“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.
