When you were in the very heart of it, there were no similes--it was like nothing you'd ever experienced and (you thought) probably nothing like anyone else had ever felt either. Now, though, the similes are rampant: it was like trying to tug on wet jeans, like walking in shoes that are giving you blisters, like having the wind knocked out of you, like trying to convince yourself that a lukewarm bath feels good, like someone shining a bright light in your eyes with your eyelids stapled up, like red ants running all over your skin, like invisible mosquitoes whining in your ears, like hearing a dentist scratch metal on your teeth or like the taste of benadryl if you suck on it. It was all those things simultaneously and to say that these little tortures are anything, really, compared to what is happening all around the world every day in Guantanamo Bay and other places with locked doors is completely idiotic. If you've never been tortured though--if the closest you've come is walking through the Tower of London and marveling that in real life somebody, in fact, many people, were drawn and quartered and racked and thumb pressed--benadryl and mosquitoes and blisters and chills can seem like torture and when they go on every single day at every single second of the day, they can make life seem not worth living.
It is, of course, a valid question--if all those similes were real actualities rather than just by-products of a brain not quite firing through its synapses right, how long would a person hold out? "There is nothing in the world worse than physical pain," said George Orwell, and he is just dishearteningly right--you cannot talk about truth or beauty or fall in love or create nice art or do much of anything if there are even a swarm of biting flies or stinging bees around you. You are reduced down to one thought "Get it off! Get it off!" That is where it begins and ends. If ten people were surrounded by bees and flies for just one solid day and somehow knew that the bees and flies would never go away for the rest of their lives, I think that all ten of them would kill themselves right then and there.
Killing yourself, though, is faintly ridiculous, particularly in a body that feels crappy and like it is covered in mosquitoes and cold, yes, but that is otherwise healthy and cancer-free and refuses even to have the decency to even get a really good fever and make the world seem a little less sharply painful and clear. Killing yourself seems like an even worse idea when one of the REASONS you are depressed in the first place is because someone young and wonderful and close to you died and you cannot quite believe in anything when someone like her can die. You do not want other people to feel like you do right now, not even the people you hate. You would not wish that on anyone And yet, you want to—you know you don't actually have it bad, you know you should shake it off and just feel better, breathe deep, sleep more, and eat right. And you will, but you can't, you absolutely can't because some fucker keeps shining a light in your eyes and the god damn ants will NOT get off your skin and the mosquitoes will NOT leave your ears. And so even when you are having fun, sort of—when you are talking or eating good food or even drunk or high, it is still within the context of "as much fun as one can have while being tortured." The physicalness of it is real and visceral. You wish you were making it up.
One night, in what will appear in this year's Guinness Book of World Records as the most half-hearted suicide attempt ever made by a human, you swallow 10 Tylenol PMs and hope that even if you don't die you'll at least get to sleep a lot. This fails. The only effect is that your eyes grow puffy and you feel confused the next day. Also, you feel like a crazy person, but a defective one, one that can't even make herself pass out or sick. You want to get food poisoning, just so you can miss class legitimately, but you can't quite face the spoiled milk or too-raw meat that this would take to make sure it happened. A few other nights you'll want to take more pills again but you'll settle for just messing up your wrists a little with scissors (further demonstrating your failure at being crazy is your inability to draw anymore than tiny streams of blood from this cutting. You marvel, in a sick way, that this could actually be a viable way of committing suicide. How do they do it? They are clearly more clever and/or desperate than you.)
To seek help is difficult, bordering on the absurd. You bike to the health center on one particularly bad night, in the fog. The fog is beautiful and the lines you make riding through it calm you down for a moment and you arrive a bright-eyed and healthy girl who spews out in one stupid-sounding sentence, "IfeelsuicidalcanIsleephere?" The benevolent building welcomes you, but is quick to remind you that staying at the health center does not excuse you from class.
You miss class anyways, and get an email that expresses concern about your attitude towards class attendance. You love school, is the thing—you love pencils (mechanical, at least) and Five Star notebooks and fat pink erasers and in your childhood you loved folders with dogs on them and Trapper Keepers and 4 function calculators. You love using them. But, of course, there's just no way that you can learn when mosquitoes won't stop whining in your ears. You can't even last fifty minutes without getting up to leave, to have a moment alone in the hallway to convince yourself that leaping out of the classroom window is weird and un-OK.
The counseling center too, while it is nice and good to have an hour to talk about yourself, feels silly. You are being light-shined and ant-attacked and shoe-blistered and lukewarm-bathed the whole time you are talking and leave with it continuing. So it is after you have tried many other things—looking at the moon and the stars and yoga and doing a semi-random act of decency and being on top of things and letting them slide and talking to friends and being alone and trying to cry and trying to laugh and eating chocolate and eating apples and aromatherapy and real therapy and drinking and sobriety and cutting and self-love and books and TV and shopping and saving—that you come down to taking pills. Going to a doctor, you learn about your brain and how it has gone into hibernation and how the synapses aren't firing fast enough, or something, and that it is not your fault because depression can happen to anyone and it doesn't care how much you try and work.
And so, in the end (though it isn't really an end, but it feels enough like one), it is not the crying on friend's beds, not being told by those who love you how much they care, not your little sister's smile or the beauty of stars in the wheat fields that makes you better. It is a white pill that you do not taste, that seems to have no effect at all at first. It has no effect at all, except that at first it just makes everything a little bit dulled—you still feel like a light is shining in your eyes, but you do not care as much. You feel a little drunker, a little less sharply yourself. You can sit still without bouncing your leg up and down at the knee.
And eventually, it is this pill—Celexa, a name you come to think is so beautiful that you would name your own child after it is what cures you. You wake up one day and feel like you are in the world again, like now you might not hate every second of existence. You know that nothing, really has changed—that it is just a pill that has made your brain surge back to life, like a resurrected computer, that the code is streaming through right now. You know that whatever tired metaphor you might use—that you were in a dark black pit of despair and now you are a butterfly flying free above the clouds, it's not anywhere near as poetic as that. There is nothing about God, nothing about trials and punishment, nothing about redemption and resurrection or any of that that you can say with a straight face. It is chemistry, biology, and pharmacy, pure and simple.
But this fact, the fact, too that this story is utterly un-unusual, that statistically it is quite likely to be your story, to a T, is unable to bother me too much. When you have been in a lukewarm bath, when you have felt like nothing but pain, throbbing behind your eyes, you don't care how it stops. You don't care that you're nothing, really, but chemicals and atoms and electrons, spinning around, and how even those electrons are nothing, really, like the planets going around the sun, even though it would be nice and tidy if it did.