Prozac Nation (2 page)

But before any of this can happen, I crumple onto my bed and start to weep uncontrollably.

Christine, my best friend, comes in to ask what's wrong. Other people come in to get their coats, strewn on my bed, and I start snapping at them, telling them to get the hell out. I start yelling at Christine that I want my room back, I want my life back. As if on cue, Zap proceeds to vomit on a coat that apparently belongs to someone named Roland, which seems like just deserts for coming to my party and being part of my awful night.

I have this palpable, absolute sense that I'm cracking up, that there's really no good reason why, and that—even worse—there's nothing I can do about it. And the thing that's really bugging me, as I lie curled up, is that the scene I'm enacting reminds me of something: It reminds me of my whole life.

 

Just outside the French doors leading into my room, Christine and Jason and a few other friends—Larissa, Julian, Ron—are conferring. I can hear them, the whispers of discussion, but they don't sound nearly as concerned and conspiratorial as they might have a few years ago. They've seen me this way before, many times. They know I go through this, I survive, I go on, it could be severe premenstrual syndrome, it could be—in this case it probably is—cocaine blues. It could be nothing.

I can imagine Jason saying: Elizabeth's having one of her episodes. I can imagine Christine saying: She's losing it again. I can imagine them all thinking that this is all about a chemical deficiency, that if I'd just take my lithium like a good girl, this wouldn't happen.

By the time I stumble into the bathroom and slam both doors and curl up tight to the floor, I'm certain that there's no way they'll ever understand the philosophical underpinnings of the state I'm in. I know that when I'm on lithium, I'm just fine, that I can cope with the ebb and tide of life, I can handle the setbacks with aplomb, I can be a good sport. But when I'm off the drugs, when my head is clean and clear of this clutter of reason and rationality, what I'm mostly thinking is: Why? Why take it like a man? Why be mature? Why accept adversity? Why surrender with grace the follies of youth? Why put up with the bullshit?

I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence. And I've been on these goddamn pills for years. At first, the idea was to get me going so I could respond to talk therapy, but now it seems clear that my condition is chronic, that I'm going to be on drugs forever if I just want to be barely functional. Prozac alone isn't even enough. I've been off lithium less than a month and I'm already perfectly batty. And I'm starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath who are just better off dead, who may live in that bare, minimal sort of way for a certain number of years, may even marry, have kids, create an artistic legacy of sorts, may even be beautiful and enchanting at moments, as both of them supposedly were. But in the end, none of the good was any match for the aching, enduring, suicidal pain. Perhaps I, too, will die young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven. Scrunched up and crying here on a Saturday night, I can see no other way.

I mean, I don't know if there are any statistics on this, but how long is a person who is on psychotropic drugs supposed to live? How long before your brain, not to mention the rest of you, will begin to mush and deteriorate? I don't think chronically psychotic people tend to make it to the nursing-home-in-Florida phase of life. Or do they? And which is worse: to live that long in this condition or to die young and stay pretty?

I stand up to take out my contact lenses, which are falling out anyway, dripping down a sliding pond of tears. The pair I have on tonight is green, a spare set I got during a buy-one-get-one-free sale, which I wear when I feel like hiding behind a creepy, phony set of eyes. They give me an inanimate appearance like I'm spooked or from another planet or a lifeless Stepford Wife who cooks, cleans, and fucks with a blissful, idiotic smile. Because the lenses are already slipping off of my pupils, it appears that I have two sets of eyes, some sick twist on double vision, and as they slide out I look like a living doll, a horror movie robot whose eyes have fallen out of their sockets.

And then I'm back on the floor.

Jason comes in after everyone has left and urges me to go to bed, says something about how it will all feel better in the morning. And I say, Goddamnit, you asshole! I don't want it to feel better in the morning! I want to deal with the problem and make it better or I want to die right now.

He sits down next to me, but I know he'd rather be with Emily, his girlfriend, or anywhere else. I know he'd rather be washing dishes in the other room or sweeping the floor or gathering cans and bottles for the recycling bin. I know that I'm so awful right now that cleaning is more appealing than sitting with me.

Jason, how long have we known each other? I ask him. What's it been, at least five years, since junior year?

He nods.

And how many times have you seen me like this? How many times have you found me bawling on the floor somewhere? How many times have you found me digging a grapefruit knife into my wrist, screaming that I want to die?

He doesn't answer. He doesn't want to say: Too often.

Jase, it's like twenty-five years already, my whole life. Every so often there's a reprieve, like when Nathan and I first fell in love, or when I first started writing for
The New Yorker.
But then the dullness of everyday kicks in, and I get crazy.

He says something about how when I'm on lithium I seem to be fine. Like that makes it all okay.

I start crying hard, taking little panicked breaths, and when I can talk it's only to say, I don't want to live this life.

I keep crying and Jason just leaves me there.

Julian, who apparently is spending the night because he lost his keys, comes in next. I might as well be Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra,
receiving supplicants on the bathroom floor.

Julian says stuff like, Happiness is a choice, you've got to work toward it. He says it like it's an insight or something.

He says, You've got to believe.

He says, Come on! Cheer up! Pull yourself together!

I can't believe how trite all this is. For a moment I want to step out of myself so I can teach him some better interpersonal skills, so I can help him learn to sound a little more sensitive, more empathic than all this.

But I can't stop crying.

Finally, he picks me up, mumbling something about how all this is nothing a good night's sleep won't cure, saying something about how we're going to go get some lithium in the morning, not understanding that I don't want to feel better in the morning, how that way of life is wearing me out, that what I really want is not to feel this way in the first place. I keep pushing away from him, demanding that he put me down. I am literally doing what people mean when they say, She went kicking and screaming. Poor Julian. I start poking at his eyes to get him to put me down because that's what I learned to do in a course on self-defense for women. Jason hears me screaming and comes in, and the two of them just kind of force me into bed, and I think that if I don't comply, maybe the men in white coats will come with a straitjacket and take me away, a thought that is momentarily comforting, and ultimately, like everything else, horrifying.

 

The first time I took an overdose was at summer camp. It must have been 1979, the year I turned twelve, when I had thin thighs, big eyes, peachy breasts, sunburn, and an edge-of-adolescence prettiness that would have made you think nothing could be wrong. Then one day during rest hour, I sat in my bed on the lower bunk, with my friend Lisanne napping just above me, and began to read a book whose epigraph was from Heraclitus: “How can you hide from what never goes away?”

I cannot remember the name of the book, any of its characters or contents, but the quote is indelible, does not come out in the wash, has been on my mind ever since. No matter how many chemicals I have ever used to bleach or sandblast my brain, I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.

Unless you die. Of course, I wasn't really trying to kill myself that summer. I don't know what I was trying to do. Trying to get my mind off my mind or something. Trying to be not me for a little bit.

So I swallowed about five or ten caplets of Atarax, a prescription allergy medicine I was taking for hay fever. The drug, like most antihistamines, was highly soporific, so I fell asleep for a really long time, long enough to avoid swim instruction at the lake and morning prayers by the flagpole through the end of the week, which was really the point after all. I couldn't imagine why I was being coerced into all those activities anyway—the rote motion of newcomb, kickball, soccer, the breast stroke, making lanyards, all this regimented activity that seemed meant only to pass a little more time as we headed, inexorably, toward death. Even then, I was pretty certain, in my almost-twelve-year-old mind, that life was one long distraction from the inevitable.

I would watch the other girls in my bunk as they blow-dried their hair in preparation for night activities, learned to apply blue eye shadow as they readied themselves to become teenagers, as they conjured boy problems like, Do you think he likes me? I watched as they improved their tennis serves and learned basic lifesaving techniques, as they poured themselves into tight Sasson jeans and covered up with quilted satin jackets in pink and purple, and I couldn't help wondering who they were trying to fool. Couldn't they see that all this was just process—process, process, process—all for naught.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.
That was my motto.

As it happens, when I took all that Atarax at camp, I fell so blissfully asleep that no one seemed to notice that anything was wrong. For once, in fact, nothing
was
wrong. I was, like the line in a Pink Floyd album I couldn't stop listening to that year, comfortably numb. I think I must have been sick anyway—nothing more serious than a cold or cough, and had been staying in bed a lot. I didn't really want to go back to the infirmary, where gooey grape-flavored Dimetapp was universally recognized to be the cure for all ills. Perhaps it seemed to everyone that I was recovering from a summer flu or something like that. Or maybe they took my bed-bound state for granted, just as my classmates at school no longer expected me to be at lunch, had come to accept that I would be hiding in the locker room carving razor cuts onto my legs, playing with my own blood, as if that's what everyone else was doing between 12:15 and 1:00
P.M.
Every time one of the counselors tried to prod me out of bed, I was too passed out, and they probably thought it was easier just to leave me alone. It's not like I was anyone's pet.

Eventually, I think maybe Lisanne got to worrying. The lump of my body under woolen blankets had become a strange fixture in the room. After a few days, the head counselor came to see me in my little cot, I think to encourage me to see a doctor. I thought to tell her that I would love nothing more than to receive medical attention—
any
attention would be just fine with me—but I was too incapacitated to move.

“So how are you feeling today?” she asked as she sat down at my feet, sliding a clipboard with schedules of activities on it beside her. Through a blur in my eyes, I looked down at her legs, full of varicose veins. She was wearing Keds that were perfectly white, as if they'd never been worn before.

“I'm fine.”

“Do you think you'll want to go play volleyball with your bunk this morning?”

“No.” Did I
look
like I wanted to play volleyball, lying here and shivering under a thick of wool army blanket in the middle of July?

“Well then,” she continued, like it was normal, “you should probably see the nurse so we can figure out what's wrong with you. Are you feverish?” She pressed her hand to my forehead, which my mother once told me was not a reliable predictor of anything, just a gesture of maternal authority. “No, no.” She shook her head. “If anything, you feel cold. That's probably because you haven't been eating.”

I wondered how much she knew about me, if she'd been privy to my files, or if they even kept such things at summer camp. Did she know that I really wasn't supposed to be here at all? Did she understand that it was just that my mother sent me here for an eight-week reprieve from single parenthood? Did she know that we had no money, that I was here as some sort of charity case, that they'd taken me because my mother worked too hard for too little and didn't know what else to do with me when school was out? Did she understand that this was all a big mistake?

“Look, I'm really not sick,” I leveled with her. I was hoping that if I told her the truth about what was wrong with me she'd insist that my mother come get me this minute, which was all I really wanted. “I just have allergies, really bad allergies, and the other day I took some of my medication, and I must have taken too much because I haven't been able to move ever since.”

“What kind was it?”

I reached into the cubby beside my bed where I kept tapes and books and pills, and flashed the near-empty bottle in front of her, shaking it like a baby's rattle. “Atarax. My doctor gave it to me.”

“I see.” Since I wasn't even twelve yet, she couldn't blame this on adolescent angst. She really couldn't blame this on much of anything. Neither could I.

I found myself wanting to explain it to her, to this middle-aged woman with the kind of haircut you call a hairdo, which needed to be set in rollers every night, who had a name like Agnes or Harriet, a name that even predated my mother's generation. I wanted to open up the vial and show her the Atarax, let her see that the white childproof cap could not fool this child. I wanted to show her the solid black pills and how pretty they were. They looked like what I imagined black beauties must look like. They were so tempting, their appearance was so subversive, that it was almost impossible for me to take just one. These little black death angels were
meant
to kill you. Never mind that they were just antihistamines, perhaps no stronger than what you get over the counter. Never mind that the person who prescribed them was thinking only of the pollen that was swelling my eyes and stuffing up my nasal passages. Never mind.