After graduating, she hitched her way to the West Coast, where she wound up playing guitar and mandolin in a street band. At one point she suffered a bad trip on LSD, and ended up high for three days. Wandering around in a paranoid daze, the police attempted to stop her for questioning. She panicked and ran. After a harried chase, she was taken to a mental hospital and subdued with Thorazine. A few days later her father arrived and took her home to Dallas.

From there she headed to Austin, where an old friend let her sleep in his bookstore. The shop hosted a songwriter’s group, and Michelle began to participate. During her stay she experienced an LSD flashback, and, unaware of what was happening, confused the hallucinations with a spiritual vision in which she envisioned herself as a warrior in the midst of battle. Concerned friends called her father, but this time he wasn’t interested in helping out. After a short stay with her mother, it was decided she would be committed to the psychiatric ward of Dallas’ Baylor Hospital; the same hospital she was born in. The decision would result in a mother/daughter estrangement that would take decades to heal.

Throughout the stay she was heavily medicated, at times unable to understand where she was or why she was even there. Under the guise of occupational therapy, patients were instructed in such basic tasks as weaving yarn around Popsicle sticks and gluing beads on paper.

At a hearing to determine whether she should remain hospitalized long term, doctors diagnosed her as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. When a psychiatrist commented that she was “under the influence of literature,” she readily agreed with the assessment. “I had just recently graduated from University, where my major was Oral Interpretation of Literature.” The comment smacked of anti-intellectualism; she was reading the classics, not escapist or fantasy-based stories.