How A Manic Episode Showed One Woman The Way Forward

Learn more about Stacy Blemaster and her book “To Be Or Not To Be: Shedding An As If Personality” here.

Playing A Role

From a young age Stacy Blemaster felt most at home when she was acting in a play.

STACY: I love being up on stage because that was a time when I felt like I knew my identity because I had a character to play. I felt like I was that character and it was very relieving to just have a character.

LAUREL: And how old were you when you finally felt like you were authentically Stacy? 

STACY: Probably 50 years old. 

LAUREL: Five zero. 

STACY: Yeah.

It took Stacy decades to fully accept herself just as she is. This is a story about how she got there. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Being A Goldberg

Stacy Blemaster grew up a Goldberg. And the Goldberg family was well known in Cleveland.

My family had generational secrets inauthenticity. I think it started with my grandparents who came over from Poland. My grandfather had a $200 million building business in real estate, and left trust funds to his kids and all the grandkids. We had the fanciest cars and the fanciest houses, just the Jewish community on the East side. And the circles that I ran in and were just very status oriented. We had donated buildings, we had a wing in the Cleveland Clinic. Our name on the temple. In a way we were like royalty. I would walk into a restaurant and someone would say, are you a Goldberg?

Stacy says with that status came the pressure to look and act a certain way.

Everything was very image oriented. People always felt pressure to be perfect and say everything was perfect and talk only about the quote unquote positive things in their life…  I seem like I had it all together and I was pretty and most popular and one of the best students.

But Stacy felt her outsides didn’t match her insides.

And I knew that it was very different internally for me, but how I coped was just kind of putting in the back of my mind kind of in a vault, all the insecurities that I had, the negative emotions and sort of pretended that they didn't exist. 

That’s where acting came in. The only break she got was on stage when she could immerse herself in a role, take on a different identity and become someone else.

College Trip

After high school graduation she went to Brown University, where diversity and individualism were celebrated.

STACY: The only way I really knew myself was being the best and being the leader and being really popular and having a group of friends that all followed me. And nobody did any of that in college. So I completely fell apart because everybody seemed to know who they were. 

LAUREL: And you were trying to be what you thought everybody wanted you to be. STACY: And there was no way to tell at Brown.

She fell into a serious depression.

By second semester, my freshman year, I couldn't get out of bed. I was really struggling academically in some of my classes.

She went to see a psychologist who asked her about her childhood.

My mom's face pops into my head, a monster face. She always told me I was a really bad person and she was going to leave and never come back. She would scream and yell and she looked like a monster and I was very scared of her. And when she would get mad at me, I remember feeling like I had to freeze. If I even moved a little finger or had a little squirm on my face or something, she would say I was disrespecting her and I feared I thought she was going to kill me absolutely petrifying. And my dad was very weak and he was verbally and emotionally abused by her too. So he couldn't stand up for me, even though I felt like he had love for me and I had love for him. And right then I knew that something was horribly wrong. That somehow it was like it flashed before my eyes that I had been lying to myself my whole life. It was like I knew my life was a sham. There was a whole story I wasn’t recognizing about how I came to be.

The next four years of college she struggled. Nearing graduation she decided to apply to graduate programs in theater.

I was doing my monologues for a teacher practicing and I really broke down and realized this is the source of my problems, this acting. And I withdrew my applications and then I got really, really depressed and knew I would completely fail and drown and have no direction if I graduated.

Psychiatric Hospital

She was living alone in Providence, Rhode Island, when she hit a low point in her life.

I was completely broken down. I remember almost like hallucinating kind of like blood was coming from the ceiling. I was not even in reality. I remember leaving the pot boiling and I almost started a fire. I had a friend who had gone to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. And that put that on my radar and I thought, maybe this is what I need to do.

With her aunt and grandfather’s help she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Kansas. 

I was assigned a psychiatrist that was sort of known to be a good psychiatrist for people that had borderline issues that were had a very disrupted life as an infant attaching to their mother. And I basically regressed into like an infant and she remothered me.

A psychiatrist there diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder and convinced her she needed to be there. So her grandfather paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep her hospitalized for a year and a half until finally her parents came. 

They said, ‘your daughter is never going to survive outside of a hospital. She's not even going to survive the plane ride to Florida. And my dad somehow had this intuition. said, do you even know what my daughter looks like?

The Manic Episode That Changed Everything

At 22 Stacy went to live in a halfway house in Florida.

I had a manic episode, which I thought was an intensely spiritual peak experience where I felt like I finally understood what life was about. There was this intense love and just a vision into the intricacies of the universe where I was standing back and realized everything was perfectly orchestrated…that there was some metaphysical spiritual world out there other bigger encompassing the smaller world that I was in that was miserable and suffering that there was something beautiful out there that I got to tap into that made that gave me the momentum to get better and live my life and guide me. 

It changed the way Stacy thought about the world.

At this point she went to a new clinic where they diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. Her father called someone he knew at the National Institute of Mental Health, who told him once the bipolar was treated, the borderline traits would disappear. And when Stacy was put on the proper medicine that’s exactly what happened.

It was around this time that she started seeing a new psychiatrist Cesar Benarroche who reaffirmed the bipolar diagnosis and adjusted her meds as they discovered the right chemistry. She’d been to many doctors but Dr. Benarroche was different. 

At one point when she was struggling he even gave her his pager number.

STACY: I was able to call over every little thing. I could not have done it without him…I felt like he could read my mind and I had to be honest with him. 22:40  I saw him three days a week and I completely trusted this man. And I felt total love from him and commitment. Like he was as committed to me as I was to him. And because of that shared commitment, I think we were able to make a miracle happen that I was able to survive in the outside world and thrive like I am today.

LAUREL: Your doctor gave you his pager number. What kinds of things would you call him with? 

STACY:  When I first moved in, I remember I had everything in boxes and I was completely overwhelmed. I didn't know where to start. And he said, start one room at a time.

LAUREL: What was the most helpful thing that he did for you?

STACY: Just being available. I mean, that's very unusual. 

LAUREL: And consistent.

STACY: Consistent and available. He had good boundaries and he passed away… I've looked at the notes people left online and he did the same thing for them. One woman says ‘he showed up in his slippers one night in the middle of the night.’ 

LAUREL: My God. That's amazing. 

STACY: Isn't it? 

LAUREL: So… sorry, that's just really... 

STACY: I feel the same way. 

She saw Dr. Benarroche for a year and a half. 

At 30 she married a man who initially she was drawn to because he made a lot of the decisions, which Stacy welcomed. She says she depended on his intelligence and strength because she was lacking in these things at the time. Together they had three children. 

He was controlling. I felt like I could defer to him. He was like a rock. He was not emotional. And he basically took care of me.

In her 40s Stacy’s mood swings mellowed. She started going to Emotions Anonymous meetings. The 12 step program gave her support and community that helped her believe in herself. And the more she did the less dependent she felt on her husband.

It was kind of his way or the highway. And I liked that because I was still very insecure. And then as I got well in therapy and Emotions Anonymous and became more independent, the relationship stopped working. All of sudden realizing that a lot of the thoughts and ideas and choices I would make were okay, that my higher power, I think somehow helped me feel intuitively that my choices were okay.

So Stacy divorced him and eventually found a partner who accepted her for who she is.

Today Stacy has her master’s in psychology and is a trained counselor. She became committed to sharing her story in the hopes it would help others. And last year she published “To Be Or Not To Be: Shedding An As-If Personality.”

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.