It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (14 page)

“You expect too much,” he continued to say.

Patricia is a good, loving woman, I told myself in response. I’d underappreciated some very good women already. When Patricia became rigid in the face of my attempts to break through her barriers, I backed off.

If she feels too nervous under pressure, I thought, then maybe taking the pressure off might work. Maybe if I gave her a stronger sense of commitment she might feel secure enough to open up. I asked Patricia to marry me, and she said yes.

I have no illusions now that those were the best motives for proposing marriage. I’m pretty sure they’re not the worst ones, either. But the idea didn’t prove to be good, or effective. Our fights escalated, and our household became increasingly tense.

“I feel like you’re asking me to buy a house,” I finally said, in a moment of frustration sometime after our engagement. “I’ll put my entire life savings into it, and I’ll promise to live in the house for the rest of my life. But the agreement you’re insisting on is that I can only see the rooms on the ground floor, even though there are two more floors upstairs. Whatever’s inside those rooms is off limits until after I move in, and no matter what I might find up there, I’ve already agreed I’ll never move out.”

In case it’s not clear, if you ever find yourself saying anything like that to anyone, especially a fiancée, it’s time to pack up the tent and leave town. The show is over, and there won’t be any encores. But that doesn’t mean the third act won’t stretch on for another year or two.

The relationship was then extended, and eventually doomed, by my absence. I spent seven months making a television show in Los Angeles, two months at home, and then two months shooting the movie in Australia where I met Abbey Leigh. That’s a spell of nine out of eleven months apart. While I was in Los Angeles Patricia visited once.  While I was in Australia, as every other actor’s spouse came and went, Patricia opted to stay home due to her terror of flying even the shortest distances.

I was going out of my mind. I was frustrated by my relationship at home, but forbidden to pursue anything else while away. I ached for some form of erotic attachment to see me through our extensive separations. After building up my courage to ask directly for what I wanted – and, though it might sound silly, what I felt I
needed
to stay connected – Patricia decided that she didn’t enjoy phone sex, or even talking about sex over the telephone. That’s when I met the twenty-five-year-old Australian. She was a young woman who possessed not only beauty, but an uncanny honesty, forthrightness, and interest in exploring her own emotional life and the motivations of those around her. I spent a tender and torturous two months falling in love behind my fiancée’s back, doing my best to keep my hands off the woman I felt compelled to spend all my time with.

“I don’t want to have anything to confess when I get home,” I told everyone around, who could easily see what was happening. “I want to be able to say, ‘Don’t worry, honey. It was only emotional.’”

I had myself locked down in a prison of my own making. I was getting none of what I wanted, and doing no one else any good. The conflicts were my own. But a good deal of my paralysis stemmed from trying to live up to the lessons I thought I’d learned in psychotherapy about my overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

“You expect too much,” Dr. Loopy had said.

Which might have been true. But I sure needed more than what I was getting.

Back home in New York after meeting Abbey Leigh, I resumed my psychotherapy sessions. For fifty minutes two or three times a week, I obsessed. Through agonized hour-long phone calls with friends, over every meal at a restaurant with anyone, and every step of the way around the Central Park reservoir, I bombarded myself, and whoever was with me, with my dilemma.  Should I stay or should I go? Was it right to override all my concerns and marry Patricia? Or should I do what I’d already determined was my unhealthy pattern thus far by (God, forgive me) trading up for a better model?

Those are good questions to ask, if they accurately identify the problem. But what if a person, like me, really did suffer from an inability to appreciate the privileges and people in his life, like Dr. Loopy suggested – but also really
was
with the wrong person? At the least, one might become confused. If you were me, you’d become profoundly depressed.

The topic of antidepressant medication had been brought up by every one of the therapists I’d seen over the years. But the conversations had always seemed rote, as if it were an option that had to be discussed and dispensed with, so the real “treatment” could begin. I’d quickly expressed my reluctance to taking any unnecessary medication, my concerns about antidepressant medication and their side effects in particular, as well as my belief that I wasn’t depressed enough to need it. (This has since made me question – in direct contradiction of my general views on medical self-determination – whether a depressed person is the best judge of whether or not he’s depressed enough to need chemical interventions.)

My psychotherapists all concurred with my assessment. We therefor launched into the “talking through my issues” approach to treatment. Which meant beginning the laborious and surreal process of my telling my life story to a string of medically certified strangers. Due to the particulars of my story, this recounting played like a horror movie highlight reel. The experience of telling my story made me just depressed enough to leave each therapist’s office aching for another appointment.

I’d sailed through my years of treatments, recurrences, and recoveries from acute leukemia without any psychotropic medication. I’d survived the breakup with Jackie, the girlfriend of five years who nursed me through the illness, without it. I’d stumbled through my post-leukemia life and relationships with my dopamine and serotonin levels unaltered from their default concentrations. I’d continued to hold off throughout the year of tormenting two different women (and myself) on two separate continents. I continued to bounce like a pinball with limited human awareness from one entanglement to another, either with women I’d already been involved with, or ones I hadn’t yet pushed completely away, without ingesting any prescription medication. Only after the terrorist attacks on New York in September 2001, after Patricia and I had taken yet another failed shot at reconciliation; only after I’d visited Sotheby’s and sold off the engagement ring; only after Abbey Leigh declined yet another of my back-and-forth approaches, in which I asked if I could come see her again in Australia; only after I’d been left completely alone in what, at the time, felt like the loneliest city in the United States, did I find myself starting off my psychotherapy session unable to speak, and able only to cry. I told Dr. Loopy I felt that I couldn’t function, and that I needed some help beyond just talk. We discussed the pharmaceutical options, a drug was decided upon, and I started taking the pills.

Sometime before this surrender to medication Patricia and I attended some agonizing “couples therapy” sessions together. During our last session Patricia said something terrifically astute.

“I don’t think Evan really loves me,” she said. “I think he
values
me. I think he respects me, and values my devotion. Evan loves
qualities
about me. But I don’t think he really loves me, for just
being
me.”

Patricia was equating “love” with “enjoyment,” as opposed to what I’d usually thought of as the more substantial aspects she’d dismissed: respect, value, loyalty, devotion. As if being “enjoyed” was even more important.

And she was right. As true as it can be that good sex, or fun and excitement, might not be enough to keep people together without shared core values, the cruel hoax with Patricia and I turned out to be that the opposite was just as true. Shared values aren’t enough if you don’t enjoy the same things, or don’t have fun in the same ways. Patricia is the one who finally decided we weren’t compatible enough, that we shouldn’t be living together, or even seeing each other. She no longer imagined us having a life together.

“I can’t see it, and I don’t want it,” she said.

I spent weeks crying over this. I fell into a state of entrenched sadness that I’d never encountered before. I’ve come across the clichéd phrase describing depression as “falling into a pit.” Like a lot of clichés, I found it to be based on truth. I felt submerged, that I could hear life going on somewhere above me, and see light, but that both were beyond my reach. Even in the depths of illness I’d never felt so without ability to plot a course back to the land of the living.

And I wasn’t able to erase Patricia’s parting words from my mind. “I can’t see it, and I don’t want it,” she’d said. But, in replaying the moment again and again in my mind, I seized upon four words she’d added at the end: “At least not right now.” I endured weeks of sleepless nights in imaginary discussions with her. Some of these led to her changing her mind.  Against my psychiatrist’s advice I dialed her up. I asked whether she might have any desire to ever try again. Patricia was surprised to hear my voice, and seemed even more surprised by my question.

“No, Evan,” she said. “I thought I was really clear. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave open the possibility of trying again. It’s not something I’ve been thinking about, and it’s not something I want to do.”

This time she didn’t end with “At least not right now.” This time, that was it.

I hung up the phone, and I fell apart. I cursed myself for setting myself back again. I wondered how long it would take, this time, to pull myself up, and out. The answer arrived exactly ten minutes later when I stopped crying and never felt so sad again.

I immediately thought about the medication. It had to have been the medication. Something sad had happened to me that – rightfully or wrongfully – felt crushing, and I’d simply cried, for a period of minutes, and then felt better. That had never happened to me before. In fact, the crying switched off so suddenly I was startled. I felt so well and pain-free I thought there must be something wrong, so I performed my own pseudo-psychological test.

For weeks, I’d been unable to think about Patricia without experiencing agonizing pain. I had to wrestle my thoughts to keep them from wandering toward her in order to just keep myself functioning. I decided to purposely push my thoughts toward the most painful, regret-filled memories I could conjure. As hard as I tried that day, and over the days and weeks to come, I could not make myself feel sad.

This is precisely what I’d been assured medication was not capable of accomplishing. It’s what I’d always heard was beyond its powers. But I can tell you, whatever it might have done for anyone else, it did it for me. It did it completely. It did it absolutely. It did it so much it freaked me out. But after feeling as sad as I had, I didn’t mind at all.

The drug seemed to set a hard floor beyond which my emotions were not capable of falling. But it also did more. It also lifted my baseline mood tremendously. I found myself walking the streets of New York with an inexplicable smile on my face, just minutes after feeling awful as a result of Patricia finally breaking things off completely. In the coming days, I felt contented, enthusiastic, and in possession of an energetic curiosity about everything around me. That might sound banal, but I’d never had a feeling like that before. I’d known happiness, and I’d known euphoria, but only the kind that resulted from something very pleasant actually occurring. I had never known feeling good for no explicit reason.

I found this fascinating. I had spent nearly every moment of my life wondering why most everyone around me seemed so much more optimistic than I was. About everything. I’d mocked – privately and publicly – what I experienced as the naïve cheerleading I encountered in all my collaborative endeavors, finding others suspect for their enthusiasm. In one crashing moment of realization, I learned that most of the people I’d come across lived their lives in a profoundly different emotional state than I had walked around with for as long as I could remember. So this is how all those people I’ve made fun of for being silly must feel all the time, I thought. But if they’re happy and having a good time, while I’m feeling miserable and superior, who’s the silly one?

I took antidepressant medication for only seven months. The experience profoundly altered my perceptions. I’ve heard depression described as “anger turned inward.” My anger (in case you haven’t noticed) points straight out. I’ve also heard it described as “grief out of proportion to circumstance.” I prefer this assessment, because “proportion” has to do with “perspective,” and the medication permanently altered mine.

I got to feel, for the first time, what it’s like to walk through a day with a different chemical cocktail bathing my brain. I was transformed into an innately happier creature. The experience of that less burdened state lived on in my memory long after discontinuing the medication. A person doesn’t need to hold a newborn baby to know how wonderful holding a baby feels. The memory endures, and the ability to conjure the sensation from that memory exists. Releasing my mind from its depressive constraints for just a few months gave me an awareness of an emotional state I hadn’t known was possible. Once I’d tasted that sweeter existence, even one that was a result of pharmaceutical manipulation, I found my mind was able to aim toward, and reach, that brighter light on its own.

“You expect too much,” Dr. Loopy had said. Maybe he was right. Still, I discovered more than I knew was possible.

The suddenness of the shift made me question my belief in psychotherapy as a curative tool. I still recommend it wholeheartedly as a way to understand oneself better, and as an aid in relating to and getting along with others. But I’ll never depend on it to address another depression. For that I’ll take a pill. Pills gave me my first glimpse out of the hole I was stuck in, and my first glimpse back into the hole from a different place than the bottom of it. I can only wonder how different things might have been had I taken them a lot sooner than I did.