I Want a New Drug

by Beverly Tjerngren

I've always been moody (some have said "volatile," my mother, being kinder, has said "mercurial"), and I've always been vulnerable to a familial tendency toward depression. I grew up having relatively good self-esteem, though, despite the usual adolescent-girl insecurites about weight and appearance, and despite feeling socially awkward a good bit of the time. Deep down, I knew that I was good enough, I was smart enough, and, doggone it, people liked me.

All that changed when I was 22 years old. My first marriage spiraled wildly out of control, I got a rejection letter from the one graduate school I really wanted to attend, and I met the man who would change my life, emphatically not for the better. Without going into gory details, the three years I lived with him were the three worst years of my life, years so bad that I still regularly have nightmares about him, though it's been six years since we lived together and nearly four years since I've seen him. Those years trashed my ego and left my self-confidence at rock-bottom.

It took me a long time to realize that my self-esteem wasn't so low because I believed all the bad things he said about me, but because in my heart of hearts I knew that I had to be stupid, worthless, weak-willed, whatever, to let myself get into such a bad, stereotypically abusive situation. How could I, raised as I was by a strong woman who taught me early on not to take shit from anyone, have walked so blindly into such a relationship? Worse, how could I have stayed for three years, even going back once after working up the courage to leave? Clearly there was something wrong with me.

It wasn't until an unbearable case of post-partum anxiety/depression sent me to a therapist less than two years ago that I started to see my situation differently. She encouraged me to stop focusing on having gotten myself into a bad situation and to start focusing on having gotten myself out. It had never occurred to me to look at things from that angle. It was a moment of epiphany for me, truly. The therapist also helped me see, hokey and psycho-babbly as it sounds, that I needed to "forgive" my 22-year-old self for making bad decisions all those years ago.

Those sessions helped me immeasurably. My anxiety dissipated and I was able to start functioning more or less normally again. Therapy wasn't a cure-all, however, and I was still plagued by a near-constant inner dialogue of self-loathing. Any little thing--a gravy made too lumpy, the "right" shirt left unlaundered on an important day, a wrong turn at an intersection--could set in motion a running stream of "fat, stupid, ugly, worthless, lazy ... god, I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself." My life had gotten better and better, but my outlook had gotten only more dismal.

Even the best therapist, the best self-help books, the best of circumstances can do only so much. Sometimes, for some people, different perspectives and positive affirmations don't have what it takes, and something more is in order. For me, "something more" goes by the name of Zoloft.

Late last fall, I looked ahead to the winter and saw nothing but a giant black hole waiting to swallow me. I knew that I simply could not make it through without help, so I approached a psychiatrist about anti-depressant drugs. He gave me a prescription for Zoloft and after just a couple of days I started to feel calmer and much better able to cope. The inner dialogue stopped. I started feeling good about myself again. Sometimes when I hit a bump in the road, I'd test out a quick "I hate myself" to see how it felt, and it just didn't click anymore. Instead of continuing with the negative self-talk (more psycho-babble, I know), I'd just shrug and say, "Nah, no big deal." What liberation. I can't describe the feeling of exhilaration.

I know that mental illness is a hush-hush topic for a lot of people, and I have to confess that I don't exactly relish putting this chink in my armor on display for all and sundry to read. The fact that I'm doing it anyway speaks to my new level of self-acceptance. Zoloft has changed my life for the better in such a way that I want to sing it from the mountaintops. I love myself, I love my life, and I won't let the path I found to that love be a dirty little secret.