Prozac Nation (30 page)

And the crying and the pain that goes with it becomes too much to bear. Usually, tears are cathartic. As you cry, the salt and water shed from your eyes and drag misery along the way. But in this case, the crying only escalates the emotions that it expresses, and the more I cry, the more upset I get, and I am thinking of every time I cried over Rafe, every time I cried because I thought he didn't love me well enough, and every time he would reassure me and tell me I was being silly, but now I am realizing that I was not being silly, because where is he now, where is he as I lay dying, and why is it that no one who is supposed to be here for me ever is?

And pretty soon the crying is about Daddy leaving, about being alone in my crib, being alone in my mother's womb, being alone in this life, and I know that I have been hysterical many times before, but this time, I don't think it's going to stop. Somebody has to make this stop! I wonder if the Xanax will help, wonder if I still have some hidden in my knapsack, wonder if anything will work or if there is no pill, no potion, no serum, no shot, nothing under the whole big black sun that can possibly penetrate a pain so deep. Well, there must be something, some very strong hand with a very tight grip that can turn off the crazy way I feel.

So I call Dr. Sterling. I start screaming at her about my lack of clarity and my fear. And then I tell her that I think I will try to call Rafe sometime tomorrow morning, and I wish there was something that would knock me out until then. In fact, I continue, I wish something would knock me out for a long time until the way I feel just stops, because this is not even an issue for therapy anymore. We can analyze it for days and that won't take away the pain. Something bigger than me is taking over my body and mind. I'm possessed.

Dr. Sterling asks me to be more specific about what's wrong and what it would take to make me feel better. I keep repeating that I want my brain annihilated, that it won't stop running and churning and burning and trying to make sense of my life, and even here in the infirmary, it still needs a vacation. I think I finally say, I want my head blotted out. I want heroin. Of course, Dr. Sterling won't prescribe a narcotic for me. Instead she decides to put me on a drug called Mellaril, an antipsychotic, a medication that's been known to help schizophrenics during their visionary episodes, a major tranquilizer in the same family as Thorazine. It is, she assures me, a complete brain drain, and it will most certainly knock me out.

After I hang up the phone, still crying like a rainstorm, a nurse walks in and gives me a small brown tablet and some cranberry juice, sort of the house drink at Stillman. She tells me to be careful not to choke since she sees that I'm wheezing from so much crying.

And quite amazingly, only a few minutes after I swallow the Mellaril, my tears and all my feelings completely subside. Just like that. Like magic. I am calm, carefree, careless. I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I'm concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before.

The next day, Dr. Sterling announces that she is so pleased with the effect Mellaril has had on me, she's decided it ought to be my drug of choice. Three times a day, the nurse will give me a little brown tablet.

I'm not sure what she wants the medication's effect to be. Apparently some doctors at McLean are experimenting with low dosages as an antidepressant. But its main result is my complete indifference to everything. After the initial euphoria I experienced with my first dose, a standard regimen of Mellaril just dulls everything. Instead of being Depressed Girl, I'm Blank Girl. I achieve a lack of affect so complete that Dr. Sterling and the other physicians almost mistake it for an improvement. And I guess it is: I am calm enough to write a semiotics paper, calm enough to compose an essay for my tutorial about feminist theory and
The Oresteia Trilogy,
calm enough to contemplate going home for a few days during intercession.

I call Rafe, who announces that the plans we'd made to meet for a few days in New York before he goes back to Brown won't work because he needs to write some papers and do other things so he can graduate. I hear him, but his words don't register. It's as if the Mellaril has blocked the receptor sites in my brain which connect facts with feelings.

Someone could walk into this room and say your life is on fire,
I hear Paul Simon singing in some song somewhere in a life that seems so far away.

11

I'm going out of my mind

With a pain that stops and starts

Like a corkscrew through my heart

Ever since we've been apart

 

BOB DYLAN

“You're a Big Girl Now”

 

I showed up on Rafe's doorstep unannounced when I knew he'd been back at Brown for a week and I still hadn't heard from him. After he broke up with me, he didn't even have the decency to escort me to the bus station because he had play rehearsal and couldn't get away. Instead he had his roommate drive me there. I felt like a sickly visiting relative that everyone grudgingly takes turns attending to because it would be wrong not to. I had images of Rafe saying to this roommate, I don't want to deal with her; you do it.

We got into his little Honda, it was below freezing, and I kept thinking I ought to be grateful, if Rafe had taken me to the bus, we'd have had to walk, but somehow I didn't feel that way. The roommate deposited me at the bus depot, all awkwardness, because what do you say to someone you're never going to see again for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that's transpired between the two of you? And it took all the strength I could muster to purchase a ticket, get on board, get a seat, buy some magazines for the road even though I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. Couldn't concentrate on the
Premiere
cover story about Cher. Or the
New York
article on John Cassablancas and his modeling agency. Couldn't even get through the contents page in
Cosmopolitan.
Couldn't even concentrate on Rafe, because how can you focus on something so consuming that it's everywhere, like the air? The only thing I could do was go blank. And I remember thinking:
This is it. This is the pain you've been waiting for all your life. Heartbreak straight up.
I remember thinking things couldn't be worse.

 

Everyone has relationships in college that go on for a few months and then just fall apart, in the way that these things do. Sometimes the end hurts bad, sometimes it's no big deal, sometimes it's a pleasant relief, but mostly it's nothing that a few days of sitting on a friend's couch with a box of tissues and a bottle of gin can't cure.

Anyone looking on from the outside would have deposited my involvement with Rafe into that slush pile of short-term loves that don't quite take off. Anyone who didn't know the particulars would have said we were a young couple with youth, timing, and distance as the preeminent factors preventing the relationship from enduring beyond the first ninety days. We were incompatible, geographically challenged, not ready for commitment—those would be among the usual litany of excuses for our demise, and they would even be the stock answers I would give to people who asked, innocently enough, Whatever happened to that Rafe guy! And no one would have any reason to doubt me. Anyone who didn't know better could never have imagined what an intense
folie á deux
we had come to inhabit during our brief union

Rafe took it upon himself to absorb my anguish completely. Part of what he liked about me was that I was depressed. He was like one of those people who is terminally attracted to alcoholics or drug addicts, only in my case I was an abuser without a substance. At times he relished the idea of being my personal Jesus, of setting up a safe haven for me in his little house in Providence, Rhode Island. I would lie in his bed for days on end, and he would bring me toast and tea and tell me he loved me and ask me to talk to him about my pain. He liked the idea of salvation. His mother was a high-maintenance hysteric, his younger sister was some version of a preadolescent psychotic, and Rafe's natural role in life was as caretaker.

It's not that unusual. Throughout the ages, troubled individuals with a knack for self-preservation have mated themselves to people who groove on their pain, knowing it's the best chance they've got to find love and care. I mean, who else but a voyeur of misery would have put up with me during my deepest depression! I got lucky when Rafe found me. And in my short dating career, I've taken up with
three
different guys who, at the time I met them, had girlfriends in mental hospitals. Surely that can't be normal, can't be a claim every girl can make. At the point of initial attraction, I didn't know that these men tended to fall for crazy women and they didn't know that I was the very thing, and still we sniffed each other out, sensed the odor of a certain cerebral mutation saw each other across crowded rooms and made introductions because some things are just meant to be Sid will always find Nancy. Tom will always hook up with Roseanne; and Ted (truly a reprobate case) will manage to get involved in tandem with both Sylvia and another woman who died with her head in the oven. F. Scott will always recognize his Zelda; Samson will always fall for Delilah; and Jason would wed Medea all over again, even if he were fully apprised of their marriage's macabre denouement. Do I detect a pattern here?

But until Rafe, I'd never been one of the lucky ones. I was always single, with occasional lapses into—well, into other kinds of lapses. I would hear about other girls who'd gone mad and been locked away, and I'd hear how they had these mournful, devoted boyfriends who would wipe their noses, tie old rags and bandannas around their bloodied wrists, run out to the pharmacy to get a last-minute prescription for a sedative called in by the doctor as the girl had a psychotic episode right there on the kitchen floor. I'd hear about these girls and wonder how they could have suffered so when they were so loved. Isolation and a sense that all human connection was elusive, was the province of others, of the happy people on the other side of the glass wall, was the worst part of my depression. I used to think: I want in on whatever deal it is that these other fucked-up chicks have got!

And then Rafe came along, and he tried to love me, I really believe he did, but there was no amount of love that would have stitched my wounded psyche at that point. In fact, compared to all the other forces at work in the world, love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion—assuming it was even real—hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grew up in an era of divorce are—in response to some atavistic instinct—still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small. As Leonard Cohen once wrote, “Love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah.” I discovered, through the love Rafe gave me, that affection as medicine is highly overrated, that a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone's love. It is just so much worse than that. I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me: There was so much damage, it was going to take a lot more than one person, or even one therapist, one drug, one electric shock treatment—it was going to take a lot of everything before the Humpty Dumpty remains of my life could be reassembled. It would have taken—and eventually did take—so much more than Rafe to save me.

And instead, his indulgence actually made me worse. A psychologist once explained to me that the worst thing a therapist can do to an extremely depressed patient is be nice. Because that kindness creates a stasis, allows the depressive to remain comfortable in her current miserable state. In order for therapy to be effective, a patient must be prodded and provoked, forced into confrontations, given sufficient incentive to push herself out of the caged fog of depression. Rafe was probably too nice to me. He allowed me to feel bad and that, in turn, allowed me to feel even worse All I ever did with Rafe was wallow in my pain.

In striking contrast, Nathan, my boyfriend after Rafe and after I was a whole lot better, did not suffer my depressive episodes gladly. In fact, he hated them—they were the thing about me that he liked the least, and by the time we started dating, in 1988, there actually was a lot more to me. I was still given to running out of doors and crying on the front lawn. I was still (and probably always will be) a person who made scenes when I got upset. But Nathan handled these situations much differently from Rafe. He would say, Come on, this is ridiculous. He would say, Enough already. He would say, Snap out of it. And you know what? His approach worked. Forced to behave, I behaved; forced to cope, I coped. By that time, of course, I had the tools with which to manage my emotions more efficiently, but still I think Nathan's way was better than Rafe's. In the years I was with Nathan, I thrived, while with Rafe I just deteriorated. This is not to say that either of these men were Svengali enough to have controlled me. And I'm sure I chose each of them for their respective qualities and how they jibed with the state I was in at those two very different times of my life. But still I have no doubt that Rafe's eagerness to be there for me while I was hurting encouraged me to hurt more. Of course it did: I wanted so badly to please him.