Skin Game: A Memoir (19 page)

Under the spell of his optimism, I at last quit my hateful job, after seven years, five months, and four days. Wailing predictions of certain disaster, financial ruin, and lifelong unemployability all the way, nevertheless I quit. I went back to graduate school. I reimmersed myself in language and literature as one who has been wandering the desert plunges bodily into the welcome, cooling waters of an oasis. I ought to have been deliriously happy. I wasn’t.

Instead, I cycled from elation to despair at a dizzying rate that left me stunned and exhausted—sometimes, in the course of one three-hour seminar, I rocketed back and forth between these extremes a half-dozen times or more. My public self, meanwhile, somehow managed to continue attending and contributing intelligently to the classroom discussion. The two almost entirely unrelated personae uneasily cohabited within my flesh.

I had dreamed for years of a life comprising only long hours of solitude and a thick stack of books, but now, when at home, I found my anxieties racing out to fill the enormous silence, churning it into a turbulent sea of worry. I was paralyzed by anxiety, too restless to stay still, too indecisive to move.

*   *   *

When you date someone, and she haltingly confesses that she’s in therapy, this patina of angst endows her with a certain poetic glamour. But when you marry her, and get to live day and night with the reasons
why
she is in therapy, angst loses a good measure of its appeal.

“You don’t cut anymore, though, do you?” he’d asked once early in our relationship, the question one that we would revisit again and again in the coming years.

A quandary: the truthful answer, or the answer that would make him happy? I didn’t want to repeat all my past mistakes. I didn’t want to continue the self-editing and the half-truths and the seamless evasions. But to say no, I no longer cut, though it would make him happy, would not be entirely the truth. I still cut, sometimes. On the other hand, to admit that I was not entirely an ex-self-mutilator, though the truth, would not make him happy.

I chose the frank equivocation, the honest half-truth, the candidly evasive answer:

“You know, the cutting doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s not about you. It’s not because of you. It’s an old, old history.”

“But you won’t do it anymore,” he said, not so much a question as the salesman’s assumed close.

Here in the course of only a minute’s dialogue was precisely the reason I had always avoided honesty, why honesty was not a good idea: the impossible promise, the promise you make for the promisee’s peace of mind and not your own.

He was a project guy, a tackle-a-problem-and-fix-it guy, and he felt he ought to be able to fix me, too.

“I know you say it doesn’t have anything to do with me,” he said, “but if you cut now I can’t help feeling like somehow I’m responsible.”

“Why does it have to be about
your
feelings?” I wanted to say resentfully. Why did I have to give up what I needed in order to make him happy?

“It’s so destructive,” he said.

“But it isn’t,” I insisted. “It’s not about hurting or punishing myself. It’s not like I’m drinking or doing drugs—that’s destructive.”

“It is destructive. It hurts me.”

“But it doesn’t have anything do to with you!” I said, exasperated.

“Of course it does! It might not be my fault, but I can’t just sit there and say it’s no big deal to me if you’re cutting yourself up with razor blades.”

At the time, his position annoyed me. It struck me as unreasonable and overly alarmist. Too stuck on his perspective and insufficiently sympathetic to mine. After all, I’d been cutting for the better part of two decades, and no one else among the few who knew about it had ever made a fuss. Even my counselors, when I sprang it on them, had merely nodded gravely, not even a trace of a wince or a twitch of an eyebrow to suggest undue concern.

I was surprised, taken aback, then, by the expectation implicit in his stubborn refusal just to let the matter slide—the expectation that love obligated me to consider
his
feelings on the issue. I’d always believed that a relationship was dedicated, above all else, to the equable preservation of an undisturbed peace, and that all parties to the relationship tacitly conspired toward this end. You didn’t volunteer information no one else wanted, and they didn’t ask questions they didn’t want to hear the answers to. Now here was this man blundering recklessly across the rules of engagement, and how was I to respond?

*   *   *

One of those long, empty afternoons, when I ought to have been reading my way through a few hundred pages of
Clarissa
for my next day’s seminar in the eighteenth-century novel, I sat curled up instead in the threadbare easy chair in my study. The chair was one my parents had bought before I was born, comfortably familiar in its frayed upholstery sprouting tufts of some silky, pre-kapok stuffing. The three o’clock light of a winter afternoon—the light of sinking depression—dropped listlessly through my window, and I could feel my spirits sagging with the declining angle of the sun.

At that moment, an understanding that had been coming together slowly in my mind for years suddenly coalesced: that the exhausted light of late afternoon
always
depressed me. It ought to have been the most obvious fact in the world, but I had never understood it clearly until this moment.

With this realization, one edge, one absolutely reliable fact was laid against the otherwise apparently featureless miasma of my unhappiness.

I suppose I’d always imagined that someday, somehow, I would rid myself completely of this unhappiness like one shrugging off a sweater—that some change in the geography of my life, or the achievement of some magical inner circle of therapeutic accomplishment, would put it fully and irrevocably behind me. Now, however, I could see that my revenant despairs had their own pattern, that as surely as they receded, so they would return, but that just as they would inevitably return, so they would once again recede. The respite might not come for days, maybe even weeks. It might last only a moment, or it might settle in for days on end, so that it became difficult to remember the precise features of unhappiness.

Somehow, however, just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return—if not predictably, then nevertheless reliably—was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure, a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years.

Somehow, too, in recognizing that something so arbitrary as the tenor of winter light had the power to disrupt my entire emotional circuitry, I found an odd relief. Maybe unhappiness wasn’t something you had to qualify for through a suitable measure of suffering. Maybe unhappiness
was
my suffering.

I remembered the afternoon of my MRI, the way I’d seen my brain that day for what it is—an organ. A lump of tissue and cells and nerves, no less than heart or lungs or kidney, generating perception as much as the heart pumps blood or the lungs extract oxygen. How we know and feel and understand the world is made possible merely by the pulse of electrochemical activity. If a heart could fail in its pumping, a lung in its breathing, then why not a brain in its thinking, rendering the world forever askew, like a television with bad reception? And couldn’t a brain fail as arbitrarily as any of these other parts, without regard to how fortunate your life might have been, without regard to the blessing and cosseting that, everyone was so eager to remind you, disentitled you from unhappiness?

32

I can say that there’s something perversely comforting in knowing that even unhappiness has its own reliability. Nevertheless, looking forward only to another and another and another bout of misery was not, in the long view, the most cheering of prospects. Knowing that my tortuous anxieties might be nothing more than the product of the odd twitch and spasm of my brain did not a whit to modify their control of my life.

Then one day the latest of my counselors suggested, as I was itemizing for her yet another example of the agonizingly tortured process of my thoughts, “I’m not suggesting you could take a pill and all this would go away, but have you ever thought about antidepressants?”

I’d been down this road before.

“I’m not depressed!” I protested. “Not ‘Ten Warning Signs of Depression’ depressed.”

Well, she didn’t think I was depressed, exactly, either. But she’d been reading the latest research on the newest class of antidepressants—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

“There’s some promising evidence that they can help with anxiety, obsessive thoughts, that kind of thing.”

This time, I was ready to consider the pharmacological tune-up. I was ready to consider almost anything that might stem the relentless tide of my thoughts. My thoughts flogged me like an overseer among the galley slaves, compelling me onward in a continuous, panicked flight to nowhere. So I went to talk to my counselor’s consulting psychiatrist.

He was old enough to be my father, nearing retirement, his manner suggesting that he’d seen quite enough and then some in his long psychiatric career. Instead of making him world-weary and cynical, however, his experience seemed to have taught him to appreciate the high hilarity and essential absurdity of the human condition. He radiated a satisfied amusement with the irrationality of things. You could tell him you cut yourself with razor blades, and you would not disturb his equanimity. He’d just nod with great interest, occasionally drawing you forth with a succinct and thought-provoking question.

For an hour I downloaded my history, cramming it all together in an unbroken stream so that even to me it did start to sound collectively disturbed. At the end of this hour during which he had drawn me forth with succinct and thought-provoking questions, he handed me a sheaf of papers, checklists on anxiety and depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders—dysfunctional potluck. I felt oddly excited, as if I’d won the mental illness lottery; the man was an M.D., a psychiatrist with years of experience under his belt. He couldn’t be wrong, he could spot a wacko at fifty paces, and he’d conferred on me the irrefutable stamp of the legitimately unbalanced.

I left his office with my little stack of papers clutched close to my chest, and on top of them all a featherweight box of samples: Paxil. Like peace. Like peaceful. I had joined the nation of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibited.

I began with a tiny dose, breaking the crumb-sized pill into quarters. I felt as though I were holding my breath, not knowing what I was waiting for or what to expect or how I would know if it worked, or when it worked, or indeed what “working” would mean.

I was still waiting, when it dawned on me, after a week or so, that the endless harangue, like a screaming argument, that had carried on in my head for years had died away. I could still hear it, but it was as though the parties to the disagreement had moved off down the hall, leaving me behind to think,
My, that certainly is a contentious debate and I’m glad it’s none of
my
concern.
I felt as if a huge space had been cleared in my life, as if I’d been sharing a room for years with an unruly crowd of surly roommates who played their stereos too loud, and they’d all suddenly moved out.

In the absence of all that noise and confusion, I was overwhelmed by a sudden explosion of energy; there were a million wonderful, engaging things I wanted to see and do and discover, and I wanted to try all of them right now.

I couldn’t pinpoint any specific thing about my life that had changed, but I felt as though I had emigrated to some other world. For the first time I understood how you could sit down at a meal and not be so busy fretting about the food and eating it and not eating it that you missed most of the conversation. I could pick up a quart of milk without feeling as though the entire fate of humankind hung in the balance between choosing the store brand or the national brand. I could make a decision, and it seemed neither complicated nor difficult to do so; you weighed certain obvious factors, and then you decided.

Well, what did all this mean for me? What did it say about the anxiety and unhappiness that had clouded and wasted the preceding two decades of my life? Had I been denied the true potential of over half my life for the sake of a short measure of serotonin? Was it truly possible, by means of a mere dose of chemistry, to unzip the suit of your old life and step into something entirely new?

This happiness, this ease of mind, was too easy. I didn’t trust it. It came too cheap. More confusing yet was what I never would have expected—I felt the absence of the familiar hue and cry of my mind, and if I can’t say that I missed it precisely, at any rate I sensed a loss of the depth and texture it had lent to my life.

Not that any of these misgivings, mind you, would have led me to give Paxil up, but in the end I forsook it anyway; doing that, I said, was like being rescued after weeks at sea in an open lifeboat, and then, after a wonderful meal and a shower and a night spent in a luxuriously comfortable bed, being informed the next morning that you would be returned to the lifeboat and set adrift once more.

I was giving up Paxil with the intention of becoming pregnant; I didn’t want to simmer my theoretical baby in a synthetic chemical stew. The ironic thing is that I might never have mustered the absurd optimism to believe that having a baby was a good idea if I hadn’t been soaking myself all these weeks in the benign bath of my own serotonin. Why was I thinking of having a baby? Who could rationally contemplate bringing a child into this terrible, careworn world? Was I in any manner qualified for such a grave responsibility, I who could spend a whole day just mustering the conviction to get to the grocery store?

In the heart of my Paxilated tranquillity, all these objections struck me as trifling, but as I weaned myself week by week, their significance mushroomed. By the time (still within hailing distance of the last molecular gasp of my Paxil) the two purple lines on the home test kit confirmed my pregnancy, I was possessed by the conviction that I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. What madness had gripped me, obscuring the obvious fact that I didn’t even particularly
like
babies? I’d always been the first to execute a discreet exit, stage left, when someone at the office appeared, mid–maternity leave, with the tiny bundle in tow. I found the oozy-squoozy, pastel-pink cultural sentimentality surrounding pregnancy toxically repulsive.