A Delicious Placebo
This is what whould happen. In the middle Of movie theaters, meetings, and restaurants, I would suddenly have to leave. Jamming my arms into my coat sleeves, I would face away from anyone who could see me, my wrists tightening. I felt asthmatic. If someone noticed that I was rushing, I'd evince artificial warmth designed to get that person away. "I need to quickly go outside, okay? Because the garage is closing. It's an early-closer. And I have to work," I'd garble, inventing words.
I developed a faith in motor memory. As I ducked out of the places I was supposed to be, I would stand up like an erect human woman, remembering the feeling of normal standing and pleasant hands. And then, over and over, I would say I was sick -- sick with any documented ailment that came into my head, any ailment I could think of except "depression," which no one, no matter what the brochures with grainy girls' pictures and the word "reuptake" say, will ever believe is a real sickness.
I didn't think of it as a sickness either. I thought of it as work. Once I got outside, I would crawl into a taxi, sink down behind the divider, and start my classified work. I'd cry until I felt blood-poisoned with tears and keep crying. After a few minutes the driver would say, "Are you all right?" In careful adherence to my contract's confidentiality clause, I would always answer, "Yes!"
Adam broke up with me in January, at midnight, after two hours of stares and logic loops. Finally, he admitted he needed to get ahold of his feelings before he could see me again. I assumed the role of love executive and said, "Let's touch base later." But, at the door, a more proactive plea occurred to me. "You're denying exactly what's best about life!" I blurted, and that was my last coherent declaration for a long time.
At home in my apartment in Brooklyn, I scoured the cupboards for a sedative, hearing distant notes from a Wharton or Tolstoy medley. Was there an apothecary that still delivered brown-paper packages of laudanum to shrieking women? I drank wine from the bottle, took a double dose of cold medicine. In my hands, filings from the Sudafed package sparkled evilly. Then my mind began to blur. I panicked: if I drift off while I am so weakened, I will wake up demolished, my bones smashed. Frightened, I lay stiff but groggy on top of my bedcovers. Later, thinking I was awake, I dreamed of slicing, shape-shifting light.
That was the beginning. Overnight, it seemed, I'd gone from a twenty-eight-year-old optimist, the type advertisers and politicians take into account, who might find a career and start a family, to a person who is unreliable and preoccupied, a person other people find themselves trying to avoid.
In my first few weeks without Adam, I thought I could engineer a quick turnaround, working maniacally and seeing everyone I knew. When that failed to lift my mood, I submerged myself in the procedures of heartbreak, lolling around my room for weeks, reading the severe poetry of Louise Bogan and listening to overproduced songs by Fiona Apple. But then the lovesick vapors burned off and I discovered something stony, jagged, and permanent underneath.
Every day I felt sadder and stranger. If depression came into my life attached to heartbreak, as one virus piggybacks another, it soon asserted its independence, bringing conclusions to my mind that were captious, adamant, and dark. I began to see life as too long, too easy to botch, and, once botched, impossible to repair. I took stock of how other people had or hadn't ruined their lives; worse, I told them what I thought. "You married too early and should have moved to South America," I pronounced to a friend who lived contentedly with her husband in Colorado. Those flights of rhetoric put me in a bind: the beliefs and actions that grew out of being depressed justified depression, and renewed it.
After a month of vain displays of resiliency, I decided I was living in the aftermath of a huge mistake. The mistake appeared to be the begging but casually not begging letter that I sent Adam over Christmas. Then the mistake seemed to be my not having been receptive enough when, several months earlier, he appeared drunk at my door at two in the morning and caught me with a Clearasil face. But the probe went back further. I shouldn't have gone to graduate school, shouldn't have broken up with good guys, shouldn't have lied to my parents about how far along on my dissertation I was. That led me to more mistakes: lying generally, not being careful in my career, taking praise too seriously.
Truthfully, I thought, exercising my hot self-knowledge, the mistake must have been longer lasting, a perverted pattern of aspiring out of ordinary happiness and abrading life's delicate surface by thrashing out for -- what? -- some brilliance or beauty or fury or extravagance that I had rabidly decided I deserved, my confidence having been mysteriously canted up. After that, I would throw off the safety measures -- friends, courtesy, family, money, work, health, sleep -- and, on the brink of breaking out of the earth's atmosphere, suddenly come diving down, without security, and hit the ground flat on my chest, crunching ribs. Then: cold stunned sobriety, and the Icarus-like mortification at having overestimated myself and flaunted my dissatisfaction with normal life. Normal life now looked like paradise: I would have to apologize to it and plea-bargain with it and then seek atonement from it in order to get back in its good graces again.
This sine curve accounted -- I decided -- for screeds I wrote in college, assorted ideological frenzies, and numberless decisions I made to just get in the car with these guys or just, fuck it, tell the faculty what I think.