Drug Wars

Is unhappiness a disease that can be medicated? I never thought so. But then, I’ve always had a bit of a problem being happy.

Through the past 16 years of struggling with episodes of Major Depression, I always felt that going on a drug would erase my identity and mean I was weak. And I didn’t want to gain a bunch of weight and have deadened sex organs. These seemed like valid concerns…but people in my life kept recommending antidepressants. Recently, when I couldn’t get through a day without hysterical crying sessions, I called a friend in Ithaca who said she’d had a great experience with Lexapro, and I stopped resisting. It felt good to just let go of the burden of depression, give it up to the gods of the pharmaceutical industry. They know what they are doing, right? I even considered that maybe, if it worked out, I should stay on this drug permanently because my regular personality was just no good (as my grandfather once remarked to my dad, during his courtship of my mom: “Have a drink, Dave. You’re no good as you are.”). My regular personality could not hold down a job for long, or earn more than $15 an hour. It ended up single over and over; got a divorce, got knocked up, and had worse meltdowns than my now 2-year-old daughter. My regular personality wanted to drink a bottle of wine per night alone (but didn’t, yet). It had spent its entire 20s studying poetry, and not having enough sex. Accumulating grad school loans! Blowing up my first car, a Chevy Caprice, due to infrequent oil changes! I started envisioning the chemically-altered me as someone who would be “stable,” open her mail more than once every few weeks, create crafts and snowman-shaped pancakes for her child, marry a kind man and be able to stay married.

It was a snap to get Lex prescribed by my family doctor, and the first day of the drugged reality was pretty damn positive. I kept thinking, So this is what normal people feel like…! On the way to the store I got mad at some rude driver, as always, but did not then collapse into tears and consider self-annihilation; instead, I soon bounced back toward a vague cheerfulness. I had more energy and a sense of purpose; I functioned and accomplished shit. It was as if someone had turned a light on inside my brain, and I saw how dark, wet, and sad it had been before.

However, less than two weeks later I decided to wean off and explore the gentle world of yoga, vitamins B and D, and other less drug-induced cures because I couldn’t stand the price that is exacted: the inability to keep a thought in one’s head, complete loss of sexual function and creativity, and flat-lining of all emotions, like I can’t feel any of my feelings and am floating by the ceiling. I know that these drugs have side-effects which typically take four weeks to fade but these features, from what I have read, were not going to go away because they are the main things that such a drug accomplishes: the shutting-down or blunting of one’s feeling centers, which zaps bad feelings and, in the process, any really good ones. No thanks.

Ultimately, feelings are information, I think. We used to utilize them to keep from being attacked by wild boars; now, we modern folk don’t know what to do with them, how to let them offer their valuable, sometimes paradoxical messages and pass through our systems without getting stuck or needing to be escaped from. I’d like to get to the point where I can have a bad day and not need to unwind with a load of fries and wine. Then again, the idea of really not needing fries and wine sounds awfully Zen and slightly creepy.

Christmas moment

I don’t have much use for holidays. That’s not true: I just usually spend them depressed or grief-stricken (like 80% of Americans). So despite my efforts to keep myself above the water, so to speak, on Thanksgiving, I did not succeed and sank down again into a lot of hard feelings: of being completely alone in life (despite the fact that I did not spend the holiday alone, but with my ex and daughter); of being bad at creating emotionally warm situations, hosting, or holding anything together without huge amounts of stress; of past holidays with my grandparents which were full of people and food-abundance and champagne, and a world that only lives in my head anymore. I made an effort by having rosé champagne and making pasta, the food of Italian forebears, and key lime pie from a recipe I’ve had since 1992, from my grandmother. It’s on a postcard because she always used to mail me such things: postcards, comic strips, newspaper articles, on which she would make some cheerful commentary, her writing full of underlines and exclamation points. She possessed constant energy and enthusiasm and was able to relate fabulously, instantly, to anyone. These are not qualities I inherited.

So, Thanksgiving, and now we’re all about to wash up on the shores of the next holiday—and I inhabited a moment of a holiday feeling last night that surprised me because it was nice and reached back to things I used to feel. Sara and I were walking to the car from the Mexican restaurant we often go to—she eats the guacamole with a spoon—and the night air smelled of some delicious, faint smoke similar to sweet piñon smoke (I remember from living in New Mexico; it seemed the winter months were full of it). It was about 65 degrees out, but due to the humidity of this place there was a chill that felt wonderful. As we’re walking, we hear bells from a nearby church. I ask Sara about the bells and she says they’re “singing.” She wants me to carry her, so I do and once we reach the car we just stop, with me still holding her, and stand and listen. She is not squirming or fidgeting for once, so we can have a moment of not fighting, of just being together, physically close and under the same spell. We can see the church: grayish, stone, beautiful; and the music that is impossible to describe but sounds like any church bell, an old, delicate sound that doesn’t quite belong on this earth. I had a thought that this is the kind of parent I can be. There are things, so many things, I can’t do well: but I can do this. I can enjoy beauty with my child. I can stand here and be here and somewhere else at the same time, somewhere that is about beauty and imagination (my true homes). It’s something. There were also blue icicle lights hung on the porch of the shotgun house across the street. The house was dark so there was just the peaked shadow of its shape, and the mysterious soft lights creating a little space of privacy and joy.