidden this for years, only ever admitting on forms like these that I took Synthroid for the thyroid disease I also have. But this time I added bipolar disorder. I wanted to see what would happen. Within a few days, my lawyer received a letter asking me to sign a waiver stating that I would “take all psychiatric medicine as prescribed.” We said, “No.” It took weeks of negotiating to compose a letter that simply said, “I will take ALL medication prescribed during shooting.” That meant my Synthroid, too. We would not allow the backers of this film to get away with putting mental disabilities in a different category from physical disabilities. In the end our argument worked and the studio agreed.

I have never missed a day of work in my life, whether from physical or mental illness. Why should I have to sign this piece of paper? Turns out that on this particular film set, one of the producers had glaucoma, the makeup artist had cancer, and someone else had a child who was showing signs of schizophrenia. So I guess we are all damaged in our ways. We all have our disabilities. I don't want to have to sign a paper vouching for mine.

Mental illness has become more acceptable now. People talk about it and “come out about it” more. And yet still there is a stigma attached. Jamison wrote another book called
Touched with Fire
. That book is about centuries of artists who would now be considered bipolar or schizophrenic. At the time, if they were diagnosed at all, these figures were labeled “hysterical.” Many killed themselves. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and the list goes on. I wish there had been medication for these tortured souls, so that we would have much more of their art to enjoy today.

But mental illness can also be a gift. I even enjoy being around people with “mental disorders” of some kind or other. I have a great producer friend who admittedly has Asperger's syndrome. He is on medication, but still can't stay on track for very long during a multiparty conversation. Yet he is ridiculously successful and fascinating, and has a brilliant mind.

So am I damaged? Of course, I'm human. Who isn't damaged in some way? But I'm not damaged because of my bipolar disease. Now that I am being treated, I can view it more as a gift. The wiring of my brain allows me to feel deeply. I believe it helps me be less judgmental and more empathetic to others, and certainly a better actress. And besides, it is a gift I share with my father, and millions of others all over the world.

10

AM I A FEMINIST?

I
s feminism an outdated label?

In the last few years, the word
feminism
has become a very loaded term.

Some young women and even some celebrities have come out to declare that they are not feminists because feminism is divisive and “militant.” Others say, well, “I am a humanist,” because it seems “less threatening” and “more inclusive.” Still others proudly proclaim from the global podium or from the homes they've decided to go back to after quitting their jobs to be full-time moms, “I am a feminist! Pay attention!”

The funny thing is that by claiming their own power and expressing their opinions, even those women who claim they are not feminists are behaving like they are. They are all women who are making their own place in the world. They are not waiting for an invitation, or hoping for equality. They aren't setting the table. They are pulling up a chair and sitting at whatever table they want.

For me, calling someone a feminist is one of the highest compliments I can pay a woman, or a man, for that matter. It's a label I give myself and I wholeheartedly accept others giving it to me.

A feminist is a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of men and women. As Hillary Clinton said at the 1995 Beijing women's rights conference, “Women's rights are human rights.”

Period. End of story.

But here's the beginning of my experiences with feminism. . . .

I wanted to play soccer in grade school. But my suburban private Catholic school did not have a girls' team. My dad, God bless him with his bad back and addictions, was the coach of my older brother's soccer team. One day when I asked him, “How come the girls don't have a team?” he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Beats the hell out of me. Just come practice with us.”

By the end of the week all hell had broken loose. The priests at our church were ready to excommunicate my dad and me. And most of the fathers of the boys on the team were secretly planning to take us down, too. “There is no place for a girl in boys' sports!” they fumed. If they had been brave enough to say this to my dad's face, he would've probably beaten them all up. I'm sure my mom had something to do with keeping the priests safe from him.

Looking back on this, I now see my dad was a feminist in his way. But I didn't know it then because I had never even heard the word.

Gloria Steinem helped me understand what the word
feminist
meant. She helped everyone understand that feminism wasn't just a fad or a recent development. It's a natural part of the quest for human rights that began well before the 1960s and 1970s. As she and others explain, it started in the early 1800s in Europe when women (and some forward-thinking men) began fighting for equal property rights and the right to vote. That movement has been rolling forward ever since, though the path and the goals have changed a million ways over the years.

The first feminists I ever knew were my great-grandmother and my mom. They certainly didn't know they were feminists.

How could they? They were seemingly ordinary women of their time. But they were living extraordinary lives: raising their families on very little, securing an education despite constant resistance, and working when it was not something a woman usually did.

Babci, which is what we called my great-grandmother, never knew that she was a feminist. And Mom certainly didn't know it. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and many others shined a light on how extraordinary people like Babci and Mom really were.

Babci was born in a steel town outside of Philly to immigrant parents from Poland. She had an eighth grade education and married a Polish cobbler from her neighborhood when she was 17. By the time she was 27, she had four kids and a dead husband. They say he died of “consumption,” which might have been a cover story for the real reason—that he was a drunk. One of those kids was my mother's father, PopPop Urban.

Babci was left dirt poor. Being dirt poor is exactly what it sounds like. She lived in a tiny house that had dirt floors with my grandfather and his siblings. Babci could not even afford a proper floor.

Babci's job had always been to raise her family. But now she had to go find a paying job. At the time, places like sewing mills and knitting mills were generally populated with female workers sewing uniforms for the men in World War II. The conditions were mostly deplorable, and the women made much less money than any man in the same plant. It was hard work, but Babci knew the stakes were high. Without a job, she would not be able to support her family and her kids would be taken away or worse, starve to death.

Outside of the mill, Babci was known as an excellent seamstress. Word spread of her skills, and soon Polish families from the neighborhood brought everything from their ripped dungarees to their torn slips for her to mend. She never would have understood why people wear ripped jeans today.

But more than just mending clothes, Babci became known for her skill at making old, worn clothing appear beautiful again. She was soon in high demand, particularly by the more well-to-do wives in town who wanted their old-fashioned dresses turned into the more modern looks.

Within a few years, her family went from living in a tiny house with dirt floors to a much larger house with cement floors, indoor plumbing, and a claw-foot tub, in a nicer town about 10 miles away. Babci remarried but soon got divorced, something that wasn't heard of in her day. She raised those four kids on her own, funded by her “sewing start-up.” I think any venture capitalist today would be thrilled to invest in someone with talent and a work ethic like hers.

As poor as she was for most of her life, Babci taught us many lessons about how to live well. There were two in particular that she constantly reinforced. I have never forgotten them.