Prozac Nation (39 page)

As I load my mother into a taxi, toting her shopping bag of bloodied clothing, I try to act concerned. Which I guess I am, but really I'm too miserable to care. I feel duty bound, but I am so absorbed in my own depression and misery that I almost hate her for burdening me with this now. In general, there is nothing like a genuine crisis to galvanize a person out of a bad mood, to snap her into a dealing mode. But I am so far gone at this point that the special surge of necessary energy, the adrenaline rush, is not hitting me at all. I am simply plodding along, forcing myself to care at all. I hate myself for being so low and I hate my mother for needing me to be otherwise. And I am on the whole disgusted that I am even thinking about these things at a time like this.

I think about what life must have been like for her before I was born. She never had a very good relationsip with her parents or sister, she barely had anything much to say or do with my father, so when she had a baby, she must have thought, At last here is someone just for me. Motherhood must be like that. It is probably the only experience that most women ever have of ownership and domination. My mother is as helpless as an infant herself, but I imagine that aside from all the physical pain this must be vaguely blissful for her: For the first time in a long time, circumstances have brought this thing back to her, this thing that is hers and hers alone. And I feel so bad because I am so scared I will not live up to it.

 

I somehow survive the relatives' visit, although I space out and nod off frequently. My grandmother is courageously trying to keep the conversation going in this glum little circle as we sit around eating an improvised lunch in the dining room, and all I keep saying in response to her questions is, I'm sorry, Grandma, what was that? As soon as anyone finishes eating anything, if a plate sits idle for even a few seconds, I grab it and run to the kitchen to wash it. Anything to get away, even for a minute or two. I have never been so eager to clear the table and load the dishwasher as I am that day.

My grandmother keeps asking my mother what's wrong with me, why I seem so tired and gloomy, and I'd overhear my mother saying something like, She's had a hard day. At one point I walk into my bedroom to get something, and I nearly collapse. When I am this depressed, every small activity is a body blow, and I feel knocked out and somnambulent all the time.

Dr. Sterling always tells me that it takes a lot of energy to be depressed and even more energy to get better, and the reason many depressives choose to go to the hospital is that it's the one place where they aren't forced to use their energy on any other activities. I start thinking that as soon as I go back to Cambridge, I'm going to check myself back in, I'm so tired from just trying to stay awake.

When the family finally leaves, I am relieved because I can't deal with them and frightened because I can't deal with myself either. I go into my mom's room to keep her company for
60 Minutes.
“How are you doing, Mom?” I ask, as I sit with her.

“I'm okay,” she says. “You've been really wonderful. You were wonderful today, and it was wonderful of you to come down here like this.”

“Mom, I've got to say, now that I see you, I can't imagine how you thought you were going to manage without me or without somebody here.”

“I don't know. I wasn't thinking, I guess.”

“I just, I feel so bad.” I don't know what it is I want to say, something about wishing I could do more. “I feel like I'm so unhappy myself that I'm more of a liability than anything else. Today, with Grandma, you know I nearly passed out at the dinner table?”

“Oh, Ellie, you were great today, you really were. Stop feeling bad about yourself. You've been wonderful to me.”

“Mom, you know, it's just, it's so terrible, there's so much I'd like to do—” What am I trying to say? “There's just so much I'd like to do that I can't seem to do right now. I can't even finish a book lately. I'm barely in school, I'm not working, and I'm so drained it's as if I were working an eighty-hour week when in reality I'm tired from doing nothing. I can't even blame breaking up with Rafe for how bad I feel because I felt this way before I met him, and we weren't even together that long. I feel so lousy and there's nothing wrong with me and I have no excuse.”

“But, Elizabeth,” she says, in the most reasonable voice I've heard from her in years, “there is something wrong with you: You're depressed. That's a real problem. That's not imaginary. Of course you can't deal with anything. You're depressed.”

I never knew that she understood. I'd never heard her acknowledge my depression so straightforwardly before. What had happened? Had somebody talked to her? Or was it all the painkillers she was taking? She almost never talked about anything that was wrong with me without qualifying it with a bunch of remarks about all the terrible things my father did to me and how he had ruined me and it was all his fault. She never could simply admit that I had a problem, it needed to be handled, who cares about pointing fingers and assigning blame. This was a definite first.

And it's strange, but when she said those words to me, when she said,
You're depressed,
it became a reality for me for the first time in a long, long time. Not that I wasn't aware that I felt like shit all the time—there was no avoiding that—but I had ceased to think of it as a legitimate condition, as a real disease, even if it did have a fancy diagnosis like
atypical depression.
No matter what Dr. Sterling or any of the other mental health practitioners ever said, I never felt I had a right to be depressed. I always felt like: Really, if I wanted to, I could snap out of this. And all the tenured faculty at Harvard Medical School could get together and tell me in then collective opinion that I had a real live chronic illness on my hands, and none of it would have meant as much as my mother telling me, for what I'm certain was the first time, that depression is a problem of its own that needs to be dealt with on its own terms.

I got up and sat next to her and hugged her, and thought to myself, She understands. She understands and it will be all right.

14

After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.

 

LANFORD WILSON

Fifth of July

 

On the plane back to school, I think that some insight is supposed to be hitting me right now. Something about the meaning of life, about dancing in the face of adversity, about struggling and persevering and succeeding. Yes, I think, any minute now, before we touch down into Logan, the insight will come. Clarity. The truth will set me free, and all that.

Of course, it never happens. Years of therapy, and it never happens. Psychotropic drugs, and it never happens. My mother gets brutalized down the block from the building we live in, and it never happens. That's the problem with reality, that's the fallacy of therapy: It assumes that you will have a series of revelations, or even just one little one, and that these various truths will come to you and will change your life completely. It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn't work that way. In real life, every day you might come to some new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because your emotional tie to them is so strong—so much stronger than any dimestore insight you might come up with—that the stupid things you do are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They are the only things about you that make you
you.
For example, knowing you're attracted to men who are bad for you doesn't keep you from getting involved with men who are bad for you. It means only that you have new and improved ways to rationalize:
It's a father thing.
Or
, It's my way of reenacting my relationship with my mother's boyfriend who raped me when I was twelve.
Or else, and this is the most desperate one
, I'm like a drug addict, I need a fix, I can't help myself.

If only life could be more like the movies, where characters muddle things through and do what's right in the end. But real life isn't like that. In
Kramer vs. Kramer,
Meryl Streep thinks it over and decides to let her son stay with Dustin Hoffman, even though she's won their ugly custody battle; but in real life, what happens is more like the case of Baby M, where the grown-ups all fight it out in court and on national television, where no one thinks about what's right for the child, only about what they want and what the law allows, and in the end it's miserable. In
The Breakfast Club,
a geek, a jock, a rich bitch, a girl in black, and a hoodlum become best friends and reconcile their differences in a few hours' worth of detention; in real life, Saturday afternoon's momentary intimacy would result only in some forced, awkward exchanges on Monday morning, everyone returning to the same old cliques and clans, the same old lipstick shades and sunglasses.

Yes, maybe years of therapy means that sooner or later, over time, you change your ways and yourself ever so slightly. But I don't have years. Or rather, it's already been years. I want it to be like the movies. I want an angel to swoop down to me like he does to Jimmy Stewart in
It's a Wonderful Life
and talk me out of suicide. Because at this point, that's what it's going to take.

 

The suicide attempt startled even me. It seemed to happen out of context, like something that should have taken place months and months ago, when there was no hope at all, when Rafe and I first broke up, when England first turned into a rainy-day nightmare. It should never have happened within a few days of returning to Cambridge, at a point when, even I had to admit, the fluoxetine was starting to kick in. After all, I was able to get out of bed in the morning, which may not seem like much, but in my life it was up there with Moses parting the Red Sea. Suddenly, feeling like I ought to return the cash my mother gave me for London, I even found it within myself to walk up Brattle Street and over to a restaurant called the Harvest, where I was able to convince the manager that I had what it took to be a cashier and cappuccino maker. Anybody would have thought that these were signs that my mood was on the upswing, and I guess it was. But just as a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little bit of energy, in the hands of someone hell-bent on suicide, is a very dangerous thing.

My improved affect did not in any way sway me from the philosophical conviction that life, at its height and at its depth, basically sucks. My mother's mugging really shook me up, and bad. It seemed impossible to reconcile with any concept of justice that something like this could happen to her, to someone whose whole life, in the first place, had never turned out quite the way she planned. Oh yes, I know, there are far more pitiful cases roaming the streets than my mother—homeless women, battered wives, hard-luck alcoholics who've lost their jobs, their families, their houses, their everything—but her particular tragedy was most striking to me, at least in part, because it really was so very banal. Here was a woman who should have had a house in the suburbs, a job she liked, involving either art or architecture, and a husband who cared for her, someone who owned a
shmata
company on Seventh Avenue or worked as a stockbroker or a middle manager at some large corporation like Procter & Gamble. That was all she wanted, nothing fancy, nothing like the kinds of stargazing dreams that I and everyone I know set their sights on. Instead, all she got was a daughter who is such a mental wreck that she is actually scared to answer the phone, never knowing what's going to happen next.

So the plan was simple: I would earn enough money to pay my mother back, and then I'd kill myself. I didn't care what drugs they put me on, I didn't care what state of false consciousness they were able to induce in me through chemicals. Because even if I wasn't depressed, I would still have years of more boyfriends who wouldn't work out to look forward to, I would still have a father who had no idea why I wouldn't talk to him, I would still have a whole world gone wrong to put up with, in which families disintegrate and relationships are meaningless. And I didn't want it.

I hate to admit it, but even after years of religious training I really don't believe in the afterlife. I still think that human beings, even our beautiful and wretched souls, are just biology, are just a series of chemical and physical reactions that one day stop, and so do we, and that is that. But I'm looking forward to this blank peace, this oblivion, this nothing, this not being me anymore. I am looking forward to it for real. Or at least, this is what I tell myself. I tell myself I'm not scared, I tell myself I really want to die, and it never occurs to me until the last possible moment that what I really want is to be saved.

 

It happens in Dr. Sterling's office. I see her on a Sunday (I have been seeing her just about every day because she is trying to keep me alive). I tell her that if I were to kill myself, I would get into a steaming hot bath in the dark, because in the dark you can't see what you are doing to yourself so you can't get scared and you can't scream, and I would slash my wrists and maybe a couple of other arteries with a fresh, shiny razor blade. And then I'd lie back in the tub and let it happen, let the blood and life drain out of me, to kingdom come and all that. I tell her that this is a surprisingly effective suicide method, from what I've read, and that the reason this kind of bloodletting so often fails is that people don't know that you've got to cut your wrists lengthwise, and not across, and because people keep the lights on, and get shocked by the sight of so much blood, and actually second-guess their decision. They also don't think of slitting their jugular vein, or some other major pulse point besides their wrists, to speed up the process. But I assure her that I won't make these mistakes.