Zak Sandler '04

Georgetown Days, Spring 2024

For Zak Sandler ʼ04, songwriting turned out to be a form of therapy in 2015 when he created the musical Something About Me, a fictional version of his experience with being bipolar, a mental condition that surfaced during his undergraduate college years.

In its earliest iteration, the show was performed only for family and friends. It has since evolved into an autobiographical play that has been repeatedly reworked and renamed to chronicle how the three manic episodes of Zak’s life have reshaped his relationship with himself and others. The most recent version of the musical, Inside My Head, has been performed in various venues–from the Kennedy Center to National Alliance on Mental Illness conventions to GDS.

“The students were captivated,” said HS history teacher Sue Ikenberry, who saw Zak perform his play at the School’s Mental Health Teach-In Day in January 2024. “I think knowing about the experiences, about these symptoms, will help them. … Zak offered a good narrative about how he came to terms with his condition over time. It’s a hopeful message.”

In addition to writing musicals, Zak is a life coach and a mental health advocate who embraces emotional transparency by speaking openly about his bipolar experiences. Previously, he worked as a pianist on Broadway for several productions, including Mean Girls, Wicked, Motown, and The Color Purple. 

“At some level, I knew that if I told my story, it would put information into the world,” Zak said. “Sharing our own stories is a part of [activism]. And so that's one thing that I'm doing with this show, and I’m presenting it in an honest, vulnerable way.”

“Trapped in My Body. Trapped in My Circumstances.”

Zak was a junior and a promising music student at Yale University in 2006 when he suddenly started feeling hopeless and alone even though he was surrounded by friends. “Trapped in My Body. Trapped in My Circumstances,” Zak wrote in a lyric describing his despair at the time.

Then came a burst of energy that generated what he calls a “39-page ideological thought salad” about God and religion and mankind’s shared truths and dreams–all of it typed furiously on his laptop during three sleepless nights. His mother (a social worker) and father (a psychiatrist) grew alarmed when they received a 4 a.m. call from their son during one of his writing frenzies. They hopped in the car to make the trip from DC to New Haven.

“When my parents arrive, they bring me to a school psychiatrist,” Zak wrote, capturing in song and narrative what happened next. “He asks me a few questions, then whispers with my parents. He turns to me and says: ‘Mr. Sandler, we’re sending you to the hospital.’”

Until then, Zak had not suspected that he was bipolar, though he now realizes that he had classic symptoms. The condition is characterized by dramatic mood swings, including mania (extreme highs) and depression (extreme lows), according to the Mayo Clinic. The mania that Zak experienced led to hospitalization and paranoid delusions. Alone at night in his hospital bed, he heard a voice. “If you fall asleep before sunrise,” it said, “you will die.”

Nine years passed, and then it happened again. Another manic episode that led to another hospitalization. “At that point, I accepted what was happening with me,” Zak said. “I didn't go out telling a lot of people, but I also didn't hide it.” Later that year, he decided to write about his experience, which led to the first version of the play. 

“I’m Cloudy”

Medications probably saved Zak’s life, but finding the right ones took trial and error. 

At times, the drugs he was prescribed kept him on an even keel but zapped his creativity. As Zak puts it in his play, one medication could make his head “cloudy … can’t create or write a song” until a new medication makes his mind feel “like a clear blue sky, brain magic at its best.”

It was during one of those clear sky stretches that Zak secured a reliable personal assistant job in New York, and got accepted into an exclusive songwriters workshop. But then came the downturn, when his medications failed him. In 2019, he was hospitalized for his third manic episode, his most traumatic one.  

Against that backdrop, it may seem peculiar that a 2020 article in Psychiatric News described Inside My Head as a “lively, poignant, and funny” musical. The article points to Zak’s decision to create characters who personify his moods–Doug his depression, Marc his mania, and Patty his paranoia. Zak hoped that doing so would make his condition more accessible to a general audience.

“I wanted to convey what it is like to go through these experiences of depression and mania and maybe help people see that it is more relatable than they may think,” Zak told the publication.

“I don’t know everything” 

Today, Zak is working with his wife Lenna Jawdat (whom he married last year) to bring a new version of Inside My Head to Broadway. The play, called Polarized, returns to the original formula of making the lead character fictional but based on Zak’s real-life experience. 

During a TEDx event in Anchorage, Alaska last year, Zak talked about how he has reframed his thinking about his “mood condition” since his first manic episode more than a decade ago. Back then, he was ashamed of having “lost my mind,” he said, scared of losing it again, and terrified that if word of the incident got out, he would lose his friends, his position as music director of his a cappella group, and his shot at any decent jobs in the future.

“I had yet to learn that in the words of Ernest Hemingway, who himself was likely bipolar: ‘We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in,’” Zak told the audience. He said he no longer thinks of his condition as an “illness” but rather as part of him, even a “superpower.” 

Alexander Hamilton most likely experienced hypomania (a milder form of mania) that can fuel intense productivity and heightened creativity, which may explain how he managed to write 51 of the 85 Federalist papers in eight months, Zak told the crowd. Singer Demi Lovato, he added, credited her ability to write up to seven songs in one night to her hypomania.

Basically, Zak figured out that he doesn’t have it all figured out, and that’s okay. As he revealed in one lyric: “When you know you don't know everything, you know more than before.”