As an intellectual girl child of the sixties who came of age in the seventies, I have always been (perhaps unsurprisingly) a Sylvia Plath fan. As a young teenager first reading The Bell Jar, I was mesmerized by the story. But even more so by the fact that it was written by a woman. A well-respected artist. And someone who had committed suicide. How could I not be fascinated?
Plath killed herself the same year I was born. But that didn’t make her too old or different for me to understand. If anything I found it poignant. While I was merely weeks old she was living her last few weeks on this earth.
Years after first reading her in high school, I thought of her again after delivering my son. I had a terrible bout of postpartum depression and for some reason, I thought of her from time to time. I imagined her trying to take care of her children while burdened with a broken marriage. What despair those circumstances and her depression must have created. Her son was barely a year old when she chose her death; her daughter only three. I wondered if at least some of her pain came from the same kind of depression many young mothers experienced. Like me. Was she as sleep-deprived, anxious, and guilt-ridden as I was?
Almost like a siren song, Plath’s name popped up a few days ago in an article at one of my favorite sites. Her story, or what I thought was her story, was suddenly in my mind again. I read about an exhibit (from several years ago). And soon found myself searching the web for anything I could find about her personal life.
At the time of her death, her poet husband,Ted Hughes, and she had separated. He was having an affair of which Plath was fully aware in the months leading up to her suicide. The mistress herself committed suicide six years later. Plath’s and Hughes’ son, a well respected and well liked professor in Alaska, killed himself in 2009. Additionally, tons of correspondence among the people in Plath’s life have been published since I last took interest in her. Including letters between Plath and her former therapist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse.
Reading about all of Plath’s heartbreak and chaos made me glad for my quiet and even-keeled life. I don’t want to brag or jinx myself, but things are going pretty well right now. Reliving my past connection to Plath, and learning new things about her, however, was troubling. It reminded me that I was once as embroiled in drama, angst, and self destruction as her. I’ve been through episodes of depression before, and since, the postpartum incident. During any of those times I could have been sucked into a vortex of despair like Plath. But I was luckier than her.
I know that because I’m currently taking fluoxetine (generic Prozac) daily. And, for the first time in many years, I feel great. Antidepressant medicines have long been, if not controversial, then certainly misunderstood. Often vilified. Like in the way people condemn the morbidly obese for getting bariatric surgery. They claim it isn’t “natural” to lose weight that way and therefore it’s not acceptable. The person is still weak and susceptible to getting fat again. He or she hasn’t earned the weight loss through life changes.
I’ve never had anyone say such a thing to me about my medications, but I don’t readily tell anyone I take fluoxetine either. One of my closest friends knows; I told my son (but he probably doesn’t remember). My husband sees the pill jar on the shelf but I don’t think he worries about what it is or does.
Not that he (or anyone else) should. My current prescription started several years ago after menopause. Just like with postpartum depression, I was blindsided. No one ever told me that menopause could suck you into a black hole of negativity and darkness. In fact, I still don’t see very much research anywhere about it like one might encounter about heart disease or skin cancer. All you hear about is hot flashes and mood swings (which I rarely experienced). I waited almost a year after menopause officially began before realizing I couldn’t crawl out of the hole I was in if I spent a million years in therapy.
It’s been four years now and I’m still on my light does of 10 – 20 mg daily. I gained confidence and stability within about three weeks of starting the meds and I haven’t looked back. Sometimes I read or hear about people feeling like they should wean off their antidepressants now that they feel better. But I know that I never will. My strength, will, and temperament have never been better and I will never risk losing all that.
In fact, as I was reading about Plath I found myself feeling for her but not overwhelmed by her story like I used to. I felt emboldened and wise; I could see more than one side to the stories and events I read about. And more than anything I felt safe. Like I knew that such turmoil and self-doubt could no longer touch me. I was past that.
Which is not to say I never feel pain or remorse or regret. It’s just now, when those thoughts of “I’m no good” or “Nothing ever works out for me” come up, I can talk back to them. I literally tell myself, that’s ridiculous: you ARE good; lots of things turn out well! My new self doesn’t let my old self talk to itself like that anymore. I know that probably sounds crazy, but it’s exactly the way it is.
It works with other people, too. A disagreement with my spouse or a friend or coworker used to bring on endless rumination and vehement internal rehearsal of what I would say to that person when I saw him or her again. If I dared. And I almost never did. Now, when a disagreement develops or someone actually attacks me verbally, I shut it down right away. I talk to my antagonist the same way I do to my old self: Come on, now, that’s not I meant or whatever needs to be said. I don’t need to rehearse or spend time getting ready for the rebuttal. Defending or explaining myself is not frightening anymore; I simply do it when I need to. And that’s that.
Yesterday, for example, I was walking my two robust and curious hound dogs off leash when I saw a woman approaching on a bicycle. My dog boys sometimes react to people on wheels so I hooked them back up to their leashes and stepped back from the dirt road we were on to give her extra room to pass. As soon as our feet touched his yard, the homeowner opened the front door.
“Ma’am, no dogs in my yard.” He was probably in his seventies and obviously the cranky type. I was pissed off that he was scolding me, especially since I was barely in his yard to begin with and I was obviously giving the bike rider room. It’s not like I had pitched a tent there.
Non-Prozac me would have bowed my head and probably said I was sorry, then felt guilty or annoyed about the encounter for days or weeks. My “new” self, however, boldly and thoroughly ensconced in its Prozac armor, turned to face him. In a tone that matched his malice, I stated, “We’re just moving out of the cyclist’s way.”
He said nothing and went back inside. But I felt like a god. Screw that guy trying to treat me like some naughty kid who was vandalizing his property. For Christ’s sake, anyone could see we were at the furthest edge of his stupid little yard and were about to step out. We weren’t on his property for even twenty seconds. What a jerk.
Now I know there are possibly other things going on here. He may have realized he overreacted as soon as I answered him or after he spotted the cyclist. Perhaps he was actually restraining himself; after all, he didn’t scream at me or use obscenities. He might have felt stupid for saying anything at all when he heard my retort. But none of that matters.
What matters is that I didn’t take any shame from it. Like I usually would prior to donning my Prozac suit. I said what I had to say and kept going. I displayed and conveyed my annoyance and I didn’t apologize. It may not sound like a big deal to people who are the confident, never-lost-anything-in- life alpha types. But for me, such behavior is rejuvenating. And damn near miraculous.
In his book, Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer, M.D., details his early experiences with the drug when he first began to prescribe it. He explained that many of his patients not only told him they felt better but also “…like myself again.” He wondered if that self were the real self—on medication—or if it were simply a kind of dream self. What one might hope he could be. The question gnawed at him but his patients couldn’t have cared less. They were better. Who cared why?
Kramer also worried that to prescribe meds to alter one’s personality (which is essentially what happens when depression descends and then lifts) might not always be a good thing. Sure, he wanted people to feel better, but he also wondered if eliminating melancholia could subtract something significant from being human. Both for us as a species and for individuals. No one wants to be sad, especially not intractably so or without reason. But might there be other facets of our character that are born from or grown with depression? How could we know?
I loved Kramer’s book and it truly helped me during a time in my life when I struggled with accepting a prescription for Paxil (a similarly constructed pharmaceutical known as an SSRI—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). I obviously wanted to feel better but I wondered if I weren’t trying to take the “easy” way out. If I weren’t like those obese patients who choose surgery instead of life changes. After reading Listening to Prozac I decided that I could try the meds and see how I felt. I also decided that judgments such as those about obese persons choosing medical intervention being weak were astoundingly conceited of me. What did I know about anyone’s conditions or needs? What did anyone else know about mine?
The prescription did work for me, despite some mild side effects and a few major ones (such as vivid, sometimes scary dreams). I stayed the course for nearly two years before tapering off under the guidance of my doctor. And I was fine. For a few years. Then I changed jobs, and was soon shouldering considerably more stress than I had expected. So I started back again.
My final course with Paxil lasted about a year and after weaning myself I was able to go medication free until that menopause thing. So I spent nearly ten years with enough functioning brain chemistry to live competently and mostly happily. I was hesitant when the darkness from menopause deepened to go back to meds. Partly because of the side effects and, to be honest, that familiar fear of judgment from others. Things I imagined people might say, “You can’t stay on meds forever.” “At some point you have to get your life together.”
Of course no one had ever said anything like that to me (except me) but even if someone might, I knew I needed help. Looking back I’m so glad I ignored my misgivings and made the appointment. And, as my doctor suggested it might, switching to Prozac eliminated the side effects. The experience is literally a dream come true.
Whatever depression is, whether it’s some neurochemical hiccup or genetic quirk or something else no has even discovered yet, it’s not my fault. I don’t need to read that from the results of a double-blind, duplicated experiment. Something physiological happens to me every now and then and the chemical reactions Prozac creates among my synapses (or whatever it does) simply work. I feel strong, optimistic, energetic, and focused. I can sleep, read, run a half-marathon, plan trips to other continents, talk to people I don’t know. As the patients in Kramer’s practice stated, I am myself again.
I don’t know where that self went after my son was born or when I changed jobs or when menopause showed up. But like a lighthouse coaxing storm weary ships to safety, Prozac brought me home. And that’s exactly where I want to be.