Another Life
I was convinced antidepressants would kill my writing. What happened instead was beyond anything I imagined.
It’s a warm, sunny morning in Los Angeles. Finches chitter in the palm trees outside my window. Inside, the apartment smells of French-pressed coffee and clean laundry. But I’m standing in the dark bathroom, holding an SSRI pill between my thumb and forefinger, sobbing.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been stalked by depression. Until recently, I’ve always found holistic ways to escape it. Healthy food. Hiking. The full eight hours. And most importantly, writing.
This last is my strongest defense. Day after day, I build a wall of words between myself and the force that pursues me — pursues many of us; I know I’m not unique. I write blogs, stories, scripts, tweets, journal entries — doesn’t matter what, as long as I’m putting words between myself and the beast.
Over time, I’ve created a body of work this way. It’s given me both a means of survival and a reason to live.
But lately it hasn’t been working. I’m not working. Something has changed inside me, robbing me of the strength I once had to fight.
About eight weeks ago I started getting headaches — massive, blinding headaches that made it impossible to do much of anything but lie in bed. I saw a bunch of doctors and told them the pain was preventing me from writing, and that failure to write was making me depressed.
They all said it was the other way around.
“You can’t fight this thing on your own,” one said. “You need help.”
Fuck you, I thought. You just want to dose me and get me out the door.
“You’re trying to control your emotions, and in doing so, creating more stress,” said another.
Fuck you too, I thought. To hell with Big Pharma and everybody else who’s feeding on my sadness.
“When is the last time you felt happy?” asked a third.
To this, I had no response. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when the beast wasn’t with me. I couldn’t imagine life without it. My thoughts ran like this: There is no life without it. Depression is the only constant, the only reality. Everything else is a delusion.
I started crying. The doctor passed me that ubiquitous box of Kleenex. I wanted to throw it at him. But instead, I took it, wadded up a tissue and pressed it against my tear ducts until they stopped leaking.
“I just need to be able to work again,” I mumbled.
The doctor looked at me for a moment. In the quiet, I noticed him for the first time. A small, fluffy-haired, spectacled man. He hunched in his chair and took slow, labored breaths, as though it hurt him to inhale.
“I can prescribe you a very low dose,” he said. “Just for you to try and see what you experience. Would you like me to do that?”
I dabbed my eyes, making a gesture somewhere between a shrug and a nod. He observed me for another moment. Then he jotted a few notes into his iPad, stood up, and shook my hand.
“There is another life,” he said — emphasizing the word “is,” as if I had said something to the contrary. Then, with instructions to call if I experienced anything troubling, he left the room.
I went to the pharmacy and picked up the prescription. Then I returned to my sunny apartment and shut myself into the cool, dark bathroom. I took the bottle out of the white paper bag, removed the cap and seal, and shook a pill into my hand.
And now here I stand. Holding this very low dose, my personal experiment. Crying as if I’d just lost a loved one.
Just fucking take it.
I stare at the pill. A little dot between my thumb and forefinger, the color of orange sherbet.
Take it.
A possible solution. A key to the gate between me and… what? Something. Anything. Anything would be better than this.
Goddamn it, put it in your mouth.
I can’t do it. What the hell is wrong with me? Am I scared? Afraid of what? That it won’t work?
No. I’m terrified that it will work.
And if that happens, I’m scared that I’ll have nothing left to live for.
Deep down, I’ve always believed that human existence is rooted in suffering. I’m not sure where I got this idea, but I do know it’s not original. In fact, it’s one of the foundational tenets of Buddhism. It also has a basis in biology: Evolution is driven partly by natural selection, partly by mutation, and in both cases, the process takes generations of seemingly pointless mayhem to unfold.
Not only have I long accepted this concept as fact, but I’ve also woven it into my identity. My purpose as a writer is to chronicle truth. If life is suffering, then for me, happiness is both a delusion and a distraction.
Or so I’ve always subconsciously believed. But now that I’m struggling to start mental health treatment, I have to examine that idea for the first time. And the examination forces me to follow the theory to its rational conclusion.
Why does the thought of taking a pill break me down? It’s logical:
1) If I took antidepressants, I might start to feel happy.
2) If I felt happy, I’d be cut off from reality.
3) If I were cut off from reality, I’d have nothing to write about.
4) If I had nothing to write about, I’d have no reason to live.
Even in my current state, I know this sounds absurd. But the belief that life is suffering is so deeply ingrained in my mind that I can’t find the error in my thinking.
So I put the pill back in the bottle. I replace the cap, drop the bottle in the bag, and shove it under the bathroom sink. There it will stay, as I plummet through the seemingly bottomless pit of my own mind.
Weeks pass. My mental status remains critical. I don’t attempt suicide, but the only reason I don’t is that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t succeed. I feel like I’m drowning in acid quicksand. Everything hurts, and it’s all meaningless — especially the pain.
Then one day, I happen to see a Huffington Post article by New York Times Bestselling Author Andrew Shaffer called “Silence of the Poets: Writers and Antidepressants.” Maybe this is God’s way of saving me, or Google’s attempt to make me a better customer. Either way, it momentarily halts my descent.
Shaffer starts off by quoting a book by former-trader-turned-philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book is called Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. This is the passage he highlights:
“Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s ‘spleen,’ Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced.”
The quote draws my attention because it seems to validate my choice to eschew treatment. However, as I keep reading, I realize that Shaffer didn’t cite it to agree. Instead, his aim is to blow Taleb’s argument — and, incidentally, my worldview — wide open.
Shaffer writes:
“What I found truly ironic about Taleb’s hypothesis is that all of the writers he uses as examples were silenced — not by antidepressants, but by their depression and substance abuse.”
Can I highlight this statement? Can I underline it in green and red? It’s so blatantly obvious, I can’t believe it’s never occurred to me before.
But then again, I can. All my life, I’ve been focused on the perception of suffering , so it’s no surprise that I’ve never considered what makes perception possible. Longevity, for instance. Maybe peace. Happiness? I’m not sure.
I know that my revulsion for antidepressants springs from a belief that they would stifle my writing. But what happens if I apply that theory to, say, Sylvia Plath? I’m basically saying that Plath never would have written anything meaningful if she’d been happy.
I’m not sure I really believe that.
In fact, I know I don’t believe it.
What I do believe, now that I consider, is that genius is innate, independent from circumstance. The ability to perceive and express one’s thoughts in original ways exists in all kinds of people, in all conceivable scenarios.
If I start with that as my foundational tenet, suffering becomes neither the means to, nor the essential subject of perception, but instead something totally separate from it. The question I ask myself as a writer changes from whether I ought to suffer, to how and what can I perceive.
I currently have a tool at my disposal that could help me find out.
With this thought in mind, I go back to the bathroom. I take out the pill bottle and shake an SSRI into my hand.
Once again, I feel the anguish rising. But this time, I force myself to push through it. I tilt my head back, open my mouth, and drop the pill down my throat.
Then I do it again the next day. And the day after that. And so on, until something starts to happen.
The first thing I notice is a softening. Light looks dimmer. Noise doesn’t clang so loud. Physically, I feel sleepy. Comfortable. Mentally… am I fuzzy? At first, I think so because anger, fear, and frustration don’t prick me like they used to. I worry that a lack of sharpness in my emotions means a loss of intellectual acuity.
But as time passes, I realize that’s not what’s happening. I still feel things; I’m just not ruined by them. It’s like my emotions were crashing cymbals, and now I can hear the rest of the orchestra playing for the first time.
Score one for perception.
Toward the end of the second week, a new pattern in my social interactions emerges. I find that I am calmer and more accepting toward loved ones. I speak more often to strangers. I smile at babies and don’t care that I’m a walking cliché.
What the hell is happening to me?
By the third week, I feel a desire to start writing again, but about different things than I ever have before. In the past, I was always consumed by the dark side of humanity: lies, crime, and violence. But now, for reasons I can’t yet articulate, I feel compelled to write about things like radical acts of kindness.
Bad thoughts still arise, of course, such as I’m making a fool of myself; I’m wasting time; I’m throwing away my career. But these are only minor shadows. I manage to sidestep them.
Then, little by little, I see new ideas gleaming. Concepts that challenge everything I once believed. For example: What if life actually isn’t defined by struggle? What if life is, in fact, hope?
Four weeks after starting the medication, on a Saturday night, I drive an hour through bumper-to-bumper traffic to go to a birthday party. I’m not in the mood for it. It’s cold and raining and (despite improvements) I have yet another headache. But I want to see my friend — a man I haven’t spoken to in months, with whom my last conversation ended badly because I was depressed, and he wanted to help but didn’t know how.
So I park outside the bar, walk in, and take a look around. I realize I don’t know a soul here except my friend. Everyone else is considerably older than I am, with more money, responsibility, and accomplishments. I feel something — not a pang, more like a bump of anxiety. I make up my mind to ignore it.
I strike up a conversation with two people, then three, then a few more. All of them are strangers. I learn about them. They make me laugh and think, and I realize I like them. The worry of whether they like me or not rises, but I press it back down and carry on talking.
As the night wears on, it dawns on me that in my previous life, although I felt a full spectrum of emotions, the ones that defined my world were typically negative. Most of the time, I acted out of fear, anger, and want. I rarely did anything out of joy or love.
Moments after I have this revelation, the band starts up. I’m surrounded by strangers, but I feel compelled to start moving anyway. Before I know it, I’m dancing. Something about this makes me feel embarrassed and vulnerable. Yet I keep going.
In the process, I remember another writer who was stilled by depression — Virginia Woolf, who wrote this in her novel The Years:
“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”
As I dance by the bar — alone at first, then with other people joining me — I realize how very true this is. We know nothing about ourselves. We build our own little worlds in futile efforts to explain and then feel anguished by our isolation.
Yet, as Woolf wrote and my doctor said, there is another life. Not everyone needs medication to find it, but I did. And now I have. Here, in this room.
Surely, I think, as the song ends and the crowd disperses, smiling — surely this is worth writing about.
In fact, it might even be what writing is actually for.
Meagan Daine is a television and podcast writer interested in cons, cults, and random acts of kindness. Follow her on Twitter/IG @writeordienow or check out her latest projects at writeordienow.com.
