Prozac Nation (32 page)

And all the unhappy families are all pretty much the same. All types of misery are identical at the core, which is why for so many years people would tell me to go to AA meetings. They'd say that all addictions are alike, and my addiction to depression or stress involved the same mental mechanism as someone else's alcoholism. In any fucked-up family, whether the problem is that the mother drinks or the father beats the children or the parents want to kill each other, the skeleton of the story line is always the same. The description of what causes the pathology is the same. It's always something about not being loved enough as a child, or being neglected at some other point. Listen to any unhappy person tell his tale of woe and it sounds like every other tale of woe.

At most, there are two kinds of dysfunctional families: those who don't talk enough and those who talk too much. The former always comes across as the more tragic, the more Eugene O'Neill-ish. These are the families in which everyone is so fearful of expressing not just their emotions, but absolutely anything, that they all drink or do drugs and get fucked up in their silence. Then one day, one of the kids gets busted at school for smoking a joint in the stairwell, or maybe the daughter turns into an anorexic, and the parents see that all kinds of hell is going on while they sip their martinis and suck on their green olives, and finally the whole family ends up seeing a counselor. Pretty soon, they discover that they have trouble communicating, and everyone learns to open up, like it's some great revelation, and the idea that this is any sort of solution to any problem completely baffles those of us from families in which everybody talks too damn much.

One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved. As it happens, I come from a family where no one ever hesitates to vent whatever petty grievances she might have, and it's like living in a war zone. I am often amazed at the things my mother has no qualms about saying to me. It's not just that she's rather impulsive about expressing her unreconsidered opinions about my mental health, but even trivial matters are fair game. For instance, I'll walk into her apartment and she'll just blurt out, Those shoes are so ugly! And I never asked her. And I like my shoes. And her comment does nothing but make me feel bad. But that's how it is. Her mother does it, her cousins, aunts, everybody. The concept of Who asked you? does not exist in my family, because the concept of individuals doesn't exist. We're all meshed together, all a reflection of one another, as if we were a pot of stew in which all the ingredients affect the flavor.

And I think about my mother and me, and about the way unconditional love has been absent from my life. Not that she doesn't always love me in her heart. But I know that if I'm not being the person she wants me to be, if I'm not the girl who got into Harvard and wins writing awards—if I'm, say, unemployed, broke, depressed, and desperate, she just doesn't love me the same way. She doesn't want to know about it. She doesn't want to know if I have sex or if I have a tattoo. She wants only the girl she wants.

Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my boyfriends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about
If you loved me you would.
As in,
If you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.

Sometimes I think part of the problem relates to ethnicity. We Jews do not have a concept of unconditional love. The God of the Old Testament is judgmental, jealous and vengeful. He gets mad
and
He gets even. The notion of turning the other cheek, the idea that faith is more important than deeds, these are distinctly Christian concepts. Some say that the difference between Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt is that the former emanates from the knowledge that we are all born already fallen, that there is nothing we can ever do to overcome the original sin; the latter springs from a sense that every one of us was created in God's image and has the potential for perfection. So Catholic guilt is about impossibility, while Jewish guilt is about an abundance of possibility.

I think of my own possibility. I think of the way it is wasted. The way it will always be wasted because I'm sitting here waiting for someone to love me as is.

 

I don't know why, but when I got back to school I really didn't want to go to Stillman. I think I was sick of all the cranberry juice. But I couldn't sit still in my own apartment with my grief. Everything I'd read about depression and recovery had stressed that the only way to solve a problem is to go through it, to sit with the feelings, to calm those fight-or-flight adrenaline instincts and just let the pain run its course. Well, fuck that.

I couldn't bear it. I have never wanted out of my skin so badly. Constant suicide thoughts. Total fear. But I didn't want to go to Stillman, and since I had started describing exactly what method I would employ to kill myself—I'd ordered pamphlets from the Hemlock Society, and I was beginning to bone up on what combinations of drugs actually, really, and truly did you in—Dr. Sterling was talking about sending me off to McLean. Which I really didn't want. Don't ask why. At that point, it would have done me good.

But instead of going to a mental institution, I decided to go to California.

Once I got to my cousin's house in Los Angeles, I sat in the sun and soaked in the hot tub. I actually did things like read Sartre in front of the Pacific Ocean. When I realized that Camus's
L'Etranger
begins on a beach, I read that too. I ate frozen yogurt at a combination bookstore and outdoor café in Venice. I risked life and limb crossing a six lane highway to get to a restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory, because for some reason I thought they'd have oysters on the half shell there (they didn't
and
there was a thirty-five-minute wait for a table). I thought about Rafe. I talked about Rafe. I talked to Rafe when I could actually reach him since I was afraid to leave a message.

I worried about finding a summer job, as I'd already been rejected by the
Chicago Tribune.
I interviewed Joni Mitchell for the
Dallas Morning News.
I considered taking the term off from school to write a whole book about Joni Mitchell. I spent more time on the telephone with potential employers in New Orleans and Atlanta and even New York than I did in the California-dreamin' sun. My cousin kept telling me I was too compulsive, that I should relax. She said, You're supposed to be on vacation. She said, You're behaving like one of those studio execs who bring their cellular phones to St. Barts and can't take a day off from the art of the deal. She said, You're too young to be this obsessive and ambitious and feverish.

She didn't seem to see that I was afraid that if I let life take over, if I flowed into my circumstances like some West Coast Zen surfer, I was certain that I would land in a depression and a bog even worse than the one I'd mucked my way into by scrambling around and pursuing this and that, scratching and clawing through these confining tubes of no-options like a hamster in a Habitrail.

Still, she said: Relax, Elizabeth!

And I said, I wish. And I thought about Rafe.

Mostly I thought: It's better in the sun. Everything really does feel better when you wake up to light flooding through the window. It makes it harder to imagine the film of blackness that I could see wrapped around everything in Cambridge and New York in the cold and in the dark. I remembered that Leo, my astrological sign, is the sun ruler, and I wondered how I could make my life more solar. Because by the time I left California, nothing seemed to matter much at all, as if the sun had stroked my brain and fried it to fritters. And I thought: Who needs Rafe?

And then I got back to Cambridge and I needed him all over again and I didn't think I could stand the pain for another minute, another hour, another day. And I remembered how, during winter break, I couldn't stand the pain of missing Rafe for four weeks. Now it was so much worse because the time was not finite. Forever and ever I would be without Rafe because I'd lost him for good.

More Mellaril, and still more pain.

Back to listening to Bob Dylan, back to hearing that cranky, desperate voice sing the most heartbreaking lines I'd ever heard. “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” “I Threw It All Away,” “Ballad in Plain D.” Why hadn't K-Tel long ago released a compilation called something like
Depressing Dylan Songs for the Brokenhearted!
And then, over and over again, I would listen to all three available versions of “You're a Big Girl Now”—the original
Blood on the Tracks
recording, the alternate take on
Biograph,
and, scariest of all, the live rendition on
Hard Rain—
as if repeated listenings would deflate the song's meaning, make its disastrous lyrics more mundane. But the sorrow and terror of certain works of art—of Picasso's
Guernica,
of Billie Holiday singing “Good Morning Heartache” at the 1957 Monterey Jazz Festival, Sylvia Plath's poem “Tulips,” Fellini's
La Strada
—never seem mitigated by exposure. Their power is amplified with every new viewing or hearing or reading, and I just find new elements of tragedy to focus on, new reasons to be empathic. This is especially true of every Bob Dylan song that has ever touched me. There are people who hate his voice, who think he's too nasal and can't sing, would rather hear his work performed by the Byrds or Ricky Nelson or the O'Jays, but they don't understand that for real Dylan fans, the sound of his ragged, edgy vocal cords is the sound of redemption. I wanted to make a whole tape that would play all his different recordings of “You're a Big Girl Now” continuously. This big girl is so very small and fragile after all.

I often didn't even have the energy to get to therapy sessions, so Dr. Sterling would have to talk to me by phone. I didn't have the energy to eat and, strange as this may sound, I didn't have the energy to sleep. All I could manage was lying in my bed. Sometimes, if I couldn't bring myself to get up and refill the glass of water, I would swallow my Mellaril straight and hope it would still metabolize on an empty stomach.

On a Sunday morning, when she didn't have go to work or to classes, Samantha got me out of bed by insisting that the sun was shining on the living room and I would feel much better on the couch than in my dark room. The conversation we were going to have would inevitably be pointless because Samantha would always wonder why I couldn't look at my situation more philosophically, why I couldn't be glad that I had experienced love with Rafe and take that as a sign that it would happen again sometime, somewhere, with someone else. And she pattered away like Pollyanna until I finally screamed:
Samantha, goddamnit, don't you see I'm desperate! What the fuck do I care how this will seem in ten years, or ten months. I'm going out of my mind right here, right now, and I don't think I can bear another minute.

As usual, I started to cry and Samantha got frenzied, digging her Filofax out of her pocketbook, looking for numbers or names of anybody who might help me, mentioning a rabbi in New York or a social worker in Cambridge or suggesting that I call her father, a psychoanalyst in Washington.

And I just looked at her. “I need a cure,” I said. “I know that I promised myself that getting rid of Rafe would be the best thing for me because it would help me confront the issues that his presence shielded me from. But I actually think that in truth he brought stuff more to the fore.”

She nods.

“I know I vowed to be in therapy and get through life day by day because this is how I'll get better, and in a few months I'll be stronger because I'll have gotten to the root of the problem and all that.”

More nods.

“But”—I burst into tears—“I don't think I can make it! I need some protection. I don't see a light at the end of this particular tunnel right now, and I'm having trouble visualizing world peace or inner peace or any of that shit, and I want to cheat on this plan to go through all this pain right now. If I were an alcoholic, I'd be saying I want a drink, but since I'm me I don't know what it is I want. But I want it
right now!
”

Samantha says something about understanding how I feel, but I'm barely listening because all I want to do is come up with a way to get blasted off this planet until the pain goes away. I want another trip to California. Or maybe I want a trip to Neptune.

And then suddenly I remember that Samantha's Argentinian ex-boyfriend Manuel lives in London and works in convertible bond sales at a major investment bank. I had managed to have a disquieting fling with Manuel's younger brother when he was a senior and I was a swoony freshman who couldn't believe that his room in Adams House was so big. While Samantha herself was working in London, she lived with Manuel, and by her description he had been very doting and had taken excellent care of her even though she'd cried herself to sleep late at night and walked out in the middle of dinner parties and sobbed on the balcony because she was having her own set of difficulties back then. So I decide that the thing for me to do is go stay with Manuel for a couple of months until I get better.