Detour

Part 1

It all started the day after I had been accepted for early admission to Columbia College.

December 19, 1993.

I was seventeen years old.

I had left my family at home in Providence, Rhode Island, and was attending my senior year of high school abroad at an international school in Paris. I was having a great time, living with friends of my parents, Edgar and Linda Phillips.

Wait.

I don't remember everything that happened.

Some memories I've forgotten over time.

Some events I blocked out as soon as they happened.

And I suppose it didn't start on that exact day,

that it started in high school,

or before,

much before maybe,

at birth,

or pre-birth; it started with my grandfather, who had this illness, or with the relative of his who passed it along to him.

Wait. Stop.

What started the day after I found out I was accepted to college was an episode so horrific that it would become impossible for me to deny that I had a mental illness for the rest of my life.

Though I had always known that something was wrong with me, what started that day was evidence, conc ... read full excerpt from Detour ebook