revelations
Here is a Los Angeles story for you: a few weeks ago I went to see a psychiatrist. His office is located on Hollywood Boulevard near where it disappears into that tangled intersection with Sunset and Virgil, not too far from a massive, block-long Scientology Center. I had started having panic attacks regularly again; I had finally hit that sick-person wall where your ideas about how you should be handling a given situation come up against the reality that your options are limited or, in this case, singular. I say I let them put me on an SSRI but the truth is that I asked for it. The world just kept getting narrower. It had become clear to me that it was only a matter of time. I could go ahead and ask. If I didn't, I was just waiting to be told.
I'd been resisting this particular prescription for years. I still don't know if that was right or not: how much of that was time lost to stubbornness, and how much of it was what I had to struggle through to see that my struggling wasn't getting me anywhere. Either way, by the time I left the building that morning, prescription for Lexapro in hand, I felt nothing but exhaustion and relief at the prospect of the pills hitting my system. You know what I mean: the lightness that only comes from letting go.
Of course this is when a Scientologist tried to hand me a pamphlet on the street. They were screening a movie about Dianetics; they wanted to talk to me about the source of my stress. Further west on Hollywood there's a museum called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. "I love DRUGS," I wanted to tell this poor person. "And so does everyone coming out of that building!"
But what good would that have done her, really. I'm sure she was determined to stand on that street corner until all of her flyers had been given away, until she had preached her message, as her conscience and her religion dictated.
-
I've been resisting writing about this, too, because it feels so stupid and inevitable. How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My SSRI. It's a whole genre of essay here on the internet, with its own set of conventions and platitudes. "It's not normal to feel this way." "The medication just lets me be myself again." "You wouldn't ignore a broken leg; why ignore a broken brain?" Etcetera.
I must have read a hundred of them. I'm not sure they ultimately convinced me of anything, one way or another, except maybe the strength of my own exceptionalism. I didn't begrudge anyone else their choices, but none of their shit applied to me, either.
And it’s only been a few weeks now so like, look, I’m no expert. All I know is that it’s working, and because it’s working, it’s bizarre. When you’re unstable you learn to monitor your emotional landscape closely, always watching for the tremors that precede a quake; I think it’s one of the reasons that people who know better resist medication for so long, actually. At a certain point it becomes impossible to imagine giving up that vigil. The idea that what you’re feeling is in some sense real becomes crucial to your ability to keep enduring it. You tell yourself the devil I know. You do not realize that you yourself are both devils, known and unknown . Control is an illusion, and in this case, a distraction.
What the fuck is a real feeling? If ten days of pills can erase two years’ worth of misery, how real was the misery to begin with? Don’t answer that. There is no answer. That’s all I really know, now, all I’ve really learned from this whole so-called “process.” Your emotional landscape is exclusively internal. It can only be calibrated against itself. For the first few days I thought I felt nothing because I didn’t feel bad. I’m embarrassed by how gleeful I get over small bits of good luck, recently: a handful of fresh figs. Three different texts from three different friends about three different things arriving in succession, lighting up my screen.
-
Yesterday Kate tweeted about how she isn’t sure what her next goal is, after getting published; I shot back, “if I had a dollar for every time someone's said "but you sold a book!" like this had solved any problem but the one.”
I’ve struggled so enormously with gratitude—with feeling the things everyone tells me I am supposed to feel about what’s happening to me. There are files for the covers of two books with my name on them sitting on my computer’s desktop. I love to look at them; I love to know that they’re going to be printed out and put on bookshelves, at least briefly, very soon. I have two book deals and a bottle of Lexapro in my bag. I’m still crying over the boy who started to break my heart ten years ago and the one who banged into all my old bruises last month. Recently H. said she didn’t like making five years plans and I said, I wouldn’t even know where to start. I know where I am, I think, but then again, honestly, do I?
What happens to me next? I keep asking. What happens to me next?
-
That’s the nice thing about publishing, I will say. Some things about it are certain. I understand why everyone wants so badly to believe that its concrete accomplishments are the solution to my imaginary problems. For instance: that second book does have a cover. You can look at it here.