Free The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

while still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of my living room. Just to prove that—while I couldn’t stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue—I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot. Hey, it was a start.
    I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine. I leaned on my support network, cherishing my family and cultivating my most enlightening friendships. And when those officious women’s magazines kept telling me that my low self-esteem wasn’t helping depression matters at all, I got myself a pretty haircut, bought some fancy makeup and a nice dress. (When a friend complimented my new look, all I could say, grimly, was, “Operation Self-Esteem—Day Fucking One.”)
    The last thing I tried, after about two years of fighting this sorrow, was medication. If I may impose my opinions here, I think it should always be the last thing you try. For me, the decision to go the route of “Vitamin P” happened after a night when I’d sat on the floor of my bedroom for many hours, trying very hard to talk myself out of cutting into my arm with a kitchen knife. I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. I had some other good ideas around that time—about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun might stop the suffering. But something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it.
    The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. I don’t think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat down in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, “I cannot walk another step further—somebody has to help me.” It wouldn’t have served those women to have stopped walking. Nobody would have, or could have, helped them. The only thing that would’ve happened was that they and their families would have starved. I couldn’t stop thinking about those women.
    And I will never forget Susan’s face when she rushed into my apartment about an hour after my emergency phone call and saw me in a heap on the couch. The image of my pain mirrored back at me through her visible fear for my life is still one of the scariest memories for me out of all those scary years. I huddled in a ball while Susan made the phone calls and found me a psychiatrist who would give me a consultation that very day, to discuss the possibility of prescribing antidepressants. I listened to Susan’s one-sided conversation with the doctor, listened to her say, “I’m afraid my friend is going to seriously hurt herself.” I was afraid, too.
    When I went to see the psychiatrist that afternoon, he asked me what had taken me so long to get help—as if I hadn’t been trying to help myself already for so long. I told him my objections and reservations about antidepressants. I laid copies of the three books I’d already published on his desk, and I said, “I’m a writer. Please don’t do anything to harm my brain.” He said, “If you had a kidney disease, you wouldn’t hesitate to take medication for it—why are you hesitating with this?” But, see, that only shows how ignorant he was about my family; a Gilbert might very well not medicate a kidney disease, seeing that we’re a family who regard any sickness as a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure.
    He put me on a few different drugs—Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Busperin—until we found the combination that didn’t make me nauseated or turn my libido into a dim and distant memory. Quickly, in less than a week, I could feel an extra inch of daylight opening in my mind. Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch—there’s not a chance. The pills gave me those recuperative night hours back, and also stopped my hands from shaking and released the vise grip around my chest and the panic