Prozac Nation (41 page)

“And this may sound kind of stupid, but I kept thinking,” I continue, “that they can't lock me away because soon it will be summer and I don't think they have Steve's ice cream at McLean. You know, I started to think about all these little things, and I thought, damn it, I can't die yet. They weren't terribly grand thoughts, just mundane pleasures that I still had to look forward to. I guess this sounds so dumb.” Dr. Sterling starts to say something about how any reason one finds to stay alive is as worthy as any other, but I'm still embarrassed to be talking about ice cream now.

“I wish I could say something more profound, but I don't know if there really is anything so grand in my future,” I try. “But I know for a fact that no matter what else goes wrong, there are still a few things I will always like doing, you know, like listening to Springsteen or seeing the movie
Nashville
yet again or going to Greta Garbo double features or putting on Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the
Goldberg Variations
or buying a new lipstick. It's all such simple stuff, but it matters. You know, the worst thing about depression is that not even the small pleasures can offer any tiny bit of comfort. At best, they're kind of okay. I mean, if Noah and I
had
found clams in Ipswich, I'm sure it wouldn't have made me happy at all. It would have been one more failed attempt. But now, you know, I feel so relieved to be alive that I want to take in a few little indulgences. I feel like I should go get a Heath Bar Crunch cone.”

“That's actually not an atypical response to a suicide attempt,” Dr. Sterling says. “The aftermaths vary so much. Some people really do deteriorate and get worse because their attempts occur much earlier on in their treatment. Some people only
begin
treatment after they've taken an overdose and are forced to. But in your case, it seems to have been something you did as a last attempt to hold on to the person you have been for so many years, the person who's depressed all the time. You're the one who's always saying that without depression, you'd have no personality at all. Well, I really think that the fluoxetine is going to work, and that whole part of you is going to go away. And I think you're scared. I think you're trying to tell me that even if you get better, it doesn't mean that you don't need me anymore, and it doesn't mean you don't need therapy and help and care anymore. Typically, in your household, the only way anything got attended to was if it had reached a point of complete desperation. But, Elizabeth, trust me, you don't need to be desperate in order for me to help you. I'm still going to be here for you even if you're not suicidally depressed.”

And, for what seems like the eighth time that day, I start to cry.

 

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony. Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest than joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I'd stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel so that the death of a roach crawling across a Formica counter can seem as tragic as the death of your own father. The people on the outside—and that's the right word, because to a depressive everyone else is
outside—
who are selectively expending their emotional energy are actually a lot more honest than anyone who is depressed and has replaced all nuance with a constant, persistent, droning despair.

But depression gave me more than just a brooding introspection. It gave me humor, it gave me a certain what-a-fuck-up-I-am schtick to play with when the worst was over. I couldn't kid myself and think that anyone enjoyed my tears and hysteria—plainly, they didn't—but the side effects, the by-products of depression, seemed to keep me going. I had developed a persona that could be extremely melodramatic and entertaining. It had, at times, all the selling points of madness, all the aspects of performance art. I was always able to reduce whatever craziness I'd experienced into the perfect anecdote, the ideal cocktail party monologue, and until that final year of real lows, I think most people would have said that when I wasn't being carted off to the emergency room I was fun. Even at my worst, when people came to see me at Stillman, I would try to keep the atmosphere light by saying something like,
So, did I tell you about the accidental blowjob?

Anyway, I thought this ability, to tell away my personal life as if it didn't belong to me, to be queerly chatty and energetic at moments that most people found inappropriate, was what my friends liked about me. In fact, over time, in the years of my recovery from depression, most of them let me know, one by one, that while they didn't
mind
that I said things that were thoughtless and out of line, they excused this behavior as a sad flaw. It wasn't what they liked about me at all. It was what they put up with, because when I wasn't busy flying around the room and ranting about nothing, I was actually just good to talk to, even a good friend. That's all their feelings for me were about. They'd be just as happy to see all the affectation go.

But before I knew this, I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me. The idea of throwing away my depression, of having to create a whole personality, a whole way of living and being that did not contain misery as its leitmotif, was daunting. Depression had for so long been a convenient—and honest—explanation for everything that was wrong with me, and it had been a handicap that helped accentuate everything that was right. Now, with the help of a biochemical cure, it was going to go away. I mean, wild animals raised in captivity will perish if placed back into their natural habitats because they don't know the laws of prey and predator and they don't know the ways of the jungle, even if that's where they belong. How would I ever survive as my
normal
self? And after all these years, who was that person anyway?

 

The day after the suicide attempt, Dr. Sterling lets me leave Stillman, and I get up and go to work at the Harvest as if nothing is wrong. It is my first day, and it is pretty clear as the manager tries to show me how to tilt a decanter of milk in different ways to produce different consistencies of steam, that this is one in a series of menial jobs I will miserably fail at. Nonetheless, I am almost happy to be behind the cash register and in front of the coffee maker today. I'm happy to be doing anything routine and normal.

At some point, when things slow down during lunch, I call Dr. Sterling to tell her I feel strange and lonely because my friends were mostly angry at me about what had happened. Eben insisted that he felt just as bad as me sometimes and didn't do things like that. Alec lectured me about how I had let myself fall into this funk and he wasn't surprised that I felt so awful considering I'd wrecked my life by spending most of first semester in Rhode Island and most of second semester in California and England. Everybody I'd spoken to about the overdose in its immediate aftermath was almost mean about it. I had expected some version of sympathy, and instead people kept telling me I'd brought this on myself. From the way they were talking, you'd think I'd committed murder—not attempted suicide. Even Samantha, my bedrock, my sob sister, seemed annoyed. I think she said, What a stupid thing to do!

Dr. Sterling explains that this is normal. She says people can be understanding about almost anything but suicide. “Remember,” she says, “these are people who feel like they're doing the best they can to be helpful, and you do something that indicates your utter rejection and dissatisfacton with their efforts. It's infuriating.”

After I hang up the receiver, I return to one waiter demanding a double espresso, a decaf cappuccino, and a café au lait, while another wants two espressos, a decaf double espresso, and a tea, and everyone needs to deliver the orders at once, everyone is shouting at me at once, I can't remember what anyone says, and I think: What if they knew? Just as I walked around the day after I lost my virginity, wondering if my aspect had changed, if my cheeks revealed this new experience in a rosier glow, today I wonder if people know I'm a failed suicide.

 

And then something just kind of changed in me. Over the next few days, I became all right, safe in my own skin. It happened just like that. One morning I woke up, and I really did want to live, really looked forward to greeting the day, imagined errands to run, phone calls to return, and it was not with a feeling of great dread, not with the sense that the first person who stepped on my toe as I walked through the square may well have driven me to suicide. It was as if the miasma of depression had lifted off me, gone smoothly about its business, in the same way that the fog in San Francisco rises as the day wears on. Was it the Prozac? No doubt. Was it the cathartic nature of going through a suicide attempt? Probably. Just as I always said that I went down gradually and then suddenly, I also got up that way. All the therapy, all the traveling, all the sleeping, all the drugs, all the crying, all the missed classes, all the lost time—all of that was part of some slow recovery process that came to the end of its tether at the same time that I reached mine.

It took a long time for me to get used to my contentedness. It was so hard for me to formulate a way of being and thinking in which the starting point was not depression. Dr. Sterling agrees that it's hard, because depression is an addiction the way many substances and most modes of behavior are, and like most addictions it is miserable but still hard to break. On Prozac, I often walk around so conscious of how not-terrible I feel that I am petrified that I'm going to lose this new equilibrium. I spend so much time worrying about staying happy that I threaten to become unhappy all over again. Any time I am bothered about anything, whether it's a line that's too long at the bank or a man who doesn't return my love, I have to remind myself that these emotional experiences (petty annoyance in the former instance, heartbreak in the latter) are reasonable and discrete unto themselves. They don't have to precipitate a depressive episode. It takes me a long time to realize that when I get upset about something it doesn't mean that the tears will never stop. It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective, so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroys almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between.

In-between.
There's a phrase that is far too underappreciated. What a great day it was, what a moment of pure triumph, to have discovered that there are in-betweens. What freedom it is to live in a spectral world that most people take for granted. Being somewhere in the middle is anathema in our culture, it connotes mediocrity, middlingness, an item that is so-so, okay, not bad, not good, not much of anything. So many people feel a need to go bungee jumping or to take vacations in Third World countries full of scorpions and armed dictators. So many people spend so much time in adventures meant only to take them out of that boring middle range, that placid emotional state where it feels, no doubt, like nothing ever happens. But me, all I want is that nice even keel. All I want is a life where the extremes are in check, where I am in check.

All I want is to live in between.

I will never not be on guard for depression, but the constancy, the obsessive and totalizing effect of that disease, the sense that life is something happening to other people I am watching through an opaque cloud, is gone.

The black wave, for the most part, is gone.

On a good day, I don't even think about it anymore.

 

It's funny, but when I was little, before I'd go to sleep my mom would do this routine with me where she'd tell me to think of pretty things. I would close my eyes and she would run her fingers over my cheeks and across my brow. And we'd go through this list. I think it was a way of preventing nightmares—and it would always be, you know, pussycats and puppy dogs and balloons at the zoo. Sometimes she'd mention yellow submarines, stars in the sky, blackbirds flying overhead, trees in Central Park, and even—believe it or not—that on Saturday I would get to see Daddy. Nothing that extraordinary, but when you're four years old, it's cats and dogs that make life worth living. And I kind of think it's maybe not so different now.

Epilogue

Not too long ago, my friend Olivia brought her cat to the veterinarian because she was chewing clumps of fur off her back and vomiting all the time. The doctor looked at Isabella and immediately diagnosed the animal with something called excessive grooming disorder, which meant that the cat had grown depressed and self-absorbed, perhaps because Olivia's boyfriend had moved out of the apartment, perhaps because Olivia was traveling so much. At any rate, the vet explained, this was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Isabella couldn't stop cleaning herself just as certain people can't stop vacuuming their apartments, or washing their hands all the time like Lady Macbeth. The vet recommended treating the cat with Prozac, which had proved extremely effective in curing this condition in humans. A feline-size prescription was administered.

Now, you have to understand that Olivia had been on and off Prozac and its chemical variants for a couple of years herself, hoping to find a way to cope with her constant bouts of depression. Olivia had also recently insisted that her boyfriend either go on Prozac or take a hike because his sluggishness and foul moods were destroying their relationship. And I had, of course, been on Prozac for more than six years at that point. So when she called to tell me that now Isabella was on it too, we laughed. “Maybe that's what my cat needs,” I joked. “I mean, he's been under the weather lately.”