The Noonday Demon (44 page)

Tina Sonego is a flight attendant for an international charter airline flying the U.S. military to engagements and flying customers for cruises and group holidays. She calls herself a “people pleaser” who has spent a lifetime trying to be nice enough to people so they’d like her. “I am funny,” she says, “and loud, and cute, and sexy—I’m everything you’d want a stewardess to be. I form completely happy emotional attachments to my passengers, for eight hours, and then they’re gone.” She is in her midforties, and her upbeat manner belies a lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism. She has a quick mind, but “intelligence was not a thing in my family; no one ever even thought of it,” and since she suffers from dyslexia, she never got past high school. Her grandmother was a maid who was expected to provide sexual services to her employer in Morocco; her grandfather was a furniture maker who grew hash there for export. She was born of first-generation immigrants on both sides and grew up in a Moroccan enclave in California, speaking a mix of French, Spanish,
and Arabic at home. Mental illness had no place in this world. “I was asking questions that didn’t have any place in our house. So I learned to perform, and I had an outside persona so that no one would ever see the sad, self-loathing woman inside me. I was split in half. And depression was what happened when the halves hit.” Tina’s father was moody, perhaps depressive, a man who had to be sheltered from anything upsetting; her mother “needs TLC but does not give it. She told me years ago, ‘Honey, I can’t make myself more sensitive just to understand you.’ ” Her sister was the same. “I was watching TV with her a few years ago, and I said, ‘Who’s that character?’ and she told me everything that had happened in the character’s life for the past twenty years. And she doesn’t even know what guy I’m going out with. I grew up thinking I was damaged goods.” After Tina’s father died, her mother remarried. Tina adores her stepfather and gives him much credit for her relative good health today.

Tina had her first full-fledged breakdown when she was nineteen, traveling in Israel and planning to write a book about kibbutzim. Her sister had to come and rescue her and bring her home. A few years later, she decided to move to Rome to be with a man she loved, and when she arrived, “the relationship turned metallic, sex was beyond impossible, and I had nothing to say.” She had sunk into another depression. Like many depressives who abuse substances, she suffered from particularly acute self-loathing and was drawn to criminal people who would treat her violently. A few years after the Rome episode, she married a Dane and moved to Copenhagen. That lasted less than two years; after the murder of her husband’s mistress, both she and her husband were questioned at length. Though they were both released, the marriage had been destroyed; he threw her out, and she had another breakdown. Her work at the time was flying soldiers to Desert Storm. She was on a layover in Rome and suddenly found she could not go on. “I still remember the moment. I ordered a chicken salad and it tasted like chalk. I knew I was depressed. And I went downhill so fast. That’s when I really started drinking. I just did everything to fuck myself up to the bitter end. I would just black out and drink and black out and drink and black out and drink. I always left suicide notes: if I don’t wake up, call my mother. I was using alcohol to kill myself. It was the easiest drug I knew; it was cheap; it was accessible. And it is respectable.”

She entered a psychiatric hospital in South Carolina, which was “like a holding area, where they were supposed to try to fix you, and the depressed people never got any attention because we didn’t make noise like the other crazies. I felt like Chicken Little, like the sky was falling. Oh, the anxiety! Anxiety in depression is this feeling like you have a terrible secret, and everyone’s going to find out, and you don’t even know what
the secret is.” She went on antidepressants and some other prescription drugs and mixed them with alcohol in an attempt to overcome anxiety. She had two grand mal convulsions as a result and ended up unconscious for three days in another hospital.

For Tina, depression was not numbness but pain. “I felt like a sponge that was waterlogged with passion, heavy and bloated. I was not silent in my pain. I would stay up all night writing letters to God in the dark. I was not born to be happy, joyous, free. If my body had its druthers, I’d be depressed all the time. When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me, ‘Be happy or go to your room with that sour face.’ I wasn’t being deliberately like that. It’s just that that’s who I am.” Interaction with other people is often acutely painful for Tina Sonego. “Dating, to me, was the most excruciating thing that God ever made. I used to throw up in the bathroom. I got married to escape the pain—it hurts me to death, wondering why no one asks me out.” Tina Sonego soon married her second husband, a Malaysian living in the United States who got in trouble with the law and returned home. She followed him to his mother’s traditional Islamic household. The constraints were simply beyond her. “My breakdown spiraled fast when I was there; I flew home sicker than I had ever been in twenty years.”

Back in the United States, she continued drinking; it was the only way she could find to control crippling anxiety. Periodically she would go to rehab and recover partway for a short time—she has now been through full-scale rehab four times. Her insurance didn’t cover treatment for addiction, but she was able to use the mental health diagnosis to get expenses covered. “The rehab program? It’s the last stop before Lourdes,” she says.

Tina Sonego went to her first AA meeting about a decade ago, and the program has been her lifesaver. She describes it as the only place she has ever been able to be honest with people. The program has not freed her of depression, but it has given her a different methodology for dealing with it. “Without the alcohol in your body trying to blot out the bad emotions, they all come out like firecrackers. But thank God I was at least a drunk, and there was something I could do about it. I went to a meeting of Emotions Anonymous, and I felt so bad for all those people because they had nothing to remove, nothing they could see to fix. Drunks are such hard-core people. There’s nothing like a drunk saying, ‘Well, did you take a drink over it?’ I can talk to them about depression, like I own it. It’s like getting a college degree, and then you have the right to talk about some things and not feel weird about them. That’s all us drunks really want, is someone to tell our story to, someone we know will listen.”

When she first began to be sober, Tina Sonego despaired. “That was
the worst depression I ever had. That was when I secluded myself in my apartment, and since I couldn’t make decisions, I just ate turkey and bologna sandwiches for a month. Depression is a search for invalidation. And you can always find as much as you want. When you’re depressed, you keep seeking to prove that you’re unworthy. We had this discussion at AA: Who are our judges? And I realized that if one judge wasn’t giving me the negative response I needed, I’d just find another one. Even now, as I catch on to a rising star, I hear my sister saying, ‘Oh, you’re trying to be bigger than you are.’

“I’ve now been through my fifth, sixth, seventh episodes and it’s like ‘It’s back! I know what’s happening!’ It reminds me of when you’ve been absorbed in a movie and suddenly the credits start to roll and you fall back into your own life. That’s how it feels. Like the movie is over. I still can’t do a thing about it. But you do get to the point where you realize it’s not going to last forever, where you can finally be able to just wait.”

She has continued going to AA meetings for five years now—“it’s like summer camp for your brain,” she says. “I’m tired of trying to find out why. Why did I have breakdowns, become a drunk? It would be interesting to know, but why waste the time: knowing isn’t going to make me feel any better. Sobriety is like a pyramid, and every time we go up a step we feel like we’re getting somewhere, and yet there’s always another step to go. When we look down, we can’t really see the steps we’ve taken and so we feel desperate, but if we look up, we’ll see God’s finger piercing the sky and know we’re going the right way.”

Tina Sonego describes the moment when she felt the drinking and the worst of the depression had lifted. “I was in Japan, and they had these beautiful flowers in the middle of a department store. And I just stopped there and touched these flowers, and I said, ‘I have a relationship with you.’ I looked at those beautiful flowers and said, ‘I’ve got a relationship with you right now.’ It doesn’t mean it has to last forever; it doesn’t mean I have to carry you with me. It’s just, I have a relationship with you right now. And so, to this day, I still remember those flowers. I still remember the joy they gave me for that one moment.” A few years later “I had an epiphany at the Frankfurt airport. I walked around, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and just wondered what the hell was going on in my life, because something felt different. And I didn’t know what it was. And then I did. I finally had a voice. I didn’t know what to do with it yet, but I knew I had a voice.”

It is a hard-won voice, but it is a clarion one. Tina Sonego is capable of being amazingly upbeat; she is a trained tap dancer who will go up to the roof of the hotel where she is staying to practice dancing and breathe the night air.

“I miss the hungry years. God, I miss the hungry years. I miss the therapists who just got down on their hands and knees and tried to make me well. And I miss the amount of emotion, even if it was bad emotion. I’ll never again have that amount of emotion unless I crash again. Life will always be an experiment for me after depression, the big Ds. But I have realized the fruits of depression—though I would have slapped the face of anyone who mentioned that idea to me when I was sick. I have this dream, of getting together with a bunch of survivors of serious depression and addiction and spending a night all together dancing and laughing about the big Ds. That’s my idea of heaven.”

I have a fairly nonaddictive personality. I have had withdrawal from certain substances, but I have never had a compulsion to consume anything. A drink does not particularly make me want another drink. A good feeling that I know to be dangerous does not overwhelm me to the point at which I want another good feeling. I had never been very sympathetic with addiction until I started taking Zyprexa. It was not the addiction to Zyprexa that made the difference. No, it was that Zyprexa destroyed the set point of my appetite. Nowadays, I can eat a perfectly normal meal and still be famished, and that hunger can be so extreme as to drive me out of my house in the middle of the night to get food. I sit with my hunger and think about how ugly a paunch can be; I remember hours of exercise that burned only a few calories. Then I feel that if I don’t eat, I’ll die, and I break down, and I go and stuff myself. Then I hate having done it. I don’t make myself throw up because I don’t want to get into a pattern of doing so; and besides, I have an iron stomach and almost nothing makes me throw up. Zyprexa addicted me to food, and at one point I had gained twenty-five pounds because of it. If you could find something that did for libido what Zyprexa does for appetite, you’d be spinning out the Don Juans. I have learned what it is like to have an overpowering, compelling drive toward a self-destructive consuming. Within the normal fluctuations of my moods, a good mood gives me self-discipline and I stave off the chocolate cupcakes; but a depressed mood saps me of that strength. Depression enables addiction. Resisting desires takes so much energy and will, and when you are depressed, it is too hard just to say no—to food, to alcohol, to drugs. It’s really simple. Depression weakens you. Weakness is the surest path to addiction. Why should you say no when no will lead you only to more intolerable misery?

M
any depressives never become suicidal. Many suicides are committed by people who are not depressed. The two subjects are not parts of a single lucid equation, one occasioning the other. They are separate entities that frequently coexist, each influencing the other. “Suicidality” is one of the nine symptoms of a depressive episode listed in
DSM-IV,
but many depressed people are no more inclined to end their lives than are people with appalling arthritis: the human capacity to bear pain is shockingly strong. Only if one decides that suicidality is a sufficient condition for a diagnosis of depression can one say that the suicidal are always depressed.

Suicidality has been treated as a
symptom
of depression when it may in fact be a problem that coexists with depression. We no longer treat alcoholism as a side effect of depression: we treat it as a problem that occurs simultaneously with depression. Suicidality is at least as independent of the depressions with which it often coincides as is substance abuse. George Howe Colt, author of
The Enigma of Suicide,
says, “Many clinicians believe that if they successfully [treat depression], they’ve treated the suicidal patient, as if suicidality were simply a nasty side effect of the underlying illness. Yet some suicidal patients have no diagnosable underlying illness, and patients often kill themselves shortly after coming out of a depression—or long after a depression has lifted.” A clinician treating someone who is depressed and suicidal will in general focus on curing the depression. While curing the depression may help to forestall the suicide, it will not necessarily do so. Almost half of all suicides in the United States are committed by people who have been in the care of a psychiatrist, and yet most come as a great surprise. There is something wrong with our thinking. One should not assume that suicidality can be lumped in with symptoms such as disrupted sleep; nor should one stop treating suicidality simply because the depression with which it has been associated seems
to have lifted. Suicidality is an associated problem that requires its own treatment. Why is it not classed as a diagnosis of its own, related to and overlapping with depression, but essentially distinct from it?