My mother has gone off of her antidepressants, and while I won’t tell her this, it has made me like her less.
“Since you’ve gone off of your medicine,” I start.
“Oh, come on–”
“No, just let me finish! Since you’ve gone off your medicine, you have more of an edge. You’re harder, somehow.”
She sighs. “I began to realize that the only thing Wellbutrin did for me was make me take shit from people when I shouldn’t.”
The notion that we have grown better because and not in spite of the pills we take every day is difficult to accept without feeling defeated, somehow. That the best version of me is possible only because of the medicine I take sometimes makes me want to cry. Each evening before bed, resigned, I take a blue pill in the shape of an oval. Each morning I wake up and I feel okay.
I don’t know how to explain the change in my mother. It’s subtle, which is what makes it so difficult to talk about. I watch her move defiantly from one room of the house to another. That it’s–there! She moves now as if daring you to challenge her; she has lived with the numbness of the medicine and refuses to go back there again. Simple questions evoke unnecessarily biting answers. My mother has gone off her antidepressants–suddenly, without tapering–and this has made her mean. It has been five weeks.
Today I read that my medicine is one that, according to a doctor, is impossible to be on if you want to write the next great American novel. Maybe my mom felt that struggle too, the internal battle that is automatically waged when your brain becomes simultaneously the enemy and the shelter from that enemy. There are things I can’t do while on my medicine, but the list of those I can’t do without it is far longer.
I couldn’t write for a very long time after I first went on Zoloft. I used to only know how to write by accessing this dark, painful space between my ribs–it was there that all the powerful words lived. Sometimes, when people I loved would touch my skin there, I would start to cry for what seemed like no reason. In Eastern medicine this space is called the heart chakra–I just know it as the place where all of my feelings knot together. For months after I started taking my medicine I couldn’t get to that place. It was still there, but I couldn’t reach it. Eventually I trained myself to go there only when necessary, and to leave before getting stuck. It’s dark there, and comforting, but I only go when I have to, now, when life demands it of me.
I guess, unlike me, my mother isn’t afraid of getting stuck there anymore.
(Portraits via)