I told the psychiatrist I was depressed. “Have you ever thought of killing yourself?” she said. I could see her getting ready to check off “Poses danger to self or others” and send me away, the way my oldest brother had once been sent away, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and dosed heavily with Thorazine. Come to think of it, maybe he committed himself, but I know the part about the Thorazine was right. I stole one of his pills once, ate it and got into the shower, and almost passed out on the tiles.
Of course I had thought of suicide. Who doesn’t want to kill themselves, at least occasionally? Middle of a sleepless night, brain churning with plans and anxieties. Sleeplessness alone is enough to make anyone want to end it all, just to get some rest. Then there’s all that awareness of mortality and existential angst that comes with my vocation as a poet. I have mucked around in the duende, what Federico García Lorca called “the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire.”
“No, of course not. Kill myself?” I gave the psychiatrist a look I hoped translated as disbelief. Who, me? Life is a precious gift from Our Lord, who is fair, wise and merciful in all things. “I just want to sleep,” I told her. “And I need a little boost. Also, I get anxious sometimes.”
I’d gone off Celexa a couple of years ago. Little by little, the slow third-world bus of my demons had been making its way back to me. I was hoping for some Xanax or sleeping pills, which my previous doctor used to prescribe, but when my health care got too expensive and I switched, my new G.P. said, “I don’t do those,” the way someone says, “I don’t do windows.” That’s when I called the psychiatrist.
“You can start by taking the TV out of your bedroom,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” I nodded, watching a dark cloud of hopelessness begin to form in her office.
“And don’t write in bed anymore,” she said.
“Right,” I said.
“Or read there, either.”
“Oh… O.K. Of course not.”
It appeared that I was exiled from my bed until it was time to sleep. This seemed to me a fate worse than waterboarding. I loved my bed. I often spent half the day in it with my laptop, writing, with my cat curled up purring by my side. I ate dinner there — a thawed tamale from the freezer, a ready-made Ayurvedic Indian meal-for-one — while watching TV. Without my bed, I might become truly suicidal.
Colette and Edith Wharton both wrote in bed. Proust wrote in bed, enclosed by cork-lined walls and ceiling, because he was sickly. I wrote in bed because it was where I felt farthest from the world of normal, everyday activities, and so most able to engage in the aberrant activity of creative work.
“What about your drug history?” the psychiatrist asked, moving right along. She was efficient. She probably had a waiting room full of depressed, suicidal patients.
I mentioned pot. I mentioned acid and amphetamines. It was a quick, tossed-off list. I didn’t really think about all the experiences behind the list; this was a psychiatrist, not a therapist, and besides, why would I tell a therapist any of that stuff? I don’t believe in therapy. Give me a psychiatrist, who will spend five minutes asking a few pointed questions and then get out the prescription pad.
She lowered her head to her clipboard and wrote. “IV use?”
I thought of IVs as those plastic bags of saline fluid my mother in assisted living needed when she got dehydrated. It took me a minute to realize that she meant needles. Oh, shooting up! Sure, I’d done that. I’d done quite a bit of it. “Well … yes.”
She scribbled furiously. I saw right away that I’d made a serious mistake. I did not have my wits about me; I was groggy from lack of sleep, and depressed. She wasn’t going to cut loose with any Ambien or Restoril now. Even Xanax was going to be out of the question.
“It was a long time ago. In my 20s. I experimented,” I said.
I had done more than experiment. I had run heroin up my arm at least a couple of times a week for about a year.
“Drinking?” the doctor said.
“A couple of glasses of wine sometimes.”
“What’s sometimes?”
“A couple of nights a week?” I hazarded.
Now she looked up. “Really? Here’s what I think. You should go to a drug treatment counselor for evaluation. I’m going to prescribe some Zoloft for the depression. Make those changes to your bedroom, O.K.? And skip the wine.”
I nodded dumbly. Skip the wine? I did not want to skip the wine. I wanted a glass right now, to remind myself that there were still pleasures available to me, still reasons to live. I wanted to go straight home to bed with a cold bottle of chardonnay, close the curtains, and drip wine into an open vein while binge-watching all seven seasons of “Californication.”
I went to the drug evaluation counselor. She thought I was fine. Was I fine? I had no idea, but she was the professional. Though if I wanted to, if I really felt I needed it, she said I could enroll in a drug and alcohol treatment program and spend eight hours a day, five days a week, with the kind of people I used to hang out with when I was doing heroin, people who lived in roach-colonized hotels and shot up between their toes.
I moved the TV out of my bedroom and spent my evenings on the couch with blankets and a pillow. Then I went to bed and didn’t sleep. The Zoloft didn’t work, so the psychiatrist upped my dosage. That made me nauseated, so I quit. Over the next few months, trying to deal with my depression, I started to think about other times I’d felt this way: after a weeklong quaalude binge at 17, again at 20 when I could do nothing one summer but sleep and read romance novels, all the days when my life had resonated with Hamlet’s famous speech: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable …” But gradually, as at other times, I came out of it, thanks to that old cliché, time passing.
I have a close friend who for many years seriously wanted, and sometimes still wants, to kill herself. She calls me when she feels this way, and I try to talk her down, to tell her the simple truth that things will change; she won’t always want to look for a gun or hoard pills, desperate for a way out. Another friend and I commiserate about when we’re in what we call “the bad place,” each of us reminding the other that a brighter world will again be available to us.
I’m writing this in bed. It makes me happy to be here, nestled in the pillows. I’m back on Celexa, a bit higher dose than before, and so far it’s working. I’m never going to be completely free of anxiety; I’m always going to observe that every silver lining has its cloud. As the singer Gillian Welch wrote, “Some girls are bright as the morning / And some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind.” I like the word “blessed.” I like to think that demons can sometimes be angels, that probing through the mire, we can recognize the glint of those small things that sustain us.
Kim Addonizio is the author of a book of stories, “The Palace of Illusions,” and the forthcoming memoir “Bukowski in a Sundress.”