Eat, Pray, Love

cision to go the route of “Vitamin P” happened after a night when I’d sat on the floor of my
bedroom for many hours, trying very hard to talk myself out of cutting into my arm with a kit-
chen knife. I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. I had some other good
ideas around that time—about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun
might stop the suffering. But something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it.
The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. I
don’t think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat
down in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, “I cannot walk an-
other step further—somebody has to help me.” It wouldn’t have served those women to have
stopped walking. Nobody would have, or could have, helped them. The only thing that
would’ve happened was that they and their families would have starved. I couldn’t stop think-
ing about those women.
And I will never forget Susan’s face when she rushed into my apartment about an hour
after my emergency phone call and saw me in a heap on the couch. The image of my pain
mirrored back at me through her visible fear for my life is still one of the scariest memories for
me out of all those scary years. I huddled in a ball while Susan made the phone calls and
found me a psychiatrist who would give me a consultation that very day, to discuss the pos-
sibility of prescribing antidepressants. I listened to Susan’s one-sided conversation with the
doctor, listened to her say, “I’m afraid my friend is going to seriously hurt herself.” I was afraid,
too.
When I went to see the psychiatrist that afternoon, he asked me what had taken me so
long to get help—as if I hadn’t been trying to help myself already for so long. I told him my ob-
jections and reservations about antidepressants. I laid copies of the three books I’d already
published on his desk, and I said, “I’m a writer. Please don’t do anything to harm my brain.”
He said, “If you had a kidney disease, you wouldn’t hesitate to take medication for it—why are
you hesitating with this?” But, see, that only shows how ignorant he was about my family; a
Gilbert might very well not medicate a kidney disease, seeing that we’re a family who regard
any sickness as a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure.
He put me on a few different drugs—Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Busperin—until we found
the combination that didn’t make me nauseated or turn my libido into a dim and distant
memory. Quickly, in less than a week, I could feel an extra inch of daylight opening in my
mind. Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep,
you cannot get yourself out of the ditch—there’s not a chance. The pills gave me those recu-
perative night hours back, and also stopped my hands from shaking and released the vise
grip around my chest and the panic alert button from inside my heart.