Prozac Nation (29 page)

And here I am, years later, when it is supposed to be clear that I am a writer, that it is through words that I will escape this sense of having no art form, and it is Saturday night, and instead of being out at a party in Adams House or seeing a double feature of Preston Sturges flicks at the Brattle Theatre or just smoking grass with my friends, I am lying in bed in the infirmary watching TV.

This is, I remind myself, all I can do right now. I am depressed to the point of being incapable of much else besides lying in this white room with these white sheets and white blankets, watching a television set suspended from the ceiling which changes channels with a remote control that you squeeze like a lemon that might be souring your tea. I know I can do so much more than this, I know that I could be a life force, could love with a heart full of soul, could feel with the power that flies men to the moon. I know that if I could just get out from under this depression, there is so much I could do besides cry in front of the TV on a Saturday night.

 

Dr. Sterling agrees, when I first check into the infirmary, that I can lie there for as long as I like, but I need to get my work done. Always, always, no matter how bad life seems to be, I must hand in my papers on time or take my finals when I am supposed to or meet deadlines for stories. So my word processor and all my books make the trek to Stillman with me, where I entertain fantasies of finding solace in my studies as I was once able to do.

But I'm too far gone for that now. It seems that I have spent so much time trying to convince people that I really am depressed, that I really can't cope—but now that it's finally true, I don't want to admit it. I am petrified by what is happening to me, so frightened of what the bottom of the well will look like once I sink down there, so frightened that in fact this is it. How did this happen to me? It seems not so long ago, maybe only a decade ago, I was a little girl trying out a new persona, trying on morbid depression as some kind of punk rock statement, and now here I am, the real thing.

I find myself calling Dr. Sterling every five minutes to get her to assure and reassure me that I will come out of this one day. And she always does, always says the right things. But a few seconds after I hang up, I'm frightened all over again. So I call all over again.

“Elizabeth, we just went through this,” she says. “What can I do to make you believe me?”

“You can't,” I say through tears. “Don't you get it? Nothing sticks. That's my whole problem. Rafe leaves the room for five minutes, and I'm sure he's never coming back. And that's how it is for me with everything. Nothing is real to me unless it's right in front of me.”

“What a terrible way to live.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you!”

I wonder if she understands that I can't go on like this.

And still, I keep telling myself that recovery is an act of will, that if I decide one day that I simply must get up and out of this bed, that I must be happy, I will be able to force it to happen. Why do I believe this is possible?

I suppose because the alternative is too frightening. The alternative will lead to my inevitable suicide. Up until now, I always thought of self-destructive behavior as a red flag to wave at the world, a way of getting the help I needed. But the truth is, lying here in Stillman, for the first time ever I am contemplating suicide completely seriously, because this pain is too much. I wonder if all the nurses who traipse through here to bring me meals, to change the sheets, to remind me to shower—I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

I call Dr. Sterling again, ask her the same questions again, and she decides, finally, that I must be given some kind of drug. After all, I am not her only patient, I am not her only problem, and every time she says something to me about feeling like she really needs to spend time with her children, I start to cry and tell her that if I die, there will be blood on her hands. If for no reason other than that she wants her private life back, Dr. Sterling is willing to try a chemical cure. She thinks that with the right medication, I might even be able to get my work done. Both my academic adviser and Dr. Sterling, along with several friends, have suggested that I just take incompletes in my courses and make the work some other time, but for some reason, I just can't. It would be too demoralizing. If I can write my papers, I keep telling myself then I'll know that I don't yet have to abandon all hope I know that if I don't do my schoolwork I really will be compelled to kill myself because the last bit of what I have to hold on to will be gone. Other kids with emotional troubles take time off from school, but they have families, they have some sense of a place in this world that can absorb them in all their pain; all I have is the semblance of a life that I have made for myself here at Harvard, and I can't let go of it. I must do my work.

My main symptoms, Dr. Sterling believes, are anxiety and agitation. In her opinion, even worse than the depression itself is the fear I seem to have about never escaping from it. As usual, my problem seems to be that I am one step removed from my problems, more a nervous audience member at a horror movie than the movie itself. “So you think I'm suffering from meta-depression?” I ask Dr. Sterling in a moment of humor.

“That's one way to see it,” she replies.

Dr. Sterling believes that the best drug for me, at least until I go for a thorough evaluation with a psychopharmacologist at McLean, is Xanax, mainly because it will have an immediate effect. An antidepressant might ultimately be a more appropriate antidote for my ills, but Dr. Sterling doesn't think I'll live to see the results of that kind of drug, which will take a few weeks to kick in, if we don't find a solution to my immediate desperation.

 

Some time after taking my first Xanax, after going for my daily constitutional, I am back in my bed at Stillman, curled up tight, my arms squeezing my pillow, convinced that I am permanently stuck in this miserable morass. Life is awful, life has always been awful, life will always be awful. In fact, with every passing day it is getting worse and worse. Dr. Sterling calls to check up on me. I tell her that while I was out in the square, standing on an interminably long line at Au Bon Pain, I nearly had a panic attack, nearly collapsed and had a convulsion in the middle of a fast-food café because I felt so suffocated. I start yelling about how she'd told me that Xanax was good for anxiety disorders, but I had never felt so nervous in my life. I tell her that I am clinging to my pillow because I am certain that the men in white coats are going to come in here and take me away any minute now, and if I hold on tightly enough maybe they won't put me in a straitjacket.

“Elizabeth,” she says, laughing, “you're already exactly where those men in white would take you, so there's no danger of that happening. Sounds like you had a negative reaction to the Xanax.” She's so matter-of-fact, as if I were not in the midst of a psychosomatic emergency.

“I think that maybe it relaxed me so much that I was actually relaxed enough to think about my problems in an uninhibited fashion,” I suggest. “Which made me realize how much I was kidding myself, which made me realize that my life is even worse than even I thought.”

“Listen,” Dr. Sterling responds, “I really don't think you should be taking the Xanax anymore. I think we're going to have to find something else.”

As soon as we hang up, against the doctor's orders, I take a few more hits of Xanax, hoping that they'll put me to sleep long enough for the bad feelings to go away. But it doesn't quite work out that way. True, I do manage to go to sleep for a good long time. But all night I dream of walls closing in on me, of being a wild animal caught in a trap by fur hunters, so desperate to get away that I bite off my own leg and instead of escaping, I bleed to death in the snow. The ground is red, the ground is white, the sky is blue, and when I wake up the bad feelings do not go away.

 

Often, in movies and novels, a favorite character is the devoted therapist, the one who goes swimming with his crazy patient to prove to her that she isn't going to drown just because her older sister did, or the one who flies across the country and meets the whole family to figure out why her pathetic charge is such a twisted young man. Of course, another stock character is the evil, manipulative psychiatrist, the Hannibal Lecter who kills his irritating, untreatable manic-depressive patient and then eats the flesh of his carcass with fava beans and Chianti. Most of my therapists have been closer to the latter type, although their cannibalism was strictly metaphorical. Dr. Sterling is the only psychiatrist about whom I can truly say, She saved my life. I think she knew that she probably wasn't going to be paid for all of her efforts, but she did what she felt was necessary anyway.

In fact, with my explicit permission, she even got in touch with my father, though I told her that under no circumstances would I talk to him myself. I think she was partly curious to speak with him, as she had heard so much about him over the last few months. But mostly she seemed to believe that if his insurance really did cover ninety percent of the cost of therapy, there had to be some way to get him to pitch in. During that stay at Stillman, she called my father and told him that she understood that he had all sorts of reasons why he felt it was up to my mother to pay for my therapy, and perhaps, she said—humoring him, no doubt—in less dire straits that might have been a reasonable decision on his part, but she really needed to see me every day and she wanted to know that he would pay for what my mother couldn't. I don't know exactly what else ensued, but she must have made the situation sound extremely desperate, because it worked. Within a week he mailed off some insurance forms for Dr Sterling to fill out.

Dr. Sterling succeeded in inventing a type of asylum for me within the Harvard medical system, sparing me a stint at a full-service mental institution. Because I'd briefly been some version of okay when we first commenced treatment, Dr. Sterling knew that somewhere in my personality there was a giggly girl who just wanted to have fun, and she thought it was important that I be allowed to express that aspect of myself. She seemed to think that one fine day I might come into my exuberant self again, and that at McLean I'd have only mattressed wallpaper and iron-barred windows and the schizophrenic down the hall to indulge it with. Her goal was to see to it that I got the kind of care and treatment that I would have at a psychiatric hospital without actually being placed in such complete confinement. It is only because of her determination and dedication that I survived that year without actually being committed, and it is only because of her that I am alive today at all.

 

I tried to remind myself that Rafe was not the problem. The problem, as Dr. Sterling explained it to me and as I myself knew, was that I was fucked up. Rafe was merely a makeshift solution I'd come up with, a pill I took to make the bad feelings go away. But now that he was not cooperating so well, now that he was refusing to be used this way, now that he was insisting that he wanted to be my boyfriend and not my panacea, he was no longer part of the solution. He was part of the problem.

Story of my life: I am so self-destructive, I turn solutions into problems. Everything I touch, I ruin. I'm Midas in reverse.

Before I could even begin to contemplate the big issues of my day—to shampoo or not to shampoo, that is the question—Alden walked in, armed with some clothing that I'd asked for, and a cup of hot chocolate from Au Bon Pain, which I thanked her for. I didn't want to ask if anyone had called because I didn't want to be disappointed, and I'm sure that if Rafe rang, she'd have told me. It was, after all, Alden who always left those big Magic Marker notes saying, “Rafe called,” or sometimes just “He called.” Although her message-taking skills were otherwise lackadaisical, Alden knew when a call was important.

So I didn't ask and she didn't mention anything and the day went on and people came by. Susannah brought me a copy of Joni Mitchell's
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
because I wanted to see the words to “Don't Interrupt the Sorrow” and she told me that I should really be reading P. G. Wodehouse or J. P. Donleavy, something cheerful and humorous. Paul came by and brought me Chinese food and a vanilla-scented candle, and we went for a walk in the snow to his apartment on Mt. Auburn Street and listened to
Clouds
on his portable tape player. Jonathan, the managing editor of the
Crimson,
came by with an anthology of female erotic fiction, the
Village Voice,
and the latest
New Republic.
Samantha came by with a copy of Paul Johnson's
Modern Times,
which she said somehow related to how I was feeling. I kept hoping someone would bring me the latest
Cosmopolitan
so I could read my horoscope and find out if my life was ever going to work out again, but no one did.

And the day went on until the evening came, and my long-term fantasy about lying in a hospital bed and receiving visitors had turned into a reality, and it was all very nice and good, but nothing mattered if Rafe didn't call. Eben and Alec came by with a chocolate milk shake from Steve's and a turkey and boursin sandwich from Formaggio, and I had a nice time talking to them, but already when they arrived I was starting to get hazy. And however well rested and well liked I was feeling, it was no deterrent to the sense of crazy that started traveling all through my body, and up into my head until I felt suffocated with it as if I were buried naked and alive in hot white summer sand, burning to death.

And finally, there is no one left to visit me, no Alden, no Paul, no Susannah, no Samantha, no Jonathan, no Eben, no Alec, nobody, and there is no one left to buffer the pain, the tremendous pain, the great big fucking pain, and I start to cry. And all I can think is,
Why hasn't Rafe called he's disappearing he's leaving me like everyone else he promised he wouldn't but he is I know it oh my God I want to die right here right now in this adjustable infirmary bed I want my corpse to be white like these sheets whiter than these blankets I want to be drained of my blood and my humanity forever I never want to feel again.