In her debut memoir I’ll Try Anything Twice: Misadventures of a Self-Medicated Life, San Francisco-based journalist Carly Schwartz gives an honest, often humorous and vulnerable account of her battle with suicidal depression and addiction, and the search for healing, self-love and belonging that took her through Mexico City and the jungles of Panama.
Schwartz began struggling with depression as a teenager. Growing up, she found community through summer camp and an all-girls boarding school, but inside, she felt deeply alone.
“I felt like the world was happening around me, and I was just stuck in my own head,” she said during a recent interview.
Coming of age in competitive academic environments, Schwartz was always an overachiever. Despite graduating in the top 10 in her high school class and getting accepted to Northwestern University, none of her achievements fulfilled her.
As a freshman in college, Schwartz joined a sorority and found a friend group. “But the hateful voice in my head only grew louder, and with unrestricted access to cheap alcohol for the first time, I learned I could temporarily drown it out by partying,” she wrote.
One afternoon, she “had that familiar realization that it was within my own authority to put an end to my misery.” Schwartz attempted suicide, but thankfully, her roommates found her in time. After the gravity of what she had done sunk in, conquering her depression became her purpose. She got a new psychiatrist and began taking antidepressants.
“Along the way, I developed an equally religious marijuana practice,” Schwartz wrote, “and the combination of SSRIs, an increasingly demanding career, the steady haze of pot smoke, and a distracting social life served as a sizable buffer between my depression and my ability to move through the world.”
From the outside, Schwartz’s life looked picture-perfect at 30—she was an editor at HuffPost, had a degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and had plenty of friends. But inside, she still felt empty.
She decided to “Eat, Pray, Love” and quit her job. She moved to Mexico City, where she enrolled in a microfinance fellowship, helping local small business owners.
During the fellowship, Schwartz took a trip back to the U.S. and met a man she calls Coco Cunningham in the book. That is not his real name. (According to the disclaimer at the beginning of the book, Schwartz changed the names and identifying details of certain individuals and organizations to protect their identity.) Cunningham, Schwartz wrote, was the charismatic son of a real estate developer who was building a sustainable modern town in the jungle in Panama, prototyping it with a school that functioned like a research institute.
Schwartz was enthralled with Cunningham. As they parted ways, he gave her his card. A few months later, with her fellowship drawing to a close and no clear next move, she reached out to Cunningham, and he invited her to Panama to check out his jungle town.
“I booked a one-way ticket to Panama and waited to see what would happen,” Schwartz wrote.
According to Schwartz’s account, everything was blissful and serene at the school, and on her fourth day, Cunningham told her he wanted her to build a media empire and document the school’s happenings. She accepted.
For the first few months, Schwartz recounts feeling inspired. “Everything I looked at, every conversation I had, sparked new ideas for my burgeoning media empire. The possibilities of what I could create felt limitless,” she wrote.
However, she details myriad issues that burst the utopic illusion. Cunnigham had an explosive temper. The conditions were unpleasant—including moldy food, dirty toilets and rampant cocaine use. Then the entire staff quit, fed up with Cunningham’s abuse.
“Things got bad really quickly,” she told the RN&R. “It was all smoke and mirrors.”
As conditions worsened, so did Schwartz’s mental health. She said she nearly committed suicide, then came to the difficult realization that she needed to leave.
“All of the glaring red flags were there from the beginning, but I did not want to see any of that,” she said. “You see what you want to see; your brain kind of distracts you. Add on to that a really charismatic and manipulative guy … who constantly builds you up and tells you, ‘You’re a media mogul.’ ‘You’re a genius.’ That, in combination with waking up next to a turquoise river in the jungle, was paradise—until it was monsoon season, and there were 80 of us with fire-ant bites all over our bodies and nothing to eat.”
“I was in denial because, I didn’t want to believe that the one thing that made me feel better in the moment was the thing that was keeping me from truly getting well.”
Carly Schwartz
Eventually, in San Francisco, she got a job at a tech company, and again things seemed fine from the outside, but she was still deeply suffering. She tried seemingly every depression treatment: ketamine therapy, different medications, various psychological professionals, outpatient programs and transcranial magnetic stimulation. Nothing worked. Finally, she came to terms with the fact that she needed to go to rehab.
“I was in denial because, I didn’t want to believe that the one thing that made me feel better in the moment was the thing that was keeping me from truly getting well,” Schwartz said, “because if I give that up then I’m just stuck with myself, and I hate myself.”
In rehab, she learned how to sit with discomfort and find happy moments without substances. Most importantly, she learned how to love herself.
“True community happens when you start by being in community with yourself and find a sense of belonging within yourself,” she said. “In the recovery world, I met people who didn’t share the same values as me or do the same things as me, but had the same struggles as me and weren’t afraid to talk about the darkest sides of themselves. (It) made me feel so much less alone.”
Carly Schwartz is slated to appear in conversation with Reno-based writer Katie Bacon at 6 p.m., Tuesday, April 21, at The Radical Cat, at 1500 S. Virginia St., in Reno, as part of the launch of her new memoir, I’ll Try Anything Twice: Misadventures of a Self-Medicated Life. For more details, go to theradicalcat.square.site/events.