A Lotus Grows in the Mud (14 page)

“No! Something’s wrong,” I say, pushing him away. Sliding off the couch and onto the floor, I am breathless. “What’s in this? Is this just pot? I don’t feel so good.”

The music is inside me now, thumping away deep in my chest cavity, making my heart jump restlessly. I close my eyes and feel as if I am float
ing in black space, completely alone, with no reality to hold on to, where no one knows or understands me.

My friend kneels on the floor next to me. “What are you feeling?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I cry. “I don’t know what I’m feeling.” My entire body starts to shake uncontrollably. I can’t get a grip. My heart is thumping in my throat; the room is spinning; the noise is deafening. I feel sick to my stomach.

He starts to stroke my hair, to caress my arm, my breast.

“No, no! Don’t touch me! I don’t feel well. There’s something wrong; there’s something very wrong.” I crawl across the floor to the bathroom and throw my guts up. My friend just sits there watching me, in his own drug-induced style.

I want him to do something, to save me. I want him to tell me what’s wrong with me. I lie back on the floor and images of my mother and my father flash before me. I see Mom’s face, and then Dad’s. What is this? Is this guilt because I’m doing something wrong? What is happening? I don’t know.

I open my eyes and I can still see them. Then I begin to hallucinate big-time, my parents’ faces swirling and melding into shafts of color, of yellows and blues so bright they hurt my eyes. I am no longer in my body. I am no longer somewhere safe. I am somewhere else, somewhere strange and frightening and lonely that scares me half to death.

Where have I gone? Where is Goldie? The happy girl? The joyful creature who loves to laugh and everyone thinks is so silly? Who embraces life with no questions? Who thinks she has all the answers? No one can answer me. No one can help me.

Shivering uncontrollably from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, I crawl to the bed. I’m shaking so violently that my teeth chatter. It is as if it’s thirty degrees below zero.

I watch my friend walk across the moonlit bedroom and sit down in a chair next to my bed. I squeeze his hand and tell him again, “There’s something terribly wrong with me.”

“What do you want me to do?” he says, wincing under the grip of my fingers. “I don’t know what to do.”

His admission only makes me feel worse, for I was sure he would. Seeing my eyes darting right and left around the room, he takes me by the shoulders and speaks into my face.

“Tell me what you’re seeing, Goldie. Talk to me!”

“It’s—like—there—are—no—walls—around—me,” I tell him, my throat closing as I hyperventilate. “I can’t hold on to anything anymore.”

He stands up for a moment and steps away from the bed with a look of horror.

“Please don’t leave me, please don’t go,” I tell him. “I can’t be alone tonight.”

My friend holds me in his arms and strokes my hair as I lie there crying, more afraid than I have ever been in my entire life. Every cell in my body feels poisoned, and my body shakes uncontrollably all night long. My eyes never close—they dare not—and despite the minutes ticking away into hours, I sense no improvement or respite. The night is relentlessly, miserably without end.

I stare at the window, waiting for the dawn, willing it to come. When it eventually arrives, its cold gray light pushing through the windows, I am horrified to find that I don’t feel any better. That scares me even more.

“I’m sick,” I whisper hoarsely to my friend as he stirs from his awkward slumber. “I’m sick and I’m scared. I need a doctor.”

Smoking that one joint triggered something in me psychologically that took me to the brink of a deep abyss. Thus began one of the scariest periods of my life. A time that still makes me shiver to think about it.

Every morning I had to force myself to get out of bed, take a shower, get dressed and go to work. Arriving at the studio each day, I put on a face and an appropriately upbeat voice and did exactly as I was told. Between takes, I hurried to my dressing room, where I lay in a nauseated faint, holding on to the sofa with both hands, afraid of falling off. No one knew what I was going through, and no one guessed. Until I eventually found my doctor, a man who would begin to lead me through the untapped passages of my mind, I was alone and scared in the big wide world called Hollywood.

I
t has always been my primary goal to be as happy as I can be. Like most of us, I believed that fame and fortune would make that elusive cocktail of happiness, giving me the elixir I sought. But I have learned that success does not always translate into personal happiness. Fame and fortune do not automatically grant you joy or even inner contentment. Some of the unhappiest people I know are some of the most successful.

I think I had to become successful to understand what success really means. I was supposed to be happy about it, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt bereaved—mourning the life I wanted, the life I had striven for—that of a chorus girl. Having more money than I knew what to do with, having more opportunities, a new apartment, a new car—all these things brought me down instead of lifting me up. It was such a shock to feel so much guilt about my success.

Success isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes we put too much emphasis on the things that appear to be the outward signs of success. The real success is how you handle your success. How generous you are with it. I believe that success only enhances who you are. It confronts you with the truth about yourself. People who are nasty become nastier. People who are happy become happier. People who are mean hoard their money and live in fear for the rest of their lives that they will lose it. People who are generous use their gifts to help people and try to make the world a better place.

My father always said, “Expectation is greater than realization,” and he was right. Success is something worth striving for, but be careful what you wish for. It may not be all that you expect it to be.

“L
ie down, Goldie, and tell me what you’re feeling.”

My analyst’s voice mellows me, and I breathe a deep sigh of relief. I have found my doctor.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I tell him, lying on his soft leather couch. “I am so scared, and there is so much going on in my life. My whole life is changing, and I feel like my friends are changing around me, and my world just doesn’t look the same as it did. I’m always happy but…but now I’m not happy anymore. I really want to go home, I just want to go back to where I was before, because I’m scared…and yet I don’t know what in the world I’m scared of. And yet when I went home, that had all changed too, so now there’s nowhere I can go that feels safe anymore. I don’t know what to do…”

“Okay, now, Goldie, why don’t we slow everything down and start at the beginning?” he says, patting my arm. And so we do.

Having been given his number by a friend, I dialed it more than fifty times before I got through. Like an addict who needed a fix, I needed him to mend my head. When I finally spoke to him, he sounded to me like the voice of God.

Until I walked into his office in Century City, I was like an automaton, barely able to place one foot in front of the other. I’d had two full days on the set of
Good Morning World,
where, for the first time in my life, I had to force a smile. I could barely speak. I was still sleepwalking
through a living nightmare. Between each shot I ran to the bathroom to throw up.

Dr. Grearson is my ticket out of this kind of hell. When I set eyes on his open, smiling, wonderful face for the first time, I know I’ve found the right man. I am so relieved to finally have someone I can talk to, some professional who can try to figure out what is wrong with me.

“Now, Goldie, tell me all your thoughts as they come into your head. It’s called ‘free association.’ Don’t be afraid, and just relax.”

With his help, I have just enrolled in the University of Goldie Hawn, the best college I ever attended. Gently, he leads me on the long journey down into myself. Tenderly, he teaches me about anger and fear. Tactfully, he makes me accept and understand my uncertainty about stretching the umbilical cord to leave all that I’ve ever known. Under his close guidance, I major in my own psyche, taking his enlightening tutorials as often as four times a week. I live for every session. I become his most devoted student.

Day after day in those early months of my time on
Good Morning World,
I turn up for work, do what I have to do and lie down in my dressing room in between takes. Anxiety attacks, depression and overwhelming nausea are my constant companions. Maintaining the cover that I am feeling happier than I am is a hundred times harder than the acting I had to do before; so is trying to be funny when I am going through the most devastating period of my life to date.

I can’t remain in the apartment where I first felt I was losing my mind, so I move to a different one, a place that isn’t so isolated, an apartment block built around a swimming pool where I can look out the big picture window and see people, night and day.

Despite dozens of offers to go to parties or out to clubs and restaurants, I become a recluse. At the end of my working day, I hurry home and cloister myself away in my big blue fuzzy chair, drinking tea or trying to read
The Art of Loving
by Erich Fromm. It is the only thing that brings me peace.

Severed from the world, I find that my only other trips out are to Dr. Grearson to spend an hour or so lying on his couch. Even with his almost
daily sessions blunting the edge of my pain, I suffer anxiety attacks at all times of the day and night, when I least expect them. I lose my appetite, and my weight drops below ninety pounds.

“Tell me about your father,” Dr. Grearson asks softly, and I think of Daddy with his glide-step and his hee-haw laugh. “And your mother.” I can see my mom in her pointy heels and pencil skirt. “Tell me everything.”

T
his episode was probably one of the most important of my life. It presented me with a pure and simple opportunity for growth. These events forced me to go inside myself and examine what was wrong. My analyst provided me with the help I needed to do that.

I’m not saying that a psychologist is always the answer; I’m not married to psychology. It could be a faith, Buddhism, a wise man, a friend. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but it is very important to understand the workings of your own mind and to unlock your own truth fearlessly.

I have come to believe that the decade between the ages of twenty and thirty is the most difficult of our lives. We individuate from our parents, and questions arise like, Who am I? What am I going to be? We don’t know where we’re going, or if we’ll be successful when we get there. But before we even address those questions, we should take the time to find out who we really are. What do we believe? And how do our relationships inform what we believe? Because if we don’t figure out who we are in our twenties, the question is going to hit us hard later. We can’t sail through life’s difficult passages until we have first dealt with the child in us, the place in us where we feel like being young will just take care of everything, because it doesn’t.

With Dr. Grearson’s help, I was able to carefully peel away the layers of my own being and examine what was underneath. I worked harder at my therapy than almost anything else. I became intimate with my fears and my insecurities and my lack of self-esteem, and I was able to dissect these deficits and see what they were made up of, and how much of it stemmed from my mother’s control issues and my father’s physical aloofness. Despite regular anxiety attacks, agoraphobia and the frequent need to go to the bathroom to heave, I persisted.

Only when I really started examining my life and my relationships honestly, without painting them rosy pink, did I truly begin to understand. My self-image was changing; the image others had of me was changing; my relationship to my parents was changing. Finally, I was able to forgive and come to love fully, deeply and honestly.

I remember one day in my analysis when I was crying and crying because I realized that however much I loved my father, however much I cherished his free spirit, he was a man who couldn’t nurture others. He couldn’t nurture my mother; he couldn’t nurture me. I was the one who took everything from my father; I took what I needed at any cost.

As I was lying on my back on the couch and crying about Daddy, I suddenly realized that I was playing with my toes just as I did when I was in the crib. I could suddenly remember everything about that perfect yellow day when I was a tiny baby. I could remember the warm water and the baby oil and the powder and my mother’s love, and I realized that I could go back there whenever I wanted and feel safe. It was such a wonderful feeling.

Dr. Grearson also helped me deal with my success. He helped me understand that the adoration or unkind criticism wasn’t mine to own. That it was all about how other people perceived me to be, not how I really was. I needed to take no responsibility other than just being a Rorschach test, an inkblot that others interpreted whichever way they needed to.

The key is to learn to respect and honor the complications of other people’s lives. It allows me to not identify personally with others’ perceptions, or to become wrapped up in my own defenses against them. If someone tells me “I love you,” it should carry no more weight than if they say “I hate you.” I give them back their joy; I give them back their anger. My truth is detached from theirs.

Consequently, I became infinitely more self-aware, more enlightened and more connected with my own mind. I was able to see that my parents’ relationship wasn’t perfect; I was able to forgive them for the things that they couldn’t do, things that people never do in a lifetime. I was able to redirect the music of my brain and take a look at the beauty of my life instead of its ugliness.

The joy of all this was that I started so young. I was just twenty-one, such a malleable age, with my childhood still so fresh for psychological excavation. Digging around in the mud of my psyche was the most important thing I could ever have done. It helped me be a better mother ultimately, a better mate; it helped me become tolerant in the face of intolerance. It helped me become, in the long run, more balanced in my failure as well as my success.

It took dedication, and great tenacity, and it would be nine long years before I graduated from my own personal college, but, when I did, I felt safe in my own arms.

I remember the day I went in to see Dr. Grearson not realizing it was to be our last session. He didn’t ask me to lie down. Instead, he took my hand, sat me on the couch and said, “Goldie, I am so proud of you. There is nothing else I can do to help you. You are on your way. You don’t need me anymore.”

Looking up at him, I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “But…”

“No buts!” he interrupted, shaking his head at me. “It is time for you to fly.”