17
I’d stopped taking my medication only a few days earlier. It had just seemed crazy to be
taking antidepressants in Italy. How could I be depressed here?
I’d never wanted to be on the medication in the first place. I’d fought taking it for so long,
mainly because of a long list of personal objections (e.g.: Americans are overmedicated; we
don’t know the long-term effects of this stuff yet on the human brain; it’s a crime that even
American children are on antidepressants these days; we are treating the symptoms and not
the causes of a national mental health emergency.. .). Still, during the last few years of my
life, there was no question that I was in grave trouble and that this trouble was not lifting
quickly. As my marriage dissolved and my drama with David evolved, I’d come to have all the
symptoms of a major depression—loss of sleep, appetite and libido, uncontrollable weeping,
chronic backaches and stomachaches, alienation and despair, trouble concentrating on work,
inability to even get upset that the Republicans had just stolen a presidential election... it
went on and on.
When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are
lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered a few feet off
the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls
again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you
have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the
sun rises anymore.
I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which, of course, it was. I became a
student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of
all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad’s fault?) Was it just temporal, a “bad
time” in my life?(When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genet-
ic?(Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with
its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American
career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was
it astrological?(Am I so sad because I’m a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all
ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don’t creative people always suffer from depres-