Melissa

There is that reactionary fear that someone who starts taking medication changes who they were or would be. Unceasing self-medication must surely be worse than accepting the hand one is dealt.

I am a better person than I was before medication, far more in control of myself. I wake in the morning and I know that I am capable of what the day will throw at me, something that seemed far less certain before. I open my mouth and the right words come out. I know myself in a way of which I was incapable before. I have done the work necessary to grow because all my resources are not wasted managing symptoms that I took for personality traits.

I have established a thirty-five-year baseline with nothing in my system. I was never a drinker or smoker. I have never done a drug that had not been prescribed to me--and refused a few of those as well. (I have often retold the anecdote that I declined to fill my Vicodin prescription after I had all my wisdom teeth extracted in one go. I wanted to be lucid enough to write through the pain and feared that I would get a taste of recreational opiates.)

In short, I know well who I am without medication.

I can detect changes in my thinking and personality that I can attribute directly to my medication. My libido is dampened such that I am indifferent outside wifely attention, which does not seem like much of a side effect. When I have modified one pill upward, I am a fraction more assertive until my body gets used to it. I usually accept things more readily and can slow my mind enough to sleep (it comes off as bragging, but I am aware now that my mind is so fast that it can spin out long paranoias if not reined in). These are not entirely because of the therapy or practice, but the interjection of outside chemicals. I have improved confidence and am more extroverted, changes that occurred almost instantly upon beginning my regimen. My writing has improved, both in quantity and quality. I can focus because I was not constantly trapped in my head. I could remember more details and strings of numbers in a way that seemed like a party trick to me. (Apparently, though, people can just do that.) One of the guards at my job told me that I became a better and more active teacher a few years ago. I did not tell her that this was exactly when I got on meds, but it correlated to more energy and less anxiety, but which translated to being adept at what I did.

I once experimented with my dosage on one of my current meds, which made everything vivid. Things were more beautiful, I felt things harder, but I also could not control my emotions. This was most dramatically seen when I burst out weeping against the refrigerator because I listened to a cover of "Wayward Son" by Kansas. I have listened to it many times since, when I had my chemicals better regulated, and I can't access that depth.

I have done personal work, but the core bump was medication. I like who I am now because I am improving, but there is the existential unease of knowing that I am a different person because of a few hundred milligrams a day of anti-epilepsy drugs. This person seems closer to who I should be, but I cannot imagine who I would be if I had continued my unadulterated state. I cannot fathom that my marriage would be as happy as it is.

Amber married a different man. I hope that she loves me more than him since I do not imagine that I am going to return to him, and I am more capable of healthily expressing my love for her. We have continued to grow together through my changes because I am better able to access my truth and articulate my needs.

We are made to improve, to learn the lessons which evaded us in the past, things that held us back. We learn to reject techniques that may have served us in a previous life but no longer do. It is no guarantee, but I hope it, nevertheless.

I would not want to revert. Who I was had too much in him that he could not process. He struggled to explain himself. He fixated and clung to unhealthy personal relationships. If meds opened the way to escape, so be it. I dug myself out. All medication did was stop the dirt from pouring back.

(Had the lockdown and present civil unrest occurred together before the revelations and practices of the last few years, I would have been less likely to have coped. The isolation alone would have eroded me since I derive pleasure and stability from being social.)

In the past, I considered psych meds in others as a character flaw, partly because they did not seem effective. I was never in the undiluted presence of these people. Perhaps their meds were transformative, and I never understood what they would otherwise be experiencing. This may have been their best self, even if it was not one entirely in their control still.

I could be saved, with some therapeutic and chemical intervention. I had the skills and support to improve. I have undergone no major trauma that would complicate my progress. I cannot say the same for those I've known for whom medication wasn't enough.

Melissa, my dear dead friend, believed that the birth control Yaz was the source of a years’ long near psychosis, suicidality, bipolar, and borderline personality symptoms. She did not believe that any of these were who she was--none of them were permanent issues with which she had to grapple but, to her, objective aspects of her reality--but she lost her job owing to her faltering mental health. (I do not think it was that the group home fired her as much as that she could no longer do the job or show up as required.) Her mental illnesses took from her the tethers that would have helped to stabilize her.

Having decided that her mental illness required nothing more than switching to another birth control pill, she was delighted. What a simple solution.

Years before Yaz, she had been in and out of rehab. She had snuck alcohol and cigarettes since she was eight, or so she claimed. Yaz was a latter-day excuse, though it may have aggravated what had been in her for all her life. Even once she was free of Yaz, she was not free of her mental health issues.

She was more in control of herself in her teens, at least outwardly, but she was never well. (In her teens, of course, she had her room in her parents’ basement and their nominal interference in her life, both which may have helped to right her toward the light in her darker moments.) Though she was on various psych meds through our friendship, nothing made much of a positive difference to her demeanor, at least not for long. I don't know what she would have been without meds because her system was never clean. I never knew the uncontaminated Melissa long enough to have a valid means for comparison.

I always suspected something more than wonky neurochemicals were to blame for Melissa's near lifelong substance use. I never asked her with acceptable depth what could have happened before she was eight that compelled this. Asking once, she credited it to being the frumpy, much younger sister of two eighties-beautiful women. This seemed unlikely revision; few eight-year-olds think this way. If there were a trauma when she was that young, she did not disclose it to me, though she proudly confessed horrific situations she sought out in her teens and twenties (e.g., meeting strangers for sex, major abuse from men--both giving and receiving--overdosing, suicidal ideation).

I don't know how she could have been saved. I must believe that she wanted to be. She was never a lost cause to me, though sometimes a losing one. She was stubborn. She wanted therapists to parrot back what she thought was true or trick them into prescribing the drugs she wanted. She couldn't suffer a naked mirror, the idea that she was truly one of the main sources of the problems in her life, even if she didn't ask to have a neurochemical imbalance or presumptive trauma.

I don't know that she wouldn't do the work, but I believe that her mental illness stopped her from succeeding. It's safer to compare myself against a far more acutely afflicted dead woman. What can she do to me now? She cannot correct my assumptions. I suspect she wouldn't, given the fresh perspective granted by being dead.

I have felt irrationality in my mind and fingered it as such. "This is not me, only something that I am going through." It is not always easy, though far more so now that I have experienced that this is truth. I don't know how often Melissa understood what was real, which sounds delusional. It feels more like not having the strength to fight against it, not trusting that she could survive the step of being clean. She rarely thought well of herself when she should have, which laid the foundation of her self-destruction. To her, if being Melissa wasn't a satisfying experience, why not punish the bitch for being insufficient.

I don't mean to set myself as better than Melissa--though I am certain that I have--only that I did not have nearly as far to go. My chemicals could be mistaken as being sensitive. Her chemicals, and what she did in their thrall or to quiet them, ruined her life by degrees. Every time she could push them back, they eroded her a bit more deeply until divots turned to canyons.

I outright feared illegal drugs and she sank beneath them, calling it swimming. Maybe her brain came to so depend on uppers and downers that it was incapable of making its own serotonin and dopamine. She had told me repeatedly that she took a dozen or more sleeping pills a night just to feel drowsy. If I did that once, it would have been a possibly successful suicide attempt.

I know by the end that she was addicted to prescription opiates and bounced between doctors trying to get new scripts. She died of a heroin overdose, which she once told me was the one drug that she could never do again because she knew it would kill her. Once she got her hands on heroin again, she said, she would do it until she died.

I don't know that there is a pill that could have helped to save her when so many had made her worse. The only intervention would have been a slow detox and then to never touch a drug again. She didn't want that and might not have been able to survive that without constant medical attention to manifold withdrawal symptoms. I am certain she would have denied that it was possible to be entirely clean. I doubt she could know what that would look like for her.

In the end, drugs may have been a better friend to her than I was. She burned friendships that she perceived as interfering with her drug use or forcing her to confront her demons. She manipulated people into giving her money or otherwise enabling her addictions. She tried begging me a few times and it depressed me that she was so low.

I once called 911 because she credibly threatened suicide. I do not regret doing this, but it stopped our friendship for months. (She was unstable already, but the trigger was telling her that I wasn't going to chase Melanie once she left me--even though Melissa seemed to think we had a "beautiful love"--which made her think about her abusive relationship with Stevehen.) When I learned that she died, my first question was "Overdose or suicide?" I didn't see another possibility for her death, but I was prepared for it for years. Her continued survival in the face of her addictions was sometimes close to a miracle.

The medication I sought was to help me confront myself. Her drugs seemed to help to smash self-reflection. Drugs were her escape turned lifestyle. Refusing the necessary work ended her scholastic aspirations, her art, her safety, her bodily sanctity, her career, her ability to be social, and, after a decade, her life. (She said once, with gleaming pride, that she had never prostituted herself for drugs. From what she did brag about, it may have only been that she didn't call it that.)

The poison, they say, is in the dose. The antidote might be the reason. Melissa poisoned herself far longer and far greater than seems possible. We joked that she must have the constitution of Ozzy Osbourne because her antics should have killed her twenty times over. I don't remember how many times she went to rehab and how many to a psychiatric ward. I remember two of each clearly but suspect a combined three others. I don't think any helped, except to give her a small vacation where she did not have to be the one making the decisions. One rehab stint ended because she wanted to smoke a cigarette and the rehab insisted that she needed her system to be entirely clean. She called her mother to pick her up (possibly within a day or so) and that was that. She was only away long enough to recover from an overdose of cocaine, which was saying something given her tolerance. Nothing stuck. She couldn't let it. Sobriety was both terrifying and boring.

The psych ward is fuzzy, though I am sure that I described what I could have here. Had she attempted suicide or had one of her mental illnesses only become particularly acute? She was Melissa there, complaining of the young women in group therapy and having to color. She would have been cleaner of anything that she was not supposed to her taking. She could not sign herself out. She was herself then because she could not escape it. If she could have been there longer, she might have had a breakthrough, but I don't think she ever did. The moment she could get out of there, she surely did.

When I called 911 for her, she was on the 72-hour observation. Melissa could make people believe she was in control, usually to get something like meds. It was almost like gaslighting, like how she dropped all her suicidality and weeping the moment 911 connected me with an operator. It almost scared me, but it certainly gave me pause about her mental integrity and how much I could trust her any longer.

I was always averse to illegal drugs, but her exemplar made certain that I would never seek the services of a dealer. I loved Melissa. She was considered almost an errant sister, but I never wanted to be like her. She had great qualities but the life she chose (or which her illnesses chose for her) was unenviable. Maybe her drugs were possessive and those that she was legitimately prescribed (not the opiates) could not find a way to relieve her true pain. Head meds can only be effective if you are ready to heal. Otherwise, they are a temporary solution, a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.

When I resorted to trying them, it was because I was losing my control and finally accepted that programming in my head was hurting me and the people whom I love. Aside from wanting to improve, I had reasons in my life to get better. People needed me. I couldn't have it only be about my survival. Taking my best self away from Amber would have been cruelty. My wife deserved my healing. Melissa did not have that when she needed it. She had her fiance Rob, but she needed the right motivation far sooner, before she met him. Maybe she was better with Stevehen but abusing him until he left (her and, then, the state) was one of the things that broke her beyond repair. She was on one path before and lost it when he reached his breaking point with her abuse. It is not remotely his fault. She pushed him to force him to prove his love. He called her bluff around the time that she tried to stab him with a kitchen knife. (Even in testing people's loyalty to her, she did not employ half-measures.)

She was so much more extreme than most people with a mental illness. She indulged where I, with weaker issues, forbore. Less fun in the short term, but I am alive and thriving now, even with my regrets. It is not a fair comparison, her extremity and my mildness, two ends of the spectrum. I could be helped. I had the right support and life experiences to ease my mental issues. I don't know how successful others I know who have been on meds have been. We are not prominent in the other's lives, but they seem to have better lives than they otherwise might.

last watched: Samurai Champloo
reading: Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World