There was a plastic carrier bag of vomit in the cupboard beside my bed. It had been there for over a week. The stench of it thickened up the air in my room.
I was in bed. The sheets were dirty, of course. They’d remained unwashed for many weeks. I was half-awake but I was in a stupor, lying there willing myself to remain under, because to get up was unthinkable.
The important thing was to avoid consciousness. The truly important thing was not to rouse myself sufficiently so that I had to feel anything.
This level of existence—semi-consciousness—I could just about handle. Anything more than that—getting up, talking to people, having to do things, was hell. Not only was it hell, I just didn’t want to do it.
I hadn’t asked anyone to be born. I hadn’t put my hand up for life on planet earth. And yet here I was, alive against my will.
If it was easy to die then I would have died, of course. If you could just fill out a form, click a button or something. But death was difficult—-and more importantly, it was painful. To slash my wrists. To take a piece of rope and tie it around my neck and hang from the ceiling. To take so many pills that my liver would shut down.
The end result—eternal unconsciousness, eternal darkness—was welcome, but the road there was too frightening. I would avoid pain at all costs. And the least pain came to me when I lay in bed under my thin duvet cover, hiding from the world.
I hadn’t asked for any of this and yet I was here. And I was angry about it. Very angry. I was nineteen years old and I’d just left home.
They say that depression is anger turned inwards and I have had huge issues with anger—at myself, at my parents, at the world. I am also incredibly defiant. That is as a result of what in recovery meetings for drugs and alcohol they call terminal uniqueness, or thinking you’re special.
If you’re really angry and you also think you’re special then you’re going to be defiant. But if you’re also afraid—and fear is always at the root of anger—then the only person you’re going to be able to turn that anger against is yourself. So you self-sabotage.
I really thought, on some level, that if I stayed in bed all day, that if I missed classes and deliberately sabotaged my own life then I would somehow be ‘getting revenge’.
It makes no sense. Who was I hurting? Me, and no one else. But I felt utterly incapable of taking any action. I couldn’t talk to people. I was living in a house full of guys (shared university accommodation) and I was too shy to speak to them. So I locked myself in my room and stayed in bed for weeks at a time. I’d just left my parents’ home. I’d been miserable there so I couldn’t be back (my stepmother hated me) but equally I didn’t have the strength to move forward either. I was stuck.
I read about Prozac. There was a two-page spread in The Sunday Times. This was in the nineties when Prozac first came out and everyone was talking about it. The article described a drug that made people feel not just well, but ‘better than well.’
I also read (perhaps this was in the book Listening to Prozac) that the root cause of a lot of people’s problems was fear of rejection. Not just sexual rejection, but any kind of rejection. Social rejection, rejection from bosses overlooking you for a pay rise, from college professors preferring someone else’s answer to yours. But if you could erase all fear of rejection then you’d be able to do pretty much anything. And Prozac would allow you to do just that.
There was a doctor’s surgery on campus. I made an appointment, and sat under bright lemon strip lighting until he saw me. I told him I was depressed and asked for Prozac. He said no. He said I should see how things went for a month and then come back if I was no better.
I wanted the drug, so I made up my mind that things would be no better. A month later I went back and saw him again. This time he prescribed me Prozac. Two tablets a day—forty milligrams. A heavy dose.
I took the pills. For two weeks or so nothing happened. Then, slowly, this feeling of lightness started to come over me. Levity. My fears started to lift. Subtly, I began to give less of a fuck. A month later I had a bulletproof shield around me. I didn’t give any fucks at all.
You see this was years before I tried any kind of talking therapy, before I tried any self-help. For me the idea of talking about my problems was stupid and weak. I only trusted chemicals: the stronger the better.
To be continued . . .
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