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