Medication and Writing

I've mentioned on my other blog that when I'm depressed, my "comfort reads" become books about depression. Identification might be the only pleasure my depression can't obstruct, and while that might make others suspicious of it -- as depression's reinforcement or, worse, a trusted double-agent -- I tend to take any pleasures I can when I'm feeling so-not-well.

Here's a passage I recently liked from Chase Twichell's essay, "Toys in the Attic: An Ars Poetica Under the Influence," from Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression. Ideally, I'd like this blog to do something similar to what Twichell does in her brief discussion of antidepressants' effects on writing: use depression to reconsider language, and use language to resist depression.

In my mid-thirties, which happens to be the average age of onset for clinical depression, I began shooting in the dark, as my doctor put it: searching through trial and error for a drug that would cure what ailed me with as few side effects as possible. Some of them make you dream, every night, the kind of dream you hate to wake from, rich and important feeling. Others keep you skittering along the surface of sleep as if a car alarm were going off somewhere in the neighborhood, but not on your street. Some make you black out if you stand up too fast, or glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth. One cures migraines, another exacerbates them. All of them affect the way in which the brain processes language. It's not something a person uninterested in words might notice, except for maybe a bit of tip-of-the tongue syndrome, but to me it's obvious that my relation to language has been subtly affected. Before the long parade of drugs, words were like water -- all I had to do was dip my mind and it would come up brimming with new excitements. I always thought of this ability as a "gift," a part of my being. Now the river of words flows around me as it always has, but I write as a translator trespassing outside the boundaries of my original language, fluent but no longer a native speaker. It's hard to explain. It feels like a new part of my brain has learned language, and the old part has atrophied. Maybe this sensation is just a physical metaphor for what the antidepressants do, I don't know, but I've come to see that this death of imaginary self (along with its language) is not necessarily a hindrance to my work, though it took me years to stop trying to call my "gift" back from its grave. Its loss functions exactly as form does in poetry: if the door's locked, try a window.