Prozac Nation (23 page)

 

When it was 7:00
A.M.
and David had finally left after I'd put him through the terrors of listening to all four Grateful Dead albums in tandem, I decided to call my mother.

“Mommy,” I whimpered when she picked up the phone. “Mommy, next weekend I'm supposed to get on a plane out of Dallas, and I want to come home. I really want to come home. Everything's wrong. I can't stay here any longer. I miss you. I need to come back.”

“Oh, Ellie.”

That's all she said at first, and I couldn't tell if she was sympathetic or angry or indifferent or what. I knew that she was mostly amazed that I was awake this early in the morning, and I didn't have the courage to tell her that I hadn't even been to sleep yet, that these days I never got to sleep before this hour.

“Listen, sweetheart,” she continued, “I've decided it's really important, wherever you are, that we get you back into therapy, because I can see it's not working too well for you without it.”

“I know.”

“So somehow, I don't know how, we're going to have to come up with the money.”

“Mommy, I don't want you to hate me.”

“I don't hate you. Don't be ridiculous. I love you. But sometimes you do terrible things.”

“I don't mean to.”

“Well, I see that. And I see that you're obviously holding some kind of grudge, I don't know if it's against me or your father or the world, but I feel like if you'd been in therapy earlier, if we'd been able to stick with Dr. Isaac, maybe you wouldn't be this way now. And I feel like that's my fault, that I should really help you get the help you need now so that you'll be all right by the time you get out of Harvard.”

“You think it's possible?”

“I don't know,” she says. “I hope so.”

8

She is the rain,

waits in it for you,

finds blood spotting her legs

from the long ride.

 

DIANE WAKOSKI

“Uneasy Rider”

 

The next semester was going to be great. A recovery period. I would treat Cambridge like a metropolitan mental health retreat, a full course load of Comp Lit, café au lait, and therapy. No boyfriends, no drinking, no drugs, nothing to distract me, pleasantly or otherwise, from my single-minded, stubborn goal of sanity. I would have no life until I knew how to actually live one. Sure, now and again there'd be parties, and of course there would be friends and gossip—friends and gossip are a good thing—but no entanglements. No obsessive-compulsive relationships that are so absorbing that when you're in the middle of one you can't even get through the fashion spreads in
Vogue,
can't even read seven thousand words about Demi Moore in
Vanity Fair,
certainly can't achieve the kind of pellucid concentration it would take to really get into therapy, to work a program to make the sturdy rugged steps it would take to lick this depression thing once and for all.

The first thing that needed to be done, once I blew into town and settled into my apartment on Kirkland Street, was to find a decent therapist. Mom would foot the bill because she was totally petrified. She thought nothing less than a medical doctor, preferably one from a top school, like, say, Harvard, would do the trick because she thought I was completely nuts. But my roommate Samantha's father, one of the first lay analysts to be accepted by some important Freudian society in Europe, recommended that I see this psychiatric social worker he had trained. I decided I'd visit all of them, every name that was ever mentioned, whether by Dr. Saltenstahl at U.H.S. or by any of the screwed-up friends I had I had consultations with so many practitioners that after a while my days were just a long series of door plaques and an alphabet soup mix of titles—Ed.D., M.S.W., Ph.D., A.C.S.W., M.D.—and it struck me as an odd irony that a person as ill equipped as I was to make decisions about almost any important aspect of my life now had to decide who would help correct that condition.

I ultimately chose a psychiatrist who Dr. Saltenstahl recommended to me, a woman who at one time worked at Harvard and now had a private practice in her beautiful colonial home on Mt. Auburn Street. Her name was Diana Sterling, and I liked her because she'd gone to Harvard like me back in the early seventies, was now married to a classmate of hers, and had two kids with the civilized-but-still-trendy names Emma and Matthew who attended a Cambridge private school full of professors' children and Daughters of the American Revolution gone hippie. It seemed to me that she lived an honorable, stable life that made sense to me, unlike so many therapists I'd met who seem to have chosen their profession mainly as a way to exorcise their own demons. I also liked that she wasn't Jewish, that the certain tendencies to overmother or overburden or overcriticize that I had always taken as mere tics of ethnicity would be recognized by Dr Sterling for the destructive dysfunctional behaviors that they were I wanted a therapist who was a role model.

I would see Dr. Sterling in her basement office twice a week. I would tell her about this and that former therapist and this and that bad experience. I would explain my parents, my Jewish education, my New York City upbringing. She would ask a question now and again, but generally the whole atmosphere seemed completely benevolent, almost too placid. I was waiting for the tears, the overwhelming emotions, the catharsis, the drama, the revelations. I was waiting for therapy to bang me over the head and make me say, Ah yes, now I see:
That's
the problem, I should have known all along.

But instead, my life in Cambridge had taken on such a complete calm and uneventfulness that I never had any new incidents to work through, and I felt too unruffled to spend much time dredging up bad memories. I would actually sit on the bus to Dr. Sterling's office trying to think of things to talk about. I felt like a girl heading out for a first date with her dream boy, creating a mental agenda of potential conversation ideas just in case, heaven forbid, there was any kind of lag. I worried that I wasn't entertaining Dr. Sterling enough, I worried that she'd put me on some list of her dull patients that she'd share with her husband late at night, of the ones who couldn't even scare up enough psychodrama in their lives to get themselves through a fifty-minute hour. I worried that my decision to abstain from self-destruction was turning me into a bore. I began to think that in my current state I was too sane for therapy. I started to wonder if maybe my time and money couldn't be better spent sitting around, reading and writing and hoping that the answers would come to me.

And then I got a job working security for the Harvard Police Department two nights a week. It was a post a lot of students took because they could sit and read during their shift. My hours were from 11:00 at night until 7:00 in the morning, and I was stationed in Adams House, where most of my friends lived, so I would mostly hang out in their rooms downing quart-size cups of coffee from Tommy's Lunch and filling out a log sheet at the end of the shift. The job was good for socializing and getting some reading done, but not seeing the sun two days a week was really hard on me. Even if you woke up at sunrise every morning, Cambridge was a gray, cloudy, lightless place, a city where the days would get shorter and the nights would get long, black, and bitter cold as the winter approached. Missing out on daylight twice a week was very detrimental to my moods since I am extremely photosensitive. Every winter, I would consider going to a tanning salon just to experience some ultraviolet rays. To begin to live in darkness as early as September was almost untenable for me.

Besides the sunshine factor, being up all night two days a week threw my schedule off for the rest of the time, and I started to skip classes and sections when I was too tired to go. The anchoring ports that used to keep my days even were all lost to what seemed like a constant need for sleep. Who had time for lunch, dinner or even a coffee break when you were too zonked to move? To top it off, I decided to live off-campus in one of my moments of folly, though it is pretty rare at Harvard, where the dormitory space is so nice and usually so much cheaper than anything you can find on the local real estate market, so I felt out of touch with the flow of life.

Between my apartment and my job, I was living out of place and out of time.

And I started to get depressed again. One afternoon, after working security the night before, I couldn't remember what day it was, I couldn't figure out what classes I had missed, and I had this twilight-zone sensation in which I almost couldn't figure out if I was in my own bed, my own room, my own head. It was like having a hangover without the alcohol. I felt unsafe and suddenly certain that my apartment was not really my home, that it was just another place I was temporarily tarrying, that like everything else in my life, all I was doing here was passing through. I got out of bed, stumbled down the long corridor toward our bathroom, rinsed my face with water, and felt myself beginning to choke. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor with my head hanging over the toilet bowl, vomiting. I hadn't eaten anything in so long that all that was coming up was bile and other gastric juices, and as soon as I was done my stomach muscles, my diaphragm, and my trachea all felt very sore, as if they'd just done a full Nautilus circuit without me. The taste in my mouth was bitter, but I was too tired to get up and brush my teeth. And then the phone rang.

From the bathroom, I could hear my friend Eben on the answering machine telling me that it was five o'clock, time to leave for the Pink Floyd concert in Hartford that I had, misguidedly, told him I wanted to go to. I ran and picked up the phone and tried explaining to him that I was inexplicably sick, that I'd just thrown up, that I felt as if I might be running a fever.

“That's just from working all night, Liz,” he said. “If you get up and go out you'll feel much better.”

I knew he was probably right. But somehow I didn't care. I was certain that I couldn't move. “Eben, I can't go to Pink Floyd with you.” I started to cry. “Eben.” I sniffed. “I'm really sorry. I'll pay for my ticket. I'll pay for yours too. Just please don't give me a hard time, not now. I feel so weak, I don't know what's wrong with me. My head hurts and my body hurts and I'm scared and I don't know why.” I kept crying.

“All right, Liz. Whatever.”

The next morning, I announced to Dr. Sterling that I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown but I didn't know why. Maybe it was all the darkness and the lack of sleep. Maybe it was the simple fact that the grace period at the beginning of the semester had ended and now reality and routine and depression were kicking in. There were no boys and no booze to blame for this downer, so it was probably just my fate. But whatever it was, it all felt very physical, a psychic ailment that had produced an ague, as if my body were mounting an attack on my mind, and I described the chills, the hot flashes, the nausea, the exhaustion.

“Something is so wrong with me,” I groaned. “I'm in so much pain, not just my head but all over, all over, like a bad flu, but one that's definitely emotional even though it's coming out all physical.”

I expected Dr. Sterling to think this was all very sudden, that as recently as a few days before I was going on and on about my surprisingly salutary state, but she must have realized that people can crash very suddenly. “All that could be part of the depression,” Dr. Sterling said after I described my symptoms. “You've been in therapy about a month, so maybe it's first starting to shake you up now. Maybe you're having your first breakdown. But don't worry: It happens. It's part of the therapeutic process. This is part of how you're going to get better.”

 

And then a few days later I woke up in blood. There was blood on the sheets, blood between the sheets, blood on my nightgown, and I thought I was dying. Actually, I thought I was dead.

And then I felt the plasmatic bits of blood that encrusted my inner thighs, saw the thick clots of burgundy that traveled down my legs like a run in a pair of stockings. And I thought, Oh no.

I had been vomiting all week before that, but I figured I was just sick as usual. Story of my life. I was so empty that sometimes my body would throw up just to get emptier. But then over the weekend crazy things started to happen. Something in my head hurt so bad that there were hot rushes and hallucinations, and I decided to call my ex-boyfriend Stone and ask him to come over and drink Hungarian red wine with me—so much for no drinking—to take my mind off my mind. And he hugged me for six hours straight because I was scared that if he let go of me I might go jump out the window. My head felt like a plane about to make a crash landing. Or something like that. Actually, it was the levity the lack of anchoring that was really starting to frighten me: I was certain that if Stone let go of me I might float up to Mars.

So when I woke up Monday morning surrounded by my own blood, I was sure I was leaving my body for good. I rolled off my futon and pushed myself up and leaned against the wall, creeping slowly down the narrow corridor until I got to the phone. I curled myself around the cradle in a fetal position because the cramps hurt so badly and my lower back felt like it had been clamped with iron tongs and I dialed Stone's number.

I looked behind me and saw a trail of blood, left in dots and splatters on the floor and smears on the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting.

“Stone, I'm dying,” I said as soon as he picked up the receiver.

“Again?”

“Stone, I'm dead. I know I said that on Saturday, and I'm sorry to wake you, but there's all this blood and I'm shaking and I'm in pain and I really think I might be dying and maybe I should see a doctor.”