happy pills

I have two pieces of writing coming out in magazines online next week, both of which I’m stressed about. I also have two print pieces probably coming out later in the spring, which I feel calm about. I’ll link here but I also made a really janky looking writing website to promote my work and will put links there as well.

This is historically the lowest time of the year for me, as it for many people afflicted with seasonal depression. I grew up in Northern California, where the seasons are historically rain and no rain. When I moved, first to northern Europe, and then to New York, I thought I was going to die. I developed a regime of vitamins: fish oil, vitamin D, iron, echinacea. I got a dawn lamp and then a colorful iridescent lamp. I tried hot exercise, which gave me a horrifying yeast infection, tried spending longer at my parents’ house working remotely (which also depressed me), tried not drinking, tried drinking a lot. One year, I watched all of Euphoria, from start to finish, in early January. This was in 2021, during the omicron outbreak, so I was back to remote work. I would wake up, make coffee, and immediately start watching Euphoria. I will say for the record I didn’t particularly enjoy the show overall, but I love Zendaya and will defend her forever.

This weekend, the first weekend of January and the first snowy weekend, I decided to meal prep. I couldn’t think of anything to cook, since most of the time I just eat chickpea pasta with anchovies on it. When my old roommate saw me preparing it for the nth time, she told me that early on in March 2020, when everyone was raiding the grocery stores, she went shopping with her ex-boyfriend, and all that was left in the pasta section was chickpea pasta. “That’s how i knew we weren’t gonna make it,” she told me. I became dependent on it last fall when I was having stomach pain so bad I thought I had an ulcer. I was heartbroken and drinking on an empty stomach a lot, and also taking Wellbutrin on an empty stomach, usually with black coffee in the morning. The chickpea pasta, I reasoned, was more nutritious than regular pasta. It made up a full meal. The limp, slightly mushy texture of it that other people I know really dislike didn’t offend me. The anchovy mixture was a watered down version of Alison Roman’s shallot pasta, which I had simplified into something I could cook in half an hour, if I came home a little drunk at 9pm.

There’s nothing aesthetic about this kind of depression. The kind I had before, the classic kind where you lie in bed and stare at the wall and avoid other people, was much more aesthetic. The Wellbutrin kind of cured me of that. The main thing it did was make me write a lot. I could suddenly turn out thousands of words a week. Deadlines seemed manageable. That becomes its own kind of solution eventually. In her book, Unfinished Business, Vivian Gornick recalls how she got her start writing after selling a piece to The Village Voice. She spent a while occasionally contributing articles, and then finally overcame her paralyzing self-doubt and asked the editor there to give her a job one day. “He said, ‘You’re a neurotic Jewish girl, you produce only one piece a year, how can I give you a job?’ I said no, not any more, I’d do whatever he wanted—and, as it turned out, I meant it. Two assignments later the job was mine.”

In an interview about the book with the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz remarks that “having to file copy will cure you of the neuroses.”

So will prescription medication sometimes. I started taking Wellbutrin in the first place after I read the proposal for Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein (tw for eating disorders). Clein, who was in recovery from an eating disorder, started taking Wellbutrin in her early 20s because it was sold to her, and to America, as “The Happy, Sexy, Skinny Pill.” Unlike typical SSRIs, which often caused weight gain, general sluggishness, and a low sex drive, Wellbutrin promised the opposite. It is contraindicated for anyone who has ever had an eating disorder because of the effect that disordered eating has on your electrolyte balance. Clein didn’t disclose her medical history to her psychiatrist, who kept upping her dose until she both relapsed into her eating disorder and eventually had a seizure.

I have never had an eating disorder. If I’m kind of weird about food sometimes, it’s to the same extent as basically every other young woman I know. I didn’t read the story as an eating disorder guide, although the idea of effortless weight loss was obviously appealing. It was more the emotional side effects that appealed to me, though. Clein describes Wellbutrin as numbing, as making the world shinier, more palatable. It reminded me in some ways of Rachel Aviv’s description of Lexapro, which either coincided with, or was the catalyst for, her life suddenly progressing. It’s hard to really parse correlation here. But when Aviv started taking Lexapro, her writing career took off, she got into a serious relationship and got married, decided to have a baby. She worried at some point that the drug had helped her fit into a box, that psychiatric medication was particularly targeted towards woman to make them compliant, docile, participants in their own subjugation.

This description also made Lexapro sound appealing to me, although less so than Wellbutrin. I figured maybe I wanted to be fit into a box. Maybe I needed a little bit of help to become more docile and sweeter, less emotionally unregulated. I got it prescribed to quit smoking, which is a common usage for it. Off cigarettes, my skin improved. My blinding headaches went away. My sleep improved. The side effects, the stomach cramps, and the weird paranoid moments where I imagined falling in front of the train in a freak accident, seemed manageable. It smoothed out my brain, took the edge off of my anxiety.

What did worry me, though, was my reaction to the Clein essay, which seemed deeply perverse. Her story is, for all intents and purposes, a horror story. She, like many other writers, describes experiencing a warped mentality at the height of her eating disorder, where any path towards thinness or control was so desirable that it literally blocked out all the negatives. My reaction was similar in a way. The drug feels like a safety net, like if I do a trust fall something will hold me up. It leaves me space to be fun, to be wild, to experiment, to spill out my feelings, without worrying I’ll fall too far. It does make the world quicker and shinier. Reading about it, that potential was so tantalizing that it blocked out all the possible downsides.

When I was around 22, I read Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado. If you haven’t read it, the book is basically a (controversial) Foucauldian look at gender. Preciado describes his own process of transitioning and how he came to intimately understand the regime of gender. A lot of people hate it because it’s written in this very jargon-y way, which is kind of annoying, and for other more theoretical reasons that I have no particular opinions about. I was impressed by it at 22.

One of Preciado’s claims, and the main one I remember, is about the birth control pill. According to Preciado, there is actually no medical reason for a full week of placebo pills, or for the specific hormonal levels typical to the pill. Instead, he asserts, the pill pack was designed to create an illusion of “natural” femininity. Like women not taking hormones, women on the pill bleed for a week. The cycle is obviously not a menstrual period, since the whole point of the pill is that it inhibits your menstrual cycle, but to the untrained eye, the effect is the same. It feels like you are still participating in womanhood. It is a regime, in other words, to enforce the rigid biopolitical norms of gender. Even the calendar design of the pack, which seems aimed at user friendliness, is structured around the month. It reproduces “natural” time. It keeps us bound to ourselves.

The birth control pill I take doesn’t actually have a full week of placebos, because it’s low dose. It only has four days of placebos, and two of the pills during those days are iron pills. It still comes in a neat little pack to remind me of my waning fertility and of the passage of time. It does not cause me debilitating side effects, like the regular pill did. On the standard, higher dose pill, I had nausea so severe it was like waking up on a ship every morning.

I used to have an IUD, which made me so sick that I had to go to the ER to get it removed. It also gave me really bad acne. I went to the dermatologist who took high-resolution pictures of my messed up face on her iPad and prescribed me Tretinoin. Come back in three months and we’ll take progress pictures, she told me. It reminded me of when I went to the orthodontist and they took all these panoramic pictures of my face and told me how braces could improve my jawline. Your model pictures! said the assistant, when she was showing them to me. I think if I ever did a consultation with a cosmetic surgeon, it would ruin my life, because this still haunts me every time I see my profile.

Acne, like weight gain, is one of these fairly superficial concerns that is often fronted as a negative outcome for otherwise positive medications. But having acne made me despondent. I stopped using the Tretinoin, which my insurance made it really hard for me to get anyway, and started using this Gwyneth Paltrow approved retinol I bought in France called A313. It’s less harsh than Tretinoin and balmier. I use it sparingly now since I am eczema-prone and because your skin cells will not infinitely replicate. There is a finite lifetime to them, as to everything else in your body.

Should we resist these kinds of biopolitical regimes? There have been other times in my life when I was able to write a lot and when I felt freer. In 2020, between March and July, I wrote a whole (discarded) novel in isolation, when the world felt small and quiet. I have at times had less social anxiety, felt less trapped in some kind of airless middle-class fishbowl. The way I see it, Wellbutrin sort of replicates those circumstances for me. It is unnatural to sit at a desk for 40-60 hours a week and to do labor which has no bearing on your life or specific meaning to you and the profits of which do not accrue to you. It is unnatural to earn money from all of that only to immediately pay it out in rent. It is unnatural, maybe even, to repeatedly attach to and then sever so totally from other people, as most of us do. For love, of whatever kind, to be so transactional.

The only thing I could think of meal prepping was paella, which I had cooked for my family on Christmas. I went shopping around 8pm, tired and sore from a reformer exercise I had done which involved repeatedly pushing yourself off a headboard, as if it was a trampoline. I remembered when I was at the store that saffron threads are ridiculously expensive as is short grain white rice, but I bought them anyway. The meal seemed absurdly lavish when I was cooking it. It was almost 10 by the time I was done. But afterwards, I felt a strange sense of accomplishment. I took a picture and sent it around. Could a depressed person make this?