empty water tank, suddenly venting a fury I didn’t know I had been carrying inside. I stayed up there, throwing and shouting and banging, until I was exhausted, and then I knelt on the layer of pointy stones that covered the rooftop and let rivulets of cool water trace small rivers down my skin.
The next morning I awoke on my air mattress. Pale, innocuous sunshine streamed in the window. I felt more truly calm than I had in months. The feeling stayed with me all day, and it was evening before I realized that I had missed my pill the night before. I was still taking Serzone, the antidepressant I had used for most of college. I had been taking it for so long now that I’d lost a sense of what it was doing for me; I only knew that if I missed a dose I would wake up in the middle of the night, overheated and itchy all over.
That evening I skipped it again. By the time I moved away from Brooklyn, two months later, the bottle had grown dusty on the shelf. It was a risky way to quit, but after all, I reasoned, Serzone hadn’t protected me from everything. I felt stuck and out of touch, and I quietly hoped that taking a break from medication might help me regain control of my life. Maybe without it I’d be able to reach back and refind that thing, that sense of purpose I knew I’d had once, but that seemed to have become lost, somewhere, during college and after.
WHEN WE GOT to Ithaca, my father helped me carry my things up to the apartment I’d rented, sight unseen, a cozy studio on the third floor of a huge Victorian house near the edge of town. The skies were lake-effect gray, but the rain had stopped. He headed off to a motel for the night, and I sat there amid my unassembled Ikea furniture, feeling a sense of despair and a sense of unreality. We had breakfast the next morning at a greasy-spoon café, and then he drove off and left me to settling in.
On my own I found the gym and the grocery store, went to a departmental party, and tracked down the academic adviser I’d been assigned to, a woman whose facial features I no longer remember, whose office was at the end of a serpentine hallway in the Grecian building that housed the English Department. She helped me with forms. Taking care of business was rewarding in a way, but the feelings of disconnection and guilt that had broken free near the end of my time in New York were stubborn; they sat on my shoulders like birds and cawed into my ears. “This isn’t actually my life,” I wrote on a long document I’d started on my computer to keep track of my thoughts, in plain contradiction of fact.
A few days after arriving in town, I met my downstairs neighbor, Casey, who was a librarian at Cornell’s labor school and liked to play Scrabble. Through him I met his friends. I wrote in letters to my mom that I’d gotten to know a librarian, a chicken farmer, a coffee shop employee, and a filmmaker. Making friends helped immensely, but my thoughts and feelings were still all tangled up. I missed New York. Ithaca seemed so small and remote and countrified. Being at school—in a funded program, no less—was an honor, but I couldn’t seem to get excited about it, and that lack of enthusiasm made me feel appalled with myself. One by one I had made all the choices that got me here, but when I opened my eyes each morning, I felt the panic of someone waking up in an unfamiliar room. The feelings didn’t fade, and after a few weeks I felt worn out by the effort of trying to hide them. One afternoon I walked into the campus medical building and asked directions to the wing for mental health.
The psychiatrist I was assigned to had a difficult-to-pronounce last name, so everyone simply called her “Dr. Barbara.” Dr. Barbara styled her gray hair in a bob and wore sensible, loose long dresses made of jersey knits. She hung Balinese masks on the wall of her office, and her shelves were lined with interesting books. After I began to feel better, I used to try during our
The next morning I awoke on my air mattress. Pale, innocuous sunshine streamed in the window. I felt more truly calm than I had in months. The feeling stayed with me all day, and it was evening before I realized that I had missed my pill the night before. I was still taking Serzone, the antidepressant I had used for most of college. I had been taking it for so long now that I’d lost a sense of what it was doing for me; I only knew that if I missed a dose I would wake up in the middle of the night, overheated and itchy all over.
That evening I skipped it again. By the time I moved away from Brooklyn, two months later, the bottle had grown dusty on the shelf. It was a risky way to quit, but after all, I reasoned, Serzone hadn’t protected me from everything. I felt stuck and out of touch, and I quietly hoped that taking a break from medication might help me regain control of my life. Maybe without it I’d be able to reach back and refind that thing, that sense of purpose I knew I’d had once, but that seemed to have become lost, somewhere, during college and after.
WHEN WE GOT to Ithaca, my father helped me carry my things up to the apartment I’d rented, sight unseen, a cozy studio on the third floor of a huge Victorian house near the edge of town. The skies were lake-effect gray, but the rain had stopped. He headed off to a motel for the night, and I sat there amid my unassembled Ikea furniture, feeling a sense of despair and a sense of unreality. We had breakfast the next morning at a greasy-spoon café, and then he drove off and left me to settling in.
On my own I found the gym and the grocery store, went to a departmental party, and tracked down the academic adviser I’d been assigned to, a woman whose facial features I no longer remember, whose office was at the end of a serpentine hallway in the Grecian building that housed the English Department. She helped me with forms. Taking care of business was rewarding in a way, but the feelings of disconnection and guilt that had broken free near the end of my time in New York were stubborn; they sat on my shoulders like birds and cawed into my ears. “This isn’t actually my life,” I wrote on a long document I’d started on my computer to keep track of my thoughts, in plain contradiction of fact.
A few days after arriving in town, I met my downstairs neighbor, Casey, who was a librarian at Cornell’s labor school and liked to play Scrabble. Through him I met his friends. I wrote in letters to my mom that I’d gotten to know a librarian, a chicken farmer, a coffee shop employee, and a filmmaker. Making friends helped immensely, but my thoughts and feelings were still all tangled up. I missed New York. Ithaca seemed so small and remote and countrified. Being at school—in a funded program, no less—was an honor, but I couldn’t seem to get excited about it, and that lack of enthusiasm made me feel appalled with myself. One by one I had made all the choices that got me here, but when I opened my eyes each morning, I felt the panic of someone waking up in an unfamiliar room. The feelings didn’t fade, and after a few weeks I felt worn out by the effort of trying to hide them. One afternoon I walked into the campus medical building and asked directions to the wing for mental health.
The psychiatrist I was assigned to had a difficult-to-pronounce last name, so everyone simply called her “Dr. Barbara.” Dr. Barbara styled her gray hair in a bob and wore sensible, loose long dresses made of jersey knits. She hung Balinese masks on the wall of her office, and her shelves were lined with interesting books. After I began to feel better, I used to try during our
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