Pulled Up Stakes,

moved here.

Extra: Times Article Inspires First TMK Post in Months

My heart skipped several beats today when I noticed this headline on the New York Times's Science Times section: "The Prozac Generation: Antidepressants Create a Kind of Identity Crisis." The article, by psychiatry professor Richard A. Friedman, was titled, in the print edition, "Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants." Uh-oh, I thought to myself. This is it. Someone else wrote the article that I've been wanting to take a crack at myself for so many years.

I read the piece in palpitations and then, a little bit calmer, I read it again. Friedman does raise exactly the point that interests me—the fact that a lot of young people, myself included, are prescribed antidepressants as teenagers, before their personalities are fully developed. Because many people tend to stay on antidepressants for years after they begin the drugs, there is a sizeable group of people who feel as though they do not know what they are like in their 'natural,' unmedicated state. Friedman writes about a 31-year-old patient, on antidepressants since age 14, who is grappling with "how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity." He mentions another patient in her mid-'20s who didn't realize that her consistently low sex drive was not, in fact, a facet of her personality, but rather a side effect of the Zoloft she'd been taking for eight years.

He doesn't go deeply into his patients' experiences or the particulars of their identity crises, though, so I feel, with a sense of relief, that there's still a little more to flush out. Instead, he spoke about his own quandary as a clinician, wondering what to tell his patients when they ask about the effects of long-term drug use or express an interest in going off their medications. He mentioned a groundswell of skepticism about studies of antidepressants, citing the worrying statistic that "97 percent of positive studies [about antidepressants] were published, versus 12 percent of negative studies."

Friedman concludes that it can be "tricky" to use "psychotropic drugs during adolescence," that antidepressants are too beneficial not to use sometimes, but that they do raise troubling questions that deserve to be considered further. I couldn't agree more. Next stop, as I see it: to get some of those patients talking about their experiences, desires, and fears.

My First German Class is Today

And I can't stop thinking

about moving

to Berlin!!!

Truly

You just can't argue with the truth.

(Hi, Dave!)

Said By My Mom

...on October 4, 2007:

"I don't think men understand stress."

Discuss.

Portland

I just got back from Minneapolis, a weekend spent with admirable Minneapolis kids, whip-smart and dedicated, articulate and nerdy and cool. I like Minneapolis because it reminds me of Portland. On the airplane home I started poking around in the old files on my computer and I found a draft of a zine that I was going to write in 2002, just as I was getting ready to leave Portland. It was basically a love-letter to the city and as I was re-reading it I found myself asking why? Why the hell did I leave?!

What I tell people now is that it was hard to find a job there, and I guess that was part of it.

And I didn’t really know what to do, that was another.

And my apartment was crappy and I looked for another one but didn’t find it. And it seemed like everyone else had left, was leaving or was going to leave. And I wanted to get out of that relationship I was in that didn’t feel quite right. And I wasn’t aware that moving across the country would be a rather extreme and, in the end, pretty financially, emotionally, and in in all other ways expensive manner of doing it.

Oh well. Live and learn.

And I thought that I wanted adventure, that was another thing.

I was ambitious. I just wasn’t sure for what.

Anyway, I’m drowning, drowning at 40,000 feet in nostalgia for Portland.

Portland the big easy. Portland the green. Portland, the happy city. Portopia.

The other day I was talking to a friend and he was relating a story by Borges or Marquez or someone about how nice it would be if we could age backwards—one would start an old man, slowly grow stronger and sharper, then smaller, more innocent, and purer of heart, and finally, at the end, as the coup de grace, crawl back into Mom.

Sometimes, I want to go back to Portland. Sometimes I want to crawl back into Mom.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever left. Do some of us have repetition-compulsions related to birth? Do we become inclined to squeeze ourselves, with tears and wailing, out of close, warm, and comfortable spaces, and into the cold unknown?

Maybe.

I want to know who coined the phase “You can’t go home again,” and what the exact circumstances were that led to their saying it.

Release

Sometimes it all seems like too much. Make the money, pay the rent, get to the grocery store, feed yourself, go to work, take brown-bag lunches, exercise, see your friends, look for love, do well on the job, do your projects, keep your dreams alive, think about what’s next. Read books, listen to music, keep up on the news, stay conversational. Look all right in clothes. Phone home.

Last Sunday I went to a barbecue/picnic in Prospect Park. Sitting on the grass, I got into an interesting conversation with two women about a disparaging remark that one of the women’s boyfriends had made about her looks, to another friend of his, early in their relationship. The other woman was trying to understand. Why would he have said something about your looks? You are lovely. At last she hit on an explanation she felt confident with. No, here’s the problem, she said. It is not about your looks. He would not have said this if he hadn’t been comparing you to something already in his mind, a vision or an ideal. It’s like Freud, she said—the difference between mourning and melancholia. Melancholia: incomplete grieving for the lost object. The object that was lost is swallowed, protected; he’s harboring something in there, a memory or a fantasy or an old girlfriend, to which he’s comparing everyone, and therefore this bizarre remark to another man about your looks not being right.

So what does this have to do with me feeling that life is too much? It occurs to me that maybe I, too, am playing a game of unfair comparison. A woman’s boyfriend couldn’t see her loveliness because he was hung up on some kind of ideal girlfriend that probably never existed the way he imagined her to, anyway. Perhaps, when I get to feeling overwhelmed, I’ve become hung up on a life that exists predominantly in my imagination. Maybe the beautiful life in there, the life that’s all things at all times, prevents me from seeing and admiring the real life out here, with its many causes for joy and pride.

Karen Horney wrote somewhere that the essence of neurosis is needing to have it all. She described a neurotic woman as one who simply must be a consummate hostess, an accomplished pianist, learned at languages, a patient listener, exciting and vivacious, an excellent cook, an avid traveler, and the best-read person in the room. Horney pointed out that it is not possible to be all these things. To not be miserable, the neurotic simply must let some of it go. She’s unbelievably loath to—but she must.

It occurs to me that in this sense we’re all more or less neurotic. We’re living in a neurotic age. New York city might be the most neurotic burg of all. Or maybe Los Angeles or Washington has that distinction. At any rate. I dream of balance. Perhaps I need to let some stuff go. But I don’t see what.

I’d like to let go of the job.

But I probably need to let go of the vision of the life that feels good all the time. The life where I already have everything that I want.

A Wish

"If I could just breed an animal that could spin toilet paper..."

-MM, 9.23.2007

What Can You Do With a Drunken Sailor?

My attention wanders. I’ve been thinking about writing more, here, again.

My head hurts. My eyes have gone all fuzzy. Is it the allergies? Is it computer screens? I feel like if I have to look at a screen anymore, I’ll do something I’ll later ask not to be held responsible for.

Work: easier this week, less crazy. Which is good and nice and less crazy but also like, “Oh. So where’d all the excitement go? Now it’s just me sitting in this big room with other silent people, looking at this screen.”

The mathematical sublimity of the internet overwhelms me. “Overwhelmed” is a key word lately. Since moving to New York, perhaps. I still feel as overstimulated as I did last summer when I made that post about information overload.

I really miss the feeling of sitting down with a book and being able to give that book my undivided attention. And retaining the material that I would encounter in that book. For a while last year, I used to fantasize about moving to the wilderness, or Vermont or something; and then I stopped, and now I am, again.

I had a crazy interaction with my therapist today and I’m not sure anymore if she’s good or bad for me. Shit: could she be one of those people who’s kind of good but overall bad for me, who will nevertheless leave a real void when they’re gone? I don’t know how many more of those people I can take.

Went running last night. Slept well. New clean sheets. I like running. Didn’t want to get up and head uptown on the long, early subway ride that takes me to therapy-land. But I did.

I’m overstimulated, see, but I miss my friends. I’m understimulated in some ways. I sit here all day getting jangled in the head and I come out having a hard time focusing my eyes on anything, but also feeling this ravenous need to connect with people—which, on a normal day, I haven’t been doing at work. Or not the right way. There really is no substitute for face-to-face.

It’s a hard time for friends. I see a lot of people but except for the housemates it often feels ad-hoc. Just because we’re all busy and stuff. Makes sense. But makes me bummed.

I guess I’m still regrouping, post-breakup. Realizing some things and trying to realize others. Fretting. Thinking about what’s next, lifewise. I want to blog about that some, soon. And, I dunno. Biting off more than I can chew. Trying to figure out how much I can chew. Umm. Taking care of oneself. It is a full-time fucking job sometimes.

Spring Break Wrap-Up

I am using the last ounce of juice in my iPod to listen to Luna. Because it’s springtime in the city. Because the theme of the week is embracing ambivalence, and the happy/sad stylings of Mr Dean Wareham fit that steez pretty well.

Charlottesville last week was so beautiful. Virginia feels like home. I like C’ville because, naturally speaking, it’s like a lusher and more decadent version of the home I know. More magnolia trees, more of that good dirt smell.

Charlottesville is like Park Slope would be if Park Slope were a small town in the country. Talk about your baby fever. Sheeesh.

Seeing Alison & Andrew was amazing. Being able to mosey down the street and eat the best tapas I’ve ever had and be treated well by the chef and then mosey back down the street and be home was amazing. New York might have lost some points. Sorry, New York, I love you but you’ll have to start trying harder. Or making it easier for people, when all we want is to get along.

To tell the truth, I felt pretty high strung and clammy for a lot of the vacation (even as getting out of town on a train feels good—damn, it always feels good), but now that I’m back, stuff’s better. I feel like I’ve been reset. Ready for summer to begin. Ready for…something.