Emotional Botox

My Auntie B liked to refer to anti-depressants as “pack-up-your-troubles-pills,” and regarded the quest for “balance” and “happiness” with unabated derision. When I went to visit her in Shrewsbury, England, fresh-faced and 14 years old, she admonished me for trying to clean her kitchen. She liked it the way it was: filthy, disorganized and pungent with that oh-so English smell of mildew, old-people and slightly rotten vegetables. She regarded my enthusiasm for cleanliness with stern disapproval, and rarely called me by name, but instead referred to me as Polly-bloody-Anna.

Auntie B was a journalist in London during the Second World War and would always speak of “horrible Americans” and “dear little Russians.” To me her biases seemed completely arbitrary as she never offered any explanation, but she avidly protected and conspicuously advertised them. According to her, the two greatest mysteries in life are that a) we are supposedly on a little ball, whizzing around the sun with our feet stuck to the ground by a mysterious force called “gravity, and b) the mechanical intricacies of sex.

Despite Auntie B’s distain for optimism, I have tried to rediscover my inner Polly-bloody-Anna. For those of you who don’t know, Pollyanna is a mythical figure: an Aryan, be-braided, patriotic 12-year-old, who is fiercely, almost pathologically, happy. She is totally enchanted with the world and everything around her — able to see the good in all people and make an imaginary castle out of two Beachwood twigs. Auntie B, quite rightly so, regarded Pollyanna as the most dangerously evil allegorical figure ever invented in children’s literature.

Perhaps it’s because I am a “horrible American,” or perhaps because I saw Pollyanna one too many times on the Disney channel growing up, that I’m constantly pursuing happiness. This means I am in an unequivocal and perpetual state of dissatisfaction. For instance, when I drive my car, I always have my hand hovering over the radio dial, manically changing the station, searching for a better song. In this search for a better song, I never actually hear any music, just the static of the liminal space between airwaves, the noise of my own indecision. And that’s how I live my life … with my hand forever hovering over the dial, relentlessly searching for the better pair of shoes, better relationship, better career, better orgasm and better anti-depressant.

Unfortunately for me, anti-depressants make me miserable. Through my three years here at Cornell, I have been on five or six different drugs. Do I need them? Probably not, but if there is a pill that is going to make me happy, I’m going to fucking take it. Where there’s a pill there’s a way. But it doesn’t work that way, and I wish someone had told me before I hopped on the Prozac bandwagon.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people who really need to be on meds. I know this for certain, and have observed loved ones close to me suffer from serious mood disorders. But because the subject of mental illness is taboo and people don’t talk about it openly, it can lead to secrecy, shame and destructive self-medication. At the same time, I am frightened by how crazy easy it is to get meds; there is no real litmus test to see if you are a good candidate for anti-depressants. Most kids experiment with illegal drugs during college, and I just happened to experiment with legal ones.

The quest for the perfect medication can be brutal with very unpleasant side-effects. I’ve been on Prozac, Cymbalta, Welbutrin, and Lexapro and every single one of them completely sedated me. These drugs have very different effects on different people, but for me I was constantly nauseated and sleepy. It felt like I was walking around with a permanent head-cold, as if my brain was full of cotton wool. Everything was fuzzy, out-of-focus and insipid. Anti-depressants are like emotional Botox: the problems and wrinkles don’t go away, they just get sort of frozen for a while.

Now I just started asking myself whether this pill popping is part of the mentality of our generation of buy, buy, buy…. next thing, move on, change cities, change boyfriends, change careers — change the God-damn channel. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this derives from the fact that I am a spoiled, over-privileged, “horrible” American. I think I have a right to be sublimely happy — Pollyanna happy — but maybe it doesn’t work that way, and maybe it shouldn’t.

Auntie B knew that Pollyanna was full of crap and that the kitchen would never really be clean. She didn’t fight it; she reveled in it, blanketing life’s misery with sardonic laughter. But she never felt sorry for herself, or for anyone else for that matter. She didn’t sit impassively in her dingy house letting melancholy take hold. No, she actively cultivated dejection, but with such vigor that it was actually sort of inspiring. There was strength in the fact that she no longer looked for cure-all happy pills or better radio stations. Maybe she was on to something.

Auntie B died this Christmas, when my relatives had all convened in South Africa in some misguided quest for familial solidarity — as if this was her last protest, her last mockery of warmth and good-cheer.

Claire Readhead is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at creadhead@cornellsun.com [1]. Silk Blue Stockings appears alternate Mondays.