By Laura Delano at Brownstone dot org.

[This is chapter one from Laura Delano's Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, 2025). Brownstone Institute is grateful for permission to reprint.]

It happened in front of the mirror as I brushed my teeth one Thursday evening. The year was 1996, and I was thirteen. Outside, the trees were thick and verdant, still weeks away from morphing into the polychromatic splendor of fall. Eighth grade had just begun, which meant goodbye to summer sports camps, mornings at the country club pool, beach days under the Maine sun.

I was now faced with the upcoming season of national squash tournaments, schoolwork, and my new responsibilities as incoming middle school president, which included standing with our headmistress each Friday morning to lead assembly. My bones buzzed with this unfamiliar social power I possessed: elected leader, role model, student of character. I wasn't sure which feeling to trust in my gut, the thrill or the terror.

There I stood at the sink: thin arms, broad shoulders, lean, muscular legs covered with picked scabs and their purple consequences. My dirty-blond hair, chopped close to my chin, was flattened on my head from spending the evening in a baseball hat. I was aswim in my favorite T-shirt, the one that said "Hockey Is Life: The Rest Is Just Details." Over my underwear, I wore my favorite pair of boys' polka-dot boxer shorts.

What happened next as I watched myself in the mirror that night still feels close enough to describe like it's happening now: The edges of my vision start to blur. My arms become gangly foreign objects that seem to have sealed themselves to my shoulder sockets. My eyes lock straight ahead against my will, taking me down a narrowing pastel tunnel that morphs to gray and then black. All that's left is my visage in the glass.

I stare, leaning closer over the sink, riveted by the sight of my face, my eyes. This face, these eyes. That girl's face and her eyes. A stranger now in front of me, someone I don't recognize.

Who is she?

For a brief moment, I'm curious.

And then: terror grabs my ankles, shooting up my legs, through my gut, up the sides of my throat to the back of my skull. I disintegrate into a million pieces, floating, fuzzy, disembodied in space, feet gone, nothing locking me to the earth, no legs, no arms, no belly, nothing: I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.

There is only the tunnel through the dark to this stranger. Her brow is furrowed, her mouth agape, those blue eyes wide open with black bullets at their centers.

Why is she staring at me? I blink to see if this unfamiliar girl will go away, but she doesn't.

Eventually I notice that when I move my hand, she moves hers. When I turn my chin to the left, to the right, she goes right, then left. Somehow, I'm not sure how, I can see that we're connected. I struggle to make sense of what this means, to differentiate what's real from what isn't: Okay, this glass is a mirror, this girl is my reflection, she is me, I am her. But something feels fundamentally different.

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? The question loops on repeat until the words become meaningless sounds.

I am no longer the girl who loved to play board games against herself, or the one who created stacks of index cards on which she'd write facts about her favorite animals that she'd obsessively study until memorized. The one who swelled with pride each time she beat a boy on the tennis court, and who trained several times a week to get herself a top ten national squash ranking.

The girl who looked forward to her afternoon ritual of grabbing a hunk of Cheddar cheese and a hard pretzel after practice before sitting down to do homework while listening to Billy Joel. I had no idea who that girl was anymore. All I knew was that she was someone else.

I left the bathroom in a daze, passing walls decorated with framed Christmas card photos of my two younger sisters and me in color coordination; a black-and-whi...