Ten years ago, in Washington, D.C., I stopped taking my medication. I knew the consequences. Eighteen months earlier, a psychiatrist in Chicago had told me that even if I stopped seeing him, I could not stop swallowing these pills. If I did, I would begin to imagine poisons, assassins, hidden cameras, and demons again; I would become erratic, unpleasant, unstable, even dangerous. I could hear that doctor, like an embodied superego who had stalked me from the Midwest to the coast, reminding me that I’d nearly stabbed my roommate in his sleep last time. Did I want to find myself in the kitchen of my new apartment with a knife again? I had a job now, an editorial position at a real news organization. Did I want to lose my job again, having lost so many other jobs? Did I want to lose my mind?
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