Coming of Age on Zoloft (4 page)

The bike fell to one side and I got off. Underneath the blue sky, I was dwarfed by oak trees and surrounded by orderly cottages on a nice suburban cul-de-sac. In the calm of the middle of a weekday, the surroundings seemed almost creepily indifferent, like the set of a horror movie. Not far off, the highway rushed softly. I felt a sensation of life speeding away from me on all sides. The world seemed so distant, so impossible to understand. I saw a pile of mulch, a scrum of bamboo, and clapboard siding. I knew the surroundings were friendly, but felt as out of place as something that had crash-landed on a strange planet. I held the unwieldy bulk of the bike in one hand, and wiped with the other at the tears that were sliding down my face. I tried to calm my breathing and, dizzy with shame, hobbled the bike away from the scene as gingerly as if I had fallen and skinned my knee.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER
I’d left, I quietly returned home. My mother was standing in the kitchen with her back to me, washing a sink full of dishes. “Oh!” she said cheerfully, turning around. “You’re back soon!”

Though there are few legitimate uses for this English word, I think it would be accurate to say that I wailed as I fell into her soapy arms. “What’s the matter?” she asked, fear spiking her voice up a few notes. She held me back at arm’s length, scanning my body for a visible wound.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sniffling and shaking, teary and confused. She looked me in the eye, and I flinched, as though her face were a flashlight exposing every hidden imperfection in me. I opened my mouth and blurted out the first thing that seemed true. “I just. Really. Don’t like myself right now.”

My mother waltz-marched me backward to the gray sectional sofa in the family room. As I remember, I spent most of the rest of the week on that sofa. The violently bad feelings subsided, leaving a residue of dullness and fear. I felt all right when I stayed in my nest, wrapped in afghans and watching TV, but I was terrified of what would happen to me when I had to return. It seemed as if all the strength and enthusiasm of the past nine weeks were gone, and I was right back to the worst of where I’d been over the summer, feeling unfit for the world and not up to the everyday tasks other people take in stride. These feelings seemed connected to Brendan, at one end, but they quickly spun off into something bigger, a dread without boundaries. I wondered what was happening to me. Was this the same malaise from the summer; had it been lurking for me all this time? Had my nine weeks of happiness at school been real, or were they the deviation, and this awful state my true baseline all along?

I wasn’t writing in my journal at the time, so I can’t consult it. Years later, though, I asked my parents what they remembered from my days on the gray sofa, and what they’d made of what was happening then.

My mother told me that she’d thought I was heartbroken. She said she knew how badly I had wanted to fall in love, that she’d watched me try and fail back in high school to reap what every song and movie and book for teenagers holds out as the pinnacle of a young life. She had been there when I was in tenth grade and a group of boys that I and another girl were close to had turned away as sharply and bafflingly as a school of fish, cutting us off completely. Maybe she even perceived that there might be, in this recent rejection, an echo of that one, which made it doubly painful. From what little I had told her about Brendan, it was easy for her to imagine that I had been disappointed and was taking it hard. And if there was something irrational and over-the-top about my mood that week—well, both she and many of her friends, she said, had breakdowns of one kind or another during college, and went on to lead normal lives. She hated to see me unhappy, but she thought I’d persevere. Sooner or later something good would happen, and it would bring me up with it.

My father took a different view, one that was rooted in his own experience. For most of my life, even before I was sure what the words meant, I had known that my father thought of himself as depressed, or depressive. The year I was eleven or twelve, he started taking an antidepressant, and I still remember the positive difference it made in him, and in the emotional climate of our whole household by extension. Long before the idea gained popular currency, my dad believed that he suffered from a genetically determined tendency to biochemical depression, and the fact that medication worked for him solidified his view that that was the case. And so, where my mother saw a case of teenage Sturm und Drang, my father saw biology asserting itself. He had worried a lot over the years about the possibility that he’d passed the depressive parts of his genetic code on to his daughters, and what was happening to me that year seemed to confirm his worst fears. When I asked him about it, he remembered that when he’d dropped me off at campus in August, I looked pale and wobbly. Nine weeks later, he’d seen me walk off an airplane with tears on my face. What was he supposed to think? These two visions made a deeper impression than the perky letters sent in between. He thought I probably needed medicine.

And what did I think? I felt close to my dad, but I’d never seriously considered the possibility that I might be depressed in the same way that he was. In high school I’d understood myself to experience mood swings—which went up as well as down, thank you very much—but that seemed like my sovereign teenage right. I didn’t know anyone my age who used antidepressants; medication seemed to belong to a world of grown-up feelings and choices that had nothing to do with me. And maybe that’s the way I wanted it. At some point in high school I had started to think of myself as a writer, an identity that meant to me then, among other things, that feelings were important. Emotion was the raw material from which everything else was going to proceed, I believed, and anything that might blunt or change mine would have seemed inimical to my vague but dearly-held ambitions. On the other hand, this new state I was in scared me deeply. College felt like a fast-moving river. There was no safe time-out place to crawl into, nothing comparable to the gray sofa at home. I felt like I had to be poised and under control at all times, and I was ready to consider just about any solution that presented itself.

Toward the end of the week, my parents and I sat in conference on the deep cushions of the sofa. I remember my mother telling me, half-jokingly, that I didn’t have to go back to college if I didn’t want to. If it was a gambit, it worked: even in my state, I could tell that nothing good would come of brooding on my parents’ couch forever. Instead, the two of them asked me to promise that when I returned, I would immediately make an appointment for myself at the school’s Health and Counseling Center. We agreed they’d get me the help I needed, whatever that turned out to be.

THE PLANE LANDED.
I caught a bus back to campus and flipped on the lights of my dorm room. The Pacific Northwest drizzle had begun; it would continue seemingly without end until May. My room didn’t look so homey or exciting anymore, but I was grateful to be able to hang out in Kate’s. Decorated with beeswax church candles and big pieces of fabric, and suffused with Kate’s comfortable and comforting presence, it was the closest thing on campus to an oasis.

During those first days back, I felt torn between wanting to maintain my dignity and a wish to tell someone what I’d been going through, to try to ask for a little extra patience or care. One night shortly after classes had begun, Kate and I walked across the soccer field at the back of the campus, on our way to the Plaid Pantry for study food: Cup O’ Noodles, Slim Jims, or a pint of Häagen-Dazs. Kate asked me how I was, and I chose that dark, soft moment to begin crying again. “Not that good,” I whispered. Saying the words made me feel destabilized. It was like dipping a hand beneath the surface of the fear that seemed to always be there, since just before the start of fall break, like an icy ocean that any casual stimulus—a song, a kind word, a harsh word, it hardly mattered—would plunge me down into, until I lost my breath among the floes.

“Oh darlin’,” said Kate, her Texas drawl the spirit of unfussy compassion. She put her arms around me. I can still see her small hands with their chipped cherry red nail polish. I swabbed at my eyes with the back of my sleeve, feeling silly but relieved—ashamed to be demanding this extra attention but wordlessly grateful for a loving friend.

THE HEALTH CENTER
at Reed College is a mossy cottage in an out-of-the-way spot near the center of campus. From the outside, it looks like a building where the heroine in a Brontë novel would live; it has that kind of weedy, wild charm. I had been inside once or twice already to stock up on the free generic medicines they gave out in single-dose paper packets: ibuprofen, aspirin, acetaminophen, cough drops, and the red nasal-decongestant pills that people took to stay awake while writing papers in these, the years before Adderall. I’d seen the free condoms and lube that rested in bins decorated cheerily with construction paper and yarn, as though enough kindly wishes on the part of the Health Center staff could make sex not just physically but emotionally safer too, and the weathered copies of
Prevention
and the Reed alumni magazine that sagged comfortably, like banana peels, on its waiting room tables.

I signed my name and student number into a ledger, and a nurse at the intake window asked me what I was here for. I crowded up, trying to create a seal between myself and the student in line behind me. “Counseling,” I whispered, as softly as I could, then took a seat and waited for what was next.

“Katherine?” The woman calling my name had dark hair and a serious face. She introduced herself as Sam and led me upstairs to a consultation room with a sloping ceiling that reminded me of my childhood bedroom. Sam closed behind us two doors hung in a single frame (“The rooms are soundproofed for privacy,” she explained) and gestured for me to take a seat in one of two overstuffed armchairs. She sat down in the other one, crossed her legs, balanced a pad of paper on her top thigh, and looked at me. I dug my fingertips into the plushy arms of the chair and looked right back at her.

“So,” Sam said. “What brings you here?”

I took a deep breath and let it out again. “Where should I start?”

“Start wherever feels natural,” she said.

“Okay.” My lip trembled, and then I began, floodgate-style. I told her about the summer, about worrying all the time, about coming to school and feeling better. I told her about the boy and the crush and the bike ride and falling apart and spending a week in a ball on the couch. I told her how a similar thing had happened when I was fourteen and tried to baby-sit for the first time, how I’d managed it then by not babysitting anymore, but it didn’t seem so easy just to avoid love and college, did it?!

I helped myself to one of Sam’s tissues while she wrote notes down on her little pad. As I watched her hand move across the paper I felt an odd mix of relief and humiliation.

Sam guided our conversation to more straightforward things. She asked if I’d been sleeping (yes, to excess); whether I’d been eating (to tell the truth, I didn’t have much of an appetite); whether I was getting my classwork done (sure, classwork was about the only thing I was getting done).

She asked me some questions that, even in my state, I could tell were meant to separate the truly crazy people from the merely, well, whatever I was. “Have you ever thought about harming yourself or others?”
No.
“Do you ever hear things that other people don’t hear?”
No!
“Do you ever feel like . . .” She paused, just for a beat, as though even she were slightly embarrassed by the question to come. “Do you ever feel like maybe just not wanting to live anymore?”

Oh boy.
“Well,” I said carefully. I tried to explain it to her. It wasn’t like I was some kind of suicidal
maniac
. But were there times lately, in the middle of long prickly afternoons, when it occurred to me what a relief it might be if there were a way to simply not, you know, exist? Yeah, there were times like that.

“In psychiatric circles,” said Sam, “that’s what we call passive thoughts of death.”

She asked me about my family, and I told her about how my father was still taking his antidepressant faithfully. I told her about my sister, still in high school, and her new group of troubled-seeming friends. I told her about my mom’s propensity to worry, and the stories I’d heard about the time when my grandmother took to her bed for a week, issuing instructions to her children about how to make their own breakfasts.

Sam nodded, smoothed a piece of dark brown hair behind her ear, and looked at me again. Then she reached for another, smaller pad from the desk behind her.

“I think you have depression,” she said carefully. “I’m going to write you a prescription for Zoloft. I’m also going to go downstairs and find some samples so you can get started right now.”

She left the room. I looked at the clock; we’d been talking for about twenty minutes. I felt like an eggshell, a brittle teacup. I felt like she’d told me to sit still and wait because it was her professional opinion that if I made a move in any direction I might break into a million pieces.
“Right now!” That’s how bad she thought it was
, I told myself.

Zoloft.

Oh, god.

I imagined a heavenly tattoo needle coming down from space to etch the scarlet letter D right into my skin.

SAM RETURNED TO
the room with five or six small cardboard boxes printed in blue, green, and white: free samples of Zoloft. She thrust them into my hands, and I put them in my messenger bag, where for the rest of the day, the tiny pills rattled around in their bottles like dried beans.

That evening I locked the door of my side of the dorm room, took out the boxes, and opened one. Out slid a plastic vial and a tissue-thin sheet of patient information, folded in a tight crimp. It had a diagram of the Zoloft molecule and a section on “pharmacokinetics.” The pills themselves were sky blue, capsule shaped, lovely. I knocked one into the palm of my hand, tilted my head back, swallowed, and waited.