Every Day, Every Day

            There are days I do not want to leave my house, other days I do not want to leave my bed.  I drag my heavy body into the shower, lean on the cold tile wall, wonder what could possibly go wrong if I simply went back to bed for a week.  Even little tasks require more energy than I have—brushing my teeth seems an insurmountable obstacle to leaving the house, which I do not want to do, anyway.

            In adolescence I started scratching the skin off my hands, feet, and face.  Lacerations sting, more painful than a clean cut.  I wanted to feel something, and pain was easy to feel, easy to identify.  I wondered what had happened to my heart; I used to feel so passionate about everything.  By high school I just could not make myself care.  Summers were easier, when the sun stayed bright for so long and I could spend long days at the window, soaking up the warmth and buried in a novel.  In a really good novel, the characters show enough emotion to let me feel it, too.  Scarlett O’Hara, Jo March, and Pip graciously shared their passion for life with my numb mind.

            My little children used to spend afternoons tucked around my feet, begging for one more book, one more chapter, one more story, anything to get a few more words from Mom before I drifted off again, sending them to play in their rooms so I could sit quietly, doing nothing.  My children were clean and fed, I taught them to read and helped with homework, we went to church and the park and visited family.  All of the doing, however, took so much energy I had no energy to play with or talk to them. 

            Driving home one day, I found myself hoping I would be in a car accident.  I could be in a coma, or dead, and not have to pretend to be alive anymore.  I could lie in state, people would come to see and declare how much like myself I look, and no one would expect me to do anything.  I started to plan for after, when I would not be alive, and that finally jolted me into feeling scared.  Who would see that my children visited my parents?  Who would know they preferred crunchy cereal and very little milk?  Who would remember to skip the scary parts of stories when the littlest one was listening?  I got home and called my doctor; something had to change.

            I said, “I don’t want to kill myself, I just want to be dead.”  Dr. Klepke wrote a prescription for a little white pill, to be taken every night at bedtime.  I swallowed it mechanically, not hoping for much, every night for a month.  I dragged through my days, taking care of all the necessary drudgery of life.  My children got fed and bathed and read to, I remembered to eat every couple of days, and life went on as it always had. 

            One morning my alarm went off at the usual time, and I jumped up to shower and dress before the children got up.  I washed my hair, brushed my teeth, found clean jeans to wear.  I felt hungry, I—hey! I actually felt hungry.  I cared whether my jeans were clean.  Gravity pulled on me no more forcefully than it pulled on everything else.  Maybe the little white pills were worth taking after all.  Maybe a new life would start today, and I would not have to scratch holes in my skin just to feel alive.

            Now some days I feel great.  I love my family; I chat with strangers in the grocery store and on the bus; I do everything normal people do without thinking about it.  Those days are the most frustrating.  I want to be a normal person; taking a pill every day is not normal.  Some days, I do not take my meds; maybe after all these years my brain does not need them anymore, maybe I am cured.  For a few days, no one notices.  Soon, though, everyone around me seems really stupid, the world seems designed to annoy me, and I lash out at the people closest to me.  A week later, my family is happy that I have retreated to my room, hiding from the world.

            I drag myself out of bed in the morning, leaning on furniture and walls, trying to summon the energy to leave the house and live my life.  I try to decide if I want my life, or if I can let it all go while I stay in bed for a week.  That is when I know my brain will never produce the normal complement of chemicals; the little white pills will always be part of my life.  I grab a glass and swallow another one with great gulps of water, wanting to rush it into my bloodstream and into my brain, wanting to feel alive and normal again.