Pills

Some of the deeper learning in our lives comes, for many of us, out of getting in deep trouble.

Parker Palmer

It was the start of September when I finally shuffled through the pharmacy door.

For 6 months the prescription for anti-depressants had been wedged into the sleeve at the back of my diary, folded and unfolded. Now it was scrunched into my hand.

Arriving home, I first parked the little stubby box at the back of the recipe holder behind my daughter’s scribbled drawings. By the end of September, the little box had graduated to my underwear draw. The seal remained unbroken though; I’d promised my wife I wouldn’t read about the side-effects before taking them.

Aged 20, I’d found myself sitting opposite a Dr in a dingy surgery on Eversholt St next to Euston station. The walls were covered with the same washy-green tiles you find in old, Victorian swimming baths. I remember how the tiles used to make the swimmers’ voices splash and echo – as though everything was happening at a distance. That was how I felt now.

“I’ll put you on anti-depressants,” the Dr mumbled.

He’d yet to look at me.

Not when I walked through the door, not when I explained about the panic attacks that had shattered my 2nd year of university. And not now, either, as he wrote me a prescription for mind-altering drugs. And not the type I’d hoped to be ingesting on my three-year philosophy degree.

“But I’m not depressed,” I replied.

“Still works,” he said, bent over his pad.

“No way,” I said, pushing back out of my chair. ” I’m not taking them.”

A few months ago, at one of my lowest points, my wife called my mum to let her know what was going on. They chatted for a while, my wife sometimes through tears and exhaustion. The medication I had started a fortnight earlier was known to induce quite harrowing side-effects. Could that be why I was feeling so bad?

My mum thought not.

“Your husband’s like a swan,” my mum said. “On the surface, everything looks calm and together. What you can’t see is the effort required beneath the surface to hold it all together. What he’s going through now is a difference, not of kind… just of degree.”

I was touched somehow to hear this. It meant that my mum, although we didn’t speak of them, intuited my troubles. And it also meant that she’d paid enough attention to me to see what was really happening. Like the Velveteen Rabbit who is made real by being seen. Through love.

By this time, though, it wasn’t just my lower body underwater…I was completely submerged.

And I realised that when I thought I’d hit rock bottom in March of this year, I actually had further to go.

Much further.