The bullet points in my journal were a far cry from the buoyant entries of the fall. In September, after I’d decided to stay at Harvard for graduate school—“Finally, a yangban in the family!” my parents rejoiced—I moved into a clean and well-maintained apartment on the Charles River in the Peabody Terrace complex. I was happy, driven: I was a go-getter, and I was going to get ’em. In October, the entries trailed off, with a few sentences about how tired I was and unable to sleep—until I was diagnosed with mononucleosis, that trivial, nonthreatening but stubborn disease that I’d contracted at the non-middle-school age of twenty-five.
It was now March of the following year. I hadn’t slept more than three hours a night in months, felt on the brink of hallucinating, and the clutch of something—mono, but really depression—had gone and got me.
At the behest of my advisor, an efficient German expert on Aristotle, I was on a reduced course load. Henrik hadn’t said anything about the mono other than “where did you get it?” “Maybe drinking from the chalice at mass,” I hypothesized, embarrassed to reveal I hadn’t put childish things away. He said rest should be the priority for now and to catch up on courses when I could. It was practical, Germanic advice, except it wasn’t working.
My self-worth was tied to Work, as if Work were a star. Work and Worth were bound together and if one fell, then the other did, too. I needed to take drastic measures of the sort as when Eve had marched me over to the infirmary during my senior year. Pursuing her own PhD in California, Eve wasn’t here now—no one was—so I went to health services alone.
“Can I sleep here?” I asked the doctor.
“Why do you want to sleep here? If you want to be admitted, you’ll need to go to the actual hospital.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with me,” I muttered. Nothing wrong except the chronic insomnia keeping me from Work and Worth. “I just need a quiet place to sleep for a few days.” Why couldn’t she read between the lines like the nurse at Princeton?
“It says in your chart we found mononucleosis back in October. Has that resolved?”
“I don’t think so. I’m tired all the time, but I’m not sure if it’s because of the mono or the insomnia.”
She asked about my apartment. My place in Peabody Terrace was a one-room studio. I’d placed bookshelves between the bed and the living room according to basic principles of feng shui, but not everything about the apartment had positive qi: Appa had not liked that I lived on the fourth floor. “That’s worse than living on the thirteenth,” he said. Four was unlucky. It was so unlucky that the character for four in Korean sounded like the character for death.
The doctor persisted. “Do you practice good sleep hygiene?” I noticed she wasn’t writing anything down, as if I didn’t have a real problem. “If you can’t fall asleep after half an hour, get out of bed and read.”
“Read?” The untouched Kant and Plato, the outstanding translations of Epictetus. She made sleep sound so simple.
I was rankled when she finally mentioned Ambien. She wasn’t going to let me have a room but was happy to throw drugs at me! I was too drained to protest. In the short lull during which she wrote the prescription, my eyes clamped shut.
“And let’s make a follow-up appointment for some antidepressants,” I heard her say from inside the darkness. I peeled open an eye. “But for now,” she concluded, “let’s get your sleep in order.”
Outside the pharmacy, I shook the container of orange capsules. It rattled as if the pills were alive, as if they were dangerous, the rattle at the end of a snake’s tail. These won’t help, I thought morosely, but then I caught myself—maybe they were like snake oil and I had to believe in their curative properties for them to work. The interaction with the doctor left me more depressed. Didn’t she understand the profound sadness was my fault? That it lay in some idiosyncratic weakness that was purely me?
It began drizzling as I plodded from Harvard Square toward my apartment. How much this walk would have meant to me at seventeen! Harvard: instead of a symbol, it was a reality, but now that I was here, happiness was a moving target. By the time I walked in the door, the rain was falling in sheets. I placed the bottle of pills on the bookshelves next to my Virgin Mary statue, a present from Umma at my first communion. That evening, I tried a pill, and over the course of fourteen or fifteen hours, I passed out for a total of five in snatches. I was more exhausted than ever.
Four days later, it still rained. I hadn’t been outside since the infirmary. I ate away the interminable hours by pacing the few hundred square feet of my apartment, listlessly flipping through supermarket magazines, sipping mugs of chamomile tea, trying to practice mindfulness, whatever that was. I peered out the window onto the slick of the parking lot below and decided to phone Houston. While the call connected, I carried my empty humidifier tank into the bathroom.
Umma sighed after I said “I’m not doing so good.”
“Just try to rest,” she said.
“I’m trying to.” Tea, Epsom salts, hot showers, cold showers, lukewarm showers, aromatherapy, and lots and lots of lavender. I figured I’d given it the old college try when it came to rest.
“Did you go to class today?”
“It’s spring break.”
“That’s right. That’s good. You can do your work slowly and not worry.”
I wanted to say, “You don’t have any right to mention my work!” But I just mumbled, “I have a lot to catch up on.”
“Is that why you sound so sad?”
I had called her to cheer me up! But that seemed ridiculously naive. Umma hadn’t cheered me up in years. “I guess I’m having a hard time.”
“What do you mean ‘a hard time’?” she asked, affronted.
“It’s hard because I can’t do any work.”
“You’re going to have to accept it: you’re sick, you’re behind with work. Mononucleosis is not cancer. What is there to be depressed about? You’re at Harvard doing two degrees! You are a healthy girl, you have been given all these opportunities.”
I fell silent, wondering whether I should feel ashamed as my mother wanted.
She went on. “Someone off the street, a homeless person… if I said, ‘We are going to give you the opportunity to do a PhD at Harvard,’ do you think that person would say no? You have all your limbs, food to eat, and a beautiful apartment overlooking the river. What do you think this person would say?” There was no sweetness in her voice, no succor, only aggression.
“I think using a homeless person in an example is a low bar.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. What is ‘low bar’?”
The flame of injustice billowed up. I was always having to talk in my mother’s language, having to meet her more than halfway. I began yelling. “It means that obviously a homeless guy is going to want food and an apartment! If all he has to do is sit on his butt and read some stupid papers, then of course he would!”
She screamed back. “You’ve always had a bad attitude and been ungrateful for the opportunities God has given you! If you have other feelings, you should ignore them until you can get your head on straight. You think you have a bad life? So many people in this world have worse lives than you!—”
I hung up, shaking. In the abrupt silence, the echo of her voice rattled in my ear. Umma argued from her own experience, which was the poverty and frustration of her dreams. She was one of the people in the world with a worse life than mine. She was the homeless person.
I looked into the bathroom mirror. So many times in the last months I had caught sight of myself here, and the reflection was always the same: me in my brother’s old pajama bottoms, a burgundy fisherman’s sweater, and a shirt the collar of which gaped like a sad maw around my neck. Even in the best of times, I rarely wore makeup, but tonight, under the stricken wattage of the bathroom light, my face looked especially naked. Instead of red from anger, it was white with fatigue. I felt naked in my soul, too. I blinked, the reflection blinked. In that moment, I wanted something to change. During the course of the monthslong insomnia, I realized I was not good company to myself, and every thought I entertained was a small knife’s cut. All this rumination and no release.
I looked down at the sink. Water overflowed the humidifier tank. Grabbing it, I slammed it on the floor. It shattered with a splintery crash.
Water ran everywhere.
It’s over, I decided. I’m never talking to her again.
