“Well, what is it?”

“Dysthymia.”

“What’s that?”

“Mild depression.”

So I guess this wasn’t an IQ test.

“You’ve been quiet. Why are you here?”

I looked up from my lap, where I had been counting my shaking fingers. Kaitlinn stared straight at me.

There had been a lull, and when the therapist lost the thread, Kaitlinn found another. She sat across from me in the square. Between our chairs was ten feet of floor, an ocean. Now the talkative alpha I didn’t want to believe belonged here, challenged me.

The therapist jumped in. “You don’t have to share if you don’t want to.”

I shrugged. I had been sitting in that chair for nearly two weeks without contributing anything. Maybe that had been unfair.

When I started speaking, I looked only at Kaitlinn. At first, the story was some wisps in the air. If it had been a bird, it would have been a small, ugly thing, but nonetheless it sprouted wings and, for a moment, flew.

I told her I’d grown up an outsider in Texas. Living as an object of easy racism in America as well as a voiceless golem in my family led me to do things to myself in order to survive and succeed—but succeed just enough. With every achievement, there was an invisible barter: Princeton for one piece of myself, Harvard for another. My mother said I ought to get over this illness as well as these qualms about the direction of my life. She loved me, but it never felt what I wanted was worth listening to because she was too busy trying to shape me in her image, to love me if and only if and on condition. Complicity in this low valuation of myself led me to attempt the ultimate act of self-erasure—suicide.

When I finished, no one laughed or said, “So what?” And Kaitlinn? She fell back in her chair, her voluminous breasts shaking. The ocean between us receded, becoming once again a dingy floor. “Damn,” she sighed out, and said nothing else. But that “damn” made me feel seen.

That night, I called Houston from the phone booth. Cell phones were prohibited on the ward, so I checked my messages remotely. There were voicemails from my parents, who were used to hearing from me every couple of days and still knew nothing of what had transpired. “Hyeseung, call us immediately or we will call Nate,” Appa said sternly in the last message.

When I got through to the house and heard my parents’ voices, any impulse to confide in them vanished. Appa would rage how “a smart girl would know how to fix herself.” Umma would wish, for the thousandth time, for her own death. Wasn’t Their Daughter’s Life at Harvard the fulfillment of their dreams, both Korean and American? Their Daughter’s Suicide Attempt would similarly be shameful in both cultures. Making an excuse about getting back to work, I said goodbye.

After the call, I didn’t make it to my bed. I only passed over the threshold of my room before I lost it. I sat on the greasy floor and sobbed. What was I thinking while I cried? I thought, I’ll never be better. This is who I am. Someday, I will die because I will have killed myself. In the darkness, I called God’s name as if he were lost to me, or perhaps I to him.

I was twenty-five. This was my worldview, and everything I knew was predicated on it: people were their beliefs and actions, and you cannot change people through drugs or therapy. The doctor had tried to convince me the depression wasn’t my fault; it was brought on by genetic predisposition and environmental causes. But that explanation, instead of serving as an acquittal, horrified me. My personality was so intertwined with the depression, I had no idea how I could back away and change my beliefs without rocking the earth beneath me.

A nurse’s aide walked the hallway. From the fluorescent-lit corridor, she turned and first looked left, at the statue lady, and then right, at me. She chose me.

She sat on my bed, and I clenched her hand with both of mine. I sobbed and coughed. I told her, “It’s no use. It’s not going to work.”

“You will be better. They will help you here,” she said. The nurse’s aide was an immigrant. Like my mother, she spoke English with an accent. I sobbed harder hearing it. Why are you a nurse’s aide? Is that what you always wanted to be?

“You will be better. The doctors will help you,” she repeated.

Why did you come here to work with the sick? You have beautiful eyes, which are welling up with tears that don’t fall.

6.

ON MY LAST MORNING IN the Stew, there was a group session in a different building. Kaitlinn didn’t want to go. Just a couple of the other patients and I crossed the lawn, tripping over melting disks of ice. In a classroom, decorative borders were stapled around blackboards and naive drawings tacked on the wall. Paper, watercolors, and markers were laid out on a table. My pupils dilated.

I felt confident here.

I returned to the main building with my charcoal drawing rolled up in my hand. Nate would arrive soon to take me home. It was Easter weekend and maybe we would do something nice, maybe I would show him what I’d drawn. We were supposed to draw a picture of the future. I drew a portrait of myself at the foot of a black bridge. On the other side was Nate, my family, and school, and I was going to walk the length of the bridge alone and save myself from this trouble.

The statue lady’s husband arrived. He and the doctor whispered at a table as the statue lady looked on, blinking. For the first time, she was responsive. She’s come out of it—an Easter miracle! But then the words “electroshock” and “last resort” floated over. The statue lady nodded her beautiful flower of a head up and down.

That afternoon I said goodbye to Kaitlinn and the others. Jean June was already gone. Nate picked me up in a rental car.

The rain had stopped.

It was beautiful outside.

PART VIII

WILL

1.

WHEN NATE OPENED THE DOOR to my apartment, no demons spilled out. Sunlight streamed through the windows, and the place smelled as it always had, not like near-death but rather cleaning solution and whatever the neighbors were cooking seeping through the walls.

He stayed in town another week, bought groceries and cooked. While Nate did chores, I spent most of my days and nights on the futon. The bed I wanted to destroy in a bonfire, it was the scene of so many tormented nights.

When the sun started to descend, so, too, would my mood. While Nate slept easily, I peered for hours into the moving vortex that was the dark and speckled ceiling. Hours later, the sun peeked round the tilting planet of the earth, indicating it was time to work. Each sleepless night reminded me how dysfunctionally I subsisted. Despite the energy I drew from the Wellbutrin, my new state of being I viewed through slivered glass—as distorted and without order. My brain felt thin and too excited to be put to any long use, as though my gray matter had been thrown into a crackling, hot pan and was charring into lace at the edges.

Ultimately, Nate returned to Princeton and I to classes. In my first-year philosophy seminar, when I attempted to take notes, the pen kept moving across the page against my will. Blink, and my hand was in a new place. I focused on a new spot, blinked again, and the pen had traveled to yet another point, having cut a jagged blue lightning bolt across the paper in what was a visual manifestation of my seizures. My advisor, Henrik, had obviously shared the news of my hospitalization with the junior professor, and when I showed up to Cicero reading group, their faces crinkled in gentle sympathy.

When the semester ended, I enrolled in a summer Latin course. After class, I walked Harvard Yard and found the campus suddenly thinned. I strode past my apartment to the Charles, and for the first time I saw how beautiful the river was that ran below my window and under so many bridges. I stood on one of them and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, everything was strikingly blue except the crimson rectangles of Peabody Terrace and the white cotton balls that were the clouds—it looked like a picture on the front of a college brochure, and me, the token Asian student, happy and striving. Below me then glided a boat, and I looked down to see the top of the sprightly head of a coxswain and eight perfect bodies slicing oars through the water. Sizzling then, my mind exhumed an image from The Odyssey, which I’d read in the time before McLean and the Stew, of how Odysseus’s men, leaving the island of the Lotus Eaters after their comrades had been taken, took their places in the boat and “smote the grey sea with their oars.”

In the early days after discharge, I realized my fundamental problems hadn’t dropped out of sight at all. Overnight, I’d become a tranquilized animal—except the taming was at my own behest. Twice a day, I swallowed the pills, which continued the self-pacification. Nowadays, I could meet Nate in ways I hadn’t been able to before, with less impatience and self-absorption. That was worth the cost. The therapists had said medication was the starting point; because the focus was no longer on your life-or-death pain, you could begin to delve into your issues.

I soon began a daily outpatient program where I learned about cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies. Paired with an excellent therapist, I started to observe my emotions and appreciate the connection between thought, feeling, and action. I still worked on my sleep, and ever the ambitious student, I completed—twice—the skills manual from the program. More than to my Latin, I applied myself to this work, despite feeling like some essential part of me had never left the Stew.

As a distraction, I rode my bike over the bridges into Boston and to the museums, where I enjoyed the art and the generous air-conditioning. For the first time, I came to understand what a New England summer really was. I hadn’t felt joy in many months, but once in a while, in front of a Sargent painting or while pacing the green of the cemetery at Mount Auburn, a tectonic plate shifted and I could think, Maybe I don’t have to die.

Nate still came up on weekends. I was ashamed how hard it was when he wasn’t present. To wind down in the evenings, I tried to read, but either from the antidepressants or the mono, my wonderful and expansive memory, the seat of my personality, had disintegrated overnight. Throwing down Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, I consoled myself, saying the philosophy wasn’t going anywhere. This is part of the process, I reminded myself, but what process I was in I did not know. And then, of course, this was mild depression! Imagine severe! My law school friends were consumed by their 2L summers, and the PhD students, while friendly, were not social, so I saw few people outside of class and between Nate’s visits. Mostly, I doodled, read magazines, and kept my apartment immaculate as if no one lived there. I did not sleep.

Latin was my sixth language. But I couldn’t write a conjugation for my shaky hand or complete a line of translation without resting. I tried to do whatever was the equivalent of blinking my brain into focus, but it remained intractable. What was worse, I found myself uncurious. When one especially ragged day I missed a Latin quiz, I knew that was it. If I couldn’t finish one six-week summer language course, then how could I possibly continue my studies in the fall?

I was in my midtwenties when I did my time in the Stew. I was beyond in loco parentis. I hadn’t told my parents yet what had happened, and Harvard had no responsibilities besides making sure I didn’t hurt myself or others. In an administrative building on Radcliffe Square, I handed the leave form to an office worker who didn’t bat an eye. Would she try to talk me out of my decision? Or would she agree this was right? But she didn’t utter a word. As she typed into the computer, I lingered on her profile. She didn’t look at all like Dean Kay from Princeton. Here, there was no Dean Kay, no one to encourage or deny me. The only person I had discussed the decision with was Nate, who was now my family, not through marriage or blood, but through struggle and common purpose.

On an unseasonably cool day in July, in a slight drizzle, I moved out of Peabody Terrace, where I had settled with optimism only ten months earlier. I drove the Penske down to New Jersey, following Nate in a car. He had subleased a furnished apartment on Princeton’s main square so that it would be more comfortable for me. The apartment felt grown-up, with black-and-white subway tile in the bathroom, a galley kitchen, herringbone floors, and a fireplace. On my twenty-sixth birthday, he threw a small party, and my college roommate, Eve, came in on the train from New York, where she now lived. We sat around the coffee table and ate the homemade pizza Nate had rolled out and baked on a stone. I had lost almost fifteen pounds, and through Eve’s eyes, I saw I was ashen and too thin. I hadn’t gotten used to the seizures, where the movie of my life skipped and I lost a nanosecond, zipping into the future. When Eve asked questions, I answered as thoroughly as I could but no more. For the first time in my life, I did not have the inclination to perform, and I saw that nothing bad happened.

The summer nights on the square were desultory and sweet, the breeze moving with something like the ambition of springtime. In the back was a courtyard where I sat with a watercolor book, scumbling the ferns with a bristle brush. The lights from the apartments threw slanted purple shadows onto the courtyard stones, and the reflecting pools glowed. In the deepening dusk, I painted the potted coleus, cool violet and open. Inside the apartment was Nate and the pacific stability he represented. During this time, he began his practice of loving me, because “it takes years to do anything good and worthwhile.”

It was from the courtyard that I finally called my parents to tell them about the Stew.

“I knew something was wrong from your voice when you called back then,” Umma said. When I told my parents about my leave from Harvard, I didn’t try to justify myself, nor did I lie and tell them it was “just for one year.” I would try never to lie to them, or myself, ever again. “Where are you going to live now?” Appa asked.

I told them. More lights blinked on above the courtyard, and I struggled to keep my voice low.

After the conversation, I walked into the apartment and threw my phone on the bed. “Not only did they not understand, they’re upset that we’re ‘living in sin,’ ” I told Nate.