I always thought that new beginnings required landscapes of grandeur: a move to a city scattered with unknowns, the emotional shifts of a relationship started or severed, traveling to a dream destination or driving towards a finish line. What it looks like, instead, is a nondescript room with a single plant and two chairs. Fluorescent lighting that buzzes above a receptionist’s desk as she scuttles around with a powerful kindness, greeting people and directing them to one of three rooms, notifying the practitioners that their patients are here. The doctor I am scheduled to see is around an hour late—car troubles—and so I wait, housekeep the digital apps on my phone (email, notes, WhatsApp), and peruse through the stories of my friends on Instagram, hypnotically swiping past the ads that continue to occupy more and more of our LED-backlit real estate. There are photos of friends debating their daily choices, friends sharing the silly choices they made, friends sharing where they chose to be for the new year: a beach, a city, a forest, and friends doubting what is going on in the world. It is calming seeing everyone live their lives, seeing one person at a beach and one person in a city, one person in a forest and one person in a home. Seeing us all choose to be somewhere, to be here, and to share it. And so here I am, sitting in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office, choosing to explore new ways to approach my mental health.
When I think about health, I think about the exercise we get, the foods we eat, the stress we avoid, and the millions of factors that contribute to whether or not our gut is happy and our blood is clean. When I think about mental health, I do not know what to think, despite graduating with a degree in psychology. Instead, the main things that come to mind are: What the fuck is wrong with me? And: What the fuck is wrong with this world we live in? Sometimes, also: Therapy, psychiatry, and existentialism as the golden triangle. If therapy doesn’t work, then try psychiatry (ideally, both). If we are too scared of psychiatry, then existentialism is an option, too: What is it in our lives that we can burn down and rebuild, so as to feel good again?
Though I have always practiced the things we are taught to do in order to flourish (meditation, journaling, gratitude, therapy), I reliably found myself, at one point or another, feeling horrible. Oh, oh no, it is happening again, followed by a long walk in which I feel like No-Face from Spirited Away, attempting to understand what I need to do in order to live a happy life—or get back to living it—what I need to start over, where I need to move, or who I need to become to get there permanently.
When I feel depressed, I feel alone. I feel lost and void of color. It is a whole body sensation that starts in the heart and seeps to the gut. Despite all of the research and treatments being focused on the brain, I do not feel anything happening between my temples. Rather, it feels as if my heart is covered in mud, or as if there is a hole, an opening that needs time to scar over, a latch waiting for a key. Sometimes I curl into a fetal position on the floor and cry, moan, or even pray. Once I actually said the words “God, please make me feel better,” even though my god is Lucy Liu, and Lucy Liu does not know me, so she cannot answer my calls, and then I thought about how I was literally becoming Elizabeth Gilbert, whose work I adore but whose personality and privilege sometimes make me cringe, for the majority of people cannot nurse their psychic wounds with a year-long sabbatical on a $200,000 advance. In these moments, I indulge in ten to fifteen seconds of imagining my partner walking in on me, displaying a great, healing concern, and curling around me until I am born anew, but no matter how many times I have attempted at telepathy, and no matter how many times he responds to my mystic calls, it does not make the dark go away, and eventually I remember that waiting to be saved is the same thing as prolonging whatever it is we are trying to escape. So I decided to save myself.
I sit with the doctor and talk to him for an hour. He tells me that he pursued psychiatry out of a fascination with the human experience. It is impossible to understand precisely how each of us experiences life, and yet, with medicine, we can attempt to improve the lives of those who are suffering. He told me that every person’s experience, their pain and anxiety and depression, their joy and pride and belief, is constituted by a million factors: our work, our relationships, our family, our history, our goals, our environment, our community, our commute. What we eat and what we hear, what we see and what we breathe. Psychiatric medicine is just one tool that enables us to live better. It is important that we address every area of our lives to understand how to live the best that we can, however, medicine can help us to do so, especially if we find ourselves struggling beyond reasonable cause.
Reasonable cause, I think, wondering if modern society and the hundreds of companies laying waste to the land for the promise of a technology they likewise claim may lead to our extinction is a reasonable enough cause to feel insane. I decide that it is, I decide that everything is, and I decide that whether or not it is our world, or a chemical imbalance in my brain, or some other million factors, the bottom line is that I want to feel better. I want help in feeling better, for the strategies I have exercised up until now have only gotten me so far, and I would like to go farther than this. I would like to live longer and larger than this.
The doctor prescribes me Prozac, a minimal dose to begin with. I walk out of the office and into the emerald canopies of a gentrified neighborhood, the sun eating down on my shoulders. I feel hopeful, I feel grateful. I feel that something this small, a tiny white pill, may mean something much larger in the scope of my life. I thank the doctor again in my head.
Funnily enough, the doctor will ghost me. I will be on my third day of Prozac, I will feel anxious—lightheaded, out of body, not myself—and I will ask him if my symptoms are normal. He will not respond to my messages, nor to any of the ones in the following days. I will lose confidence in continuing with the prescription and decide to take a pause. Three months later, I will find a new psychiatrist a block away, who will tell me that his goal is to make people feel better on the least number of medications, at the lowest dose. He will tell me that my former psychiatrist’s prescription does not make as much sense. He will prescribe me a different one, which will confuse me, but I will be there to try something, so I will try it. Ten milligrams of Lexapro. Start with a quarter, then a half, then the full ten.
Over the next several months, life will feel normal. No drastic changes will take place, aside from the reliable change life brings: waves and droughts of motivation, the cast of friends I see most often, trips to see family. And then one day I will think back two weeks, three weeks, a month, and I will realize that my heart has felt intact throughout, that I have not needed to enter the fetal position in a record amount of time. I will write, I will make things, I will start believing in myself as a person who can exist as a person, not a production mechanism, and create a livelihood separate from the traditional frames in which we are taught livelihoods are built (at an office, under a boss, through a job board). I will talk about my medication openly, happily, and comedically, so that anyone else wondering about psychiatric help might better believe that it is indeed helpful, as it is common. I will have days where I feel down and days where I doubt what I am doing, but they will remain days. They will not grow into beliefs, and so they will not require existential planning, nor the breaking down of previously laid foundations.
Around three months into taking Lexapro, I will have a day in which the hole reappears. The day will last longer than twenty-four hours, and I will think to myself: Oh, oh no, it is back. I will have already realized that the important habit I practiced prior to taking medication is necessary with it, and yet, it will take me a day to admit this to myself, for I will have felt so generally good without said habit that I want to believe that I am finally happy with myself, as myself.
The thing about happiness is that I have always associated it with other people. Community is a word that has been tossed around like salad, overdressed and underplated. To me, community is simply a sense of belonging. Though the ideal community is one in which we belong to a group of best friends who live in the same apartment building, such community is tricky1, for the majority of adults a) live apart from their closest friends, b) spend eight hours working, not communing, and c) are not living in everyday designs that make it easy to develop the same sense of belonging with new friends as they might have with their closest friends, in that we rarely see our new friends over and over again, nor do we have as many opportunities to socialize outside of a schedule.
Community, however, can exist in a broader sense. I have realized, over the past several years, that even the smallest gestures of connection can close the hole in my heart: a conversation with a stranger, running into a friend on a walk, or delighting in the joys of discovering commonalities within a group of acquaintances. Knowing this, I began to make it a habit to write at cafes, organize social gatherings, and meet friends several times a week. Feeling better, however, led me to opt for the lazy solution: Only showing up to things other people initiated.
After the two-day spell, I will begin to resume my previous habit. I will reach out to people, show up to events, and organize gatherings. When I think about the spell, it will appear in my mind as an event, as opposed to a lifelong sentence, something that reminds me I am still myself, a capybara who thrives in social worlds. A signal I can take to live better.
In the following days, I will wake up and go about living. I will bike under a bright sky and think about what to bake. I will laugh with my partner and feel close to embodying a dream. I will write and walk and worry about the pollution, and I will notice that when I worry, I worry without the verb becoming my vocation. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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It is worth noting that the happiest “seasons” of my life were always in large communities (when I lived with seven friends in college, when I spent a year co-living at a Swedish university, when I moved into a large house of strangers in Mexico City). I think I am literally a capybara, in that I am happiest when I belong to a big group, when I am surrounded by people I can interact with every day, in that I need social connection—likely to a neurodivergent degree. Although modern life is designed for the opposite (nuclear families, couples in enormous houses, everyone owning the same things, etc.), I like to imagine what future possibilities exist. However, this is a topic for another essay.