And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch-there’s not a chance. Quickly, in less than a week, I could feel an extra inch of daylight opening in my mind. He put me on a few different drugs-Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Busperin-until we found the combination that didn’t make me nauseated or turn my libido into a dim and distant memory. Please don’t do anything to harm my brain.” He said, “If you had a kidney disease, you wouldn’t hesitate to take medication for it-why are you hesitating with this?” But, see, that only shows how ignorant he was about my family a Gilbert might very well not medicate a kidney disease, seeing that we’re a family who regard any sickness as a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure. I laid copies of the three books I’d already published on his desk, and I said, “I’m a writer.
I told him my objections and reservations about antidepressants. When I went to see the psychiatrist that afternoon, he asked me what had taken me so long to get help-as if I hadn’t been trying to help myself already for so long. I listened to Susan’s one-sided conversation with the doctor, listened to her say, “I’m afraid my friend is going to seriously hurt herself.” I was afraid, too.
I huddled in a ball while Susan made the phone calls and found me a psychiatrist who would give me a consultation that very day, to discuss the possibility of prescribing antidepressants. The image of my pain mirrored back at me through her visible fear for my life is still one of the scariest memories for me out of all those scary years. I couldn’t stop thinking about those women.Īnd I will never forget Susan’s face when she rushed into my apartment about an hour after my emergency phone call and saw me in a heap on the couch. The only thing that would’ve happened was that they and their families would have starved. Nobody would have, or could have, helped them. I don’t think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat down in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, “I cannot walk another step further-somebody has to help me.” It wouldn’t have served those women to have stopped walking. The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. But something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it. I had some other good ideas around that time-about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun might stop the suffering. I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. For me, the decision to go the route of “Vitamin P” happened after a night when I’d sat on the floor of my bedroom for many hours, trying very hard to talk myself out of cutting into my arm with a kitchen knife. If I may impose my opinions here, I think it should always be the last thing you try. The last thing I tried, after about two years of fighting this sorrow, was medication. (When a friend complimented my new look, all I could say, grimly, was, “Operation Self-Esteem-Day Fucking One.”) And when those officious women’s magazines kept telling me that my low self-esteem wasn’t helping depression matters at all, I got myself a pretty haircut, bought some fancy makeup and a nice dress. I leaned on my support network, cherishing my family and cultivating my most enlightening friendships. I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine. Just to prove that-while I couldn’t stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue-I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot. I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, “Is there anything about this scene you can change, Liz?” And all I could think to do was stand up, while still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of my living room. I tried so hard to fight the endless sobbing.
I exposed myself to the uplifting arts and carefully protected myself from sad movies, books and songs (if anyone even mentioned the words Leonard and Cohen in the same sentence, I would have to leave the room).
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