A week ago I got the prescription. Two days later I picked it up. I’m not functioning. These magic pills feel like my last straws, but I still can’t bring myself to open the bottle.

It’s been twenty-odd years since I last turned to Prozac.  The drug and the disease it’s meant to treat are both better understood, and I understand I’m at that place where I need help that can’t come from myself or another human.  I’ve tried other magic pills and management methods. Some of them get me out of the cave for a while, but, as the characters on my favorite guilty pleasure show ‘Once Upon a Time’ are fond of saying, All magic comes with a price.

Managing the big “D” with tricks means getting through it, but it also means experiencing every throb of worry and pain in every nerve. It means that tears are always waiting in the wings for the weak moments as over-analysis of very interaction keeps the psyche in a constant state of almost-adolescent angst. The magic pills dull that pain, but they do have a price.

Some cause weight gain (pretty depressing). Others lead to all nighters for nights on end.  But all of them, while evening the keel and pulling my attention from the depths back to the horizon, wrap themselves around the soul like a neoprene wetsuit.  It’s not a straight jacket, but the thick, impenetrable insulation does inhibit sensation.  It’s a price, and the question I ask of every bottle of magic pills is how much?

The last year has been the most creatively-productive one I’ve ever known.  Stimulated by new friendships forged at a writer’s workshop at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, I’ve written and drawn more and more regularly than ever before.  Before the workshop, I was a dabbler, trying to choose between two crafts and vacillating between them as the mood struck me.  A year of unprecedented encouragement offered a more rewarding search for authenticity in our work.  The workshop which started with a focus on rural and small town life ultimately became the search for the stories and meanings in all of our lives.  

That search meant opening my eyes and my soul.  It meant discovering beauty and meaning in my very ordinary life.  It meant living life and recognizing the ways I had kept it out.  

Depression doesn’t keep life out.  It keeps me withdrawn from life, watching it from my cave, but I’m never quite sure if the pills are a way out of the cave or just a way to be less aware of it.  It’s that uncertain but sometimes strong anesthetic effect that makes me fear the cure as much as the disease.

But there’s another uncomfortable reality.  The deeper I go, the less I write.  Not ironically, and the less I write, the deeper I go.

There’s a romantic picture of the tortured artist.  It isn’t entirely unfounded.  There is an frighteningly long list of authors and artists whose lives were upended and prematurely ended by mental illness.  

However, as I struggle to work at the one occupation that truly gives me satisfaction, I’ve begun to wonder how much of their ability to express their creativity was actually hamstrung by their cranial chemical imbalances.   Mania may produce periods of intense productivity, but, as I study the lives of the luminaries, it seems that the despair at other end of the spectrum often coincided with a withdrawal from life and work.  

By contrast, the few people I’ve met in ‘real life’ who are working as artists or writers, are the ones who have managed their moods to allows themselves to ‘show up for work’ everyday.  There is no drama in the work.  There is only the work, as there is with any other job.

Right now, I feel constantly in jeopardy of failing the day job and the parenting job  – forget achieving the dream job of writing.  I know only fear of the unknown keeps the pills in their bottle, but int this moment the pursuit of the authentic is yielding one other invaluable lesson.  It is that fear can be as crippling and counterproductive as any mental illness, and, while the debate over the link between creativity and mental illness thrives, my small hope is that conquering my fear of what might happen will be the stimulating cure to any analgesic effects of the curative I’m about to swallow.

A few weeks ago I came out of the cave. Struggling to stay productive as my elaborate and expansive fantasy world beckoned, desperate for inspiration, I began to write about my writer’s ‘block’. It’s more of a cave sealed by a great iron door than a block. When I’m teetering on the edge of a serious depression as I do almost annually, I retreat behind the door. The world behind it is richer and provides a sustaining refuge when anxiety and despair grow, inflaming one another and consuming me. But, the escape is never without a cost, as my sister recently reminded me.

Fantasy is my mentally-induced coma. When I’m diving into it, I still function, holding up my end of the household. For most of my fantasy visit, the only lifeline out of that very deep and seductive pit is the knowledge that several someone else’s completely depend on my not letting go. But, even though I’ve never completely lost my grip on that line, I know that living at the back of my mind means I’m not fully living with the people I love.

There are pharmaceutical ‘cures’ and therapies for depression, but they, too, come with costs. Some – physical side effects, sluggishness, even increased risk of suicide – are printed on the label. But others are not so apparent.

The back of my cave is dark, but sometimes I think it also provides me with tremendous depth of field when I do look back out at the ‘real world’. It doesn’t allow for any filter all the events of the day and their implications intrude on my consciousness as soon as I venture outside my fantasy realm, and they are in sharp focus at every distance. Where my mania lets the popular media burn out disturbing details through overexposure, my depression cancels out the glare.

With tack-sharp clarity and all at once I can see a life that is finally unfolding as I always wanted – people to love, work to sustain us, and a physical refuge from the rest of the world – and the things that can undo it. I pass a rusting upturned oil drum on the banks of the Battenkill and wonder how much ooze still covers the rocks at the bottom of that river. How many parts per million now float in that water where my children cavort in the summer? How much of it seeps into our ground water? Our well must be safe. How much of our cleaning products get into our well? Are they really going to start fracking across the state line? Can we protect our own water? Do we have any say in it? How do people find the courage to take these on? I should be trying to write the next Silent Spring, and all I can come up with is posts about laundry. And that’s before I even turn on the news.

There have been times when my worries have taken me to a dangerous precipice, and after many years of walking to the edge and staring into the delicious dark, I learned from an observant aunt that there were alternatives to this routine. I began to explore Prozac, which was popular at the time, and for a short time, it worked. And then it didn’t. I tried others. And, while sometimes they could contain the chain reactions of my worries, they created a new nagging fear.

The new worry had nothing to do with the chest palpitations they produced but with the foggy filter they fit over my lens on the world. I began to sense the problems of the world less, but in the back of my mind, I knew they were still there. The fog didn’t help to resolve them anymore than the fear did, and I often wondered if its true function was to obscure my own cowardice when considering how to help solve those problems.

I’m working to barricade the door to my fantasy realm now. It stands in the way of my present and future. But it is only just behind me, and now as I wait for my mania to shine its white hot, distorting light on the world, its problems are still in sharp focus.  I know I don’t have the wherewithal or courage to be an agent of change, but as much as that clarity can be a curse, I’m still not sure the filter is a blessing either.

Over the last eight months, I’ve realized that the biggest hurdle to becoming a real writer is not finding an agent or a publisher but, rather, finding the courage to look at your own life honestly.

I’ve always thought there was a fine line between courage and crazy.  Mine is a secret door at the back of my brain.  This door leads from the part of my brain that lives in what you and I call the real world to an alternate universe.  If you were to step through the door to this world with me, you would find that it is also very real – bigger than life at times.  It is very much like the ‘real’ world. It has countries and languages, beauty and even danger.  It has problems.  But in this world, the problems are surmountable.  The humans are heroes, and, sometimes, I am one of them.  It is a world I have allowed not only to flourish but to take up a fair amount of real estate in my head.  I’ve been building and populating this universe since I could crawl.

I think this world has existed somewhere in my head since I was old enough to be aware of the physical world.  However, I began maintaining it in earnest soon after my parents moved from Baltimore to Ohio.  Already dealing with then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder (or what they then called manic depression, if it was discussed at all back then), I went from having giddy highs and intense lows that confused both me and my parents, to my first conscious flirtation with suicide when I was thirteen.

The move itself was a huge change.  My sister and I both lost our closest friends.  We went from a small school to a comparatively huge one.  The new city was not the cowtown we’d anticipated, and the kids were surprisingly fashion conscious – something years of uniforms had not prepared either of us for.  I tried, but I never acquired the art of dressing well enough to avoid merciless teasing.  Our old school had been incredibly diverse, but the new one was rigidly homogenous.

I was a typical eighth-grader and would have done (and, at first, tried) anything to fit in.  The first autumn leaves hadn’t hit the ground, however, before I realized it was not going to happen.  For the first time in my life, I heard people (kids) using racial slurs in ‘polite’ company.  The first time I heard it was in homeroom sitting next to a girl who would later become one of my closest friends.  A recent immigrant from Romania, unashamedly intelligent, and the only Jewish girl in a class of several hundred, she was a prime teasing target.  As the weeks wore on, the teasing took on a decidedly xenophobic tone.  I started to wonder if the teacher was deaf as she allowed the other students to make fun of this girl’s accent and clothes and her ‘Jewish’ nose.  Then, one horrible day after our entire class had been introduced to those black-and-white Holocaust movies, one of these boys turned to her and started softly singing, “Kill all the jewish people”.

I couldn’t believe that she didn’t cry.  I was already crying (a lot of us were), but, instead of finding the courage to stand up to these bullies on behalf of my friend, I began trying to find ways to avoid school altogether.  My parents had no way of knowing how bad the teasing was, and my sick-outs became more elaborate as Mom and Dad’s commitment to my education began to clash with my depression that was no longer a small, pulsating lump but a full-blown tumor.

At one point I even went so far as to swallow a half a bottle of Tylenol, in a half-assed attempt to ‘end it all’ – the first, but not last, conscious flirtation with suicide. My ignorance of toxicity didn’t kill me, but it made me vomit enough to keep me home from school for a few days.  My parents saw only the the vomit (it never occurred to me to tell them what had caused it), however, and, when my stomach recovered and my fake outs failed me, it was back to school and deeper into my own world in the cave at the back of my mind.

I made a few very close friends in the new school system, but I also lost a lot interest in being in a in-crowd that continually expressed its xenophobia so gleefully.  I (sometimes willingly) made myself a ripe target over the years, and my cave grew more elaborate and colorful.  At some point, I realized I needed a line of demarcation so no one would discover my fantasy world.

There is a big iron door there now.  Thanks to the intervention of an observant aunt, I ultimately came to terms with my bipolar brain, but I still go to the door more often than I should.  I have tried numerous pharmaceutical therapies for my bipolar, and they work for a time.  But they also have side effects, and I still have the nagging worry that the ‘balance’ they offer is as much an avoidance of my problems as is my door.  Now in my forties, perspective is my therapy, and, when I’m heading into and riding the highs that go with manic depression, it’s sufficient.  But when I’m sliding down the curve and the world begins to be tinged with shadows, I clear the cobwebs from the door and turn the key.

Lately, though, as I’ve been thinking about the writing life I want, I’ve had to take a hard look at the things I can control and the things in and around my life that I can’t.  Sometimes the things I can’t control terrify me, and, even as I write and want to write more, the place at the back of my brain calls out to me like a soothing siren.  For years, my world was an anesthetic when my dark side threatened to overwhelm me, but like any drug, it has side effects.  It is not a performance-enhancing drug, it is more like a mentally-induced coma.  When I’m under, I do manage to meet my day-to-day obligations, but I don’t create.  I don’t engage.  I don’t feel.  I let the ice start to close over my head, and the quiet and control are addicting.

My world is not my depression.  It is not the tumor, but it is just as dangerous.  Even during extended high periods, when cobwebs and briars have grown over the door, something has kept me from throwing away the key or paving over that real estate with something ‘normal’.  I’ve been retreating to it recently, and just yesterday began thinking about its origins.  I began thinking, again, about my friend who, apparently, never needed a door because she was brave.  And, when I sat down to write this morning, I wasn’t sure if confessing my crazy to the world was a brave thing or even a good idea.

It’s probably neither.  People who know me well know, and people who know me a little can probably guess something’s a little off.  But today it’s the first brick in the wall I’m trying to build to seal up that room.

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