“Erik, you cannot selectively shut down. You can’t cherry-pick the feelings you want to suppress. The limbic system is not a sophisticated switchboard. It’s just one primitive switch. On or off. You mute one feeling, and you mute them all. And now, if you start digging into one feeling…”
“I wake up all of them and now I’m fucked,” he said, exhaling wearily.
Diane interlaced her fingers around a knee. “We’ve discussed before going on antidepressants.”
He dropped his head back, squirming against the notion. “I don’t really want to.”
“Why not?”
“It just makes me feel weak.”
“You’re in a weak place right now.”
He put his head in his hands, trying to dig for the words to articulate this fierce aversion. “I don’t want to be that kind of person. I don’t want to need a pharmaceutical crutch the rest of my life. It makes me feel… I don’t know. Weak.”
“Let me tell you what meds won’t do,” Diane said. “They won’t make it all go away. They won’t numb you, they won’t fix you. If you keep coming to see me, you are going to keep feeling, Erik, and feeling bad and feeling hard. But with the proper medication, we can slice off the extreme end of the spectrum, those horrible episodes of depression and anxiety keeping you from making progress with me. Meds can hold the floor under your feet while we rebuild some of your walls.”
He chewed on her metaphor, allowing himself to entertain the idea. “I guess so.”
“And the goal here, Erik, my goal, is to get you off the meds. I certainly don’t want you on them for the rest of your life if it’s not necessary. And honestly, I don’t think you will be.”
With her declaring she had a goal for him, his trust in her deepened. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “All right,” he whispered. “All right, I’ll try.”
Deeper
He saw a doctor, who tried several medications before finding one that got the floor under his feet without giving him nauseating headaches or killing his appetite. He also got a prescription for Klonopin, to use as needed for anxiety. It was the closest thing to a wolf-killer he could imagine. Half a tablet took the edge off a panic attack but still let him go about daily business. If the pack came at night to get him, he took a full tablet and so long, suckers.
He was starting to sleep again. And as Diane had foreseen, the drugs did dull the razor-sharp edge to the depression. Which he appreciated. But they also sliced off the other end of the spectrum, and he noticed nothing particularly excited him, either.
Which he could handle.
He and Diane kept digging.
“God, the blood,” he said. “I hate blood. I couldn’t get it off me. Everything was just soaked with it.”
“Whose blood?”
“Everyone’s.”
Daisy’s blood caked in the hair of his forearms. Outlining his fingernails and crusted in his eyebrows.
Lucky’s blood on the bathroom floor.
David’s blood on the kitchen wall.
“My dreams were filled with blood,” he said. “It’s all over some of my memories. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think back to some of those times and it’s—” He made a throwing motion with both hands, an imaginary bucket of blood. “It’s splashed there.”
“Your loved ones were shot,” Diane said, and began to raise her fingers, one at a time. “A boy committed suicide in front of your eyes. Your girlfriend’s leg had to be sliced open. You held a girl having a miscarriage. You beat up a friend who betrayed you.” She was out of fingers. Her hand curled into a fist and dropped on the arm of the chair. “These are horrible experiences, Erik. Spaced over the course of a lifetime you wouldn’t just blithely get over them. They all happened to you in a single year.”
Erik stared past her, open-mouthed. “It was bad,” he said. He admitted it. Declared it. His mind flipped up an unexpected image of himself as a small boy, in his parents’ bedroom door.
I had a bad dream.
Standing at the foot of their bed with an affronted attitude. A sense of entitlement.
I had a bad dream. Something terrible happened. Look at me. Agree.
“It was horrible,” he said.
Diane nodded.
*
Deeper.