This won’t be a long entry. All of it is gone so this is just paper and ink and has become a job. I have put off journaling even though there is much that needs to be recorded because it’s just so much work. So I will leave off meticulous detail and poignant words – if I could even find them in the first place, which is doubtful.
.
Zoloft is quite effective. I didn’t notice much that first week of half-doses but by the time I was on full doses, it became exponentially easier to do my job with a quiet voice, a smile, and gentle eyes. The only thing is it took all the rest of me away. In order to do my job, my life drained away into those little blue pills. I didn’t feel drugged, exactly; I wasn’t a zombie. To all eyes, I seemed to return to the old Nicole and on several levels that was precisely true. But to keep me from feeling the bad things too much, the medicine kept me from feeling anything too much. And it kept me from really minding. It was with a distant concern I noticed this and kept my mouth shut except when I was taking these pills. Because it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter than I no longer missed the runs, neglected my journal, and had to real desire to write. None of that mattered in the face of what I gained – I could do my job and whether I was no longer miserable or couldn’t feel the misery in any case, I couldn’t really care. I had to face the reality that I would need to be on this medication for as long as I had this job, as long as I was in this profession. I would have no soul indefinitely.
.
Because that is what it really boils down to. All those things that made me me, everything that made my heart flutter with anticipation and my muscles flex with satisfaction was gone from me. Price for sanity? One soul. Well, isn’t that perfect. That’s exactly what I have to offer. What a Faustian bargain.
.
Days passed and my writing languished. This journal was never opened. The one or two times I went running, I was going on fumes of remembered glory and anticipation only to be gutted when I saw yet again all the garish orange lights at my marina. They took my sanctuary, my destination from me. The loss crippled me, squeezed the breath right out of my chest. But I didn’t cry. The pills take that from me, too. I don’t remember the last time I cried, let alone wept. Incomplete tears and half-gasped sobs were all my body could manage for the terrible loss of my marina.
.
How high is too high a cost to do your duty? To survive this job, everything of meaning has been carved away from me, a pound of flesh. They took my meaning away in my writing and my purpose away in my running, for what is the point of running if you have nowhere to run to?
.
But I begin to suspect that it is not just the medication. Now that it is Spring Break, I cannot afford to let this precious freedom pass without writing. I cannot just sit by and lose myself in movies and computers when I could be creating. So I whittled my doses back to half a pill a day last week and then stopped taking it altogether as the week came to a close. True, I didn’t notice the Zoloft take effect till after about a week so maybe it’s too early to tell the effect of cessation. But I suspect with each passing unchanging day that maybe the medication only brought to the fore the truth – maybe this job, this year, truly has changed me. Maybe I am not unscathed and I really have paid the toll instead of inching by with my hand on my wallet. Maybe pieces of me really are missing and can’t be recovered. Maybe I will never have my running or my writing again. Maybe I will always bear these scars that no one seems to notice because people only see what they want to see. Maybe I am a broken toy and have lost those pieces of me that make me work, all in order to make a living. But there’s a big difference in being alive and making a life.
No comments:
Post a Comment