DESOLATION

When I moved out of my mom’s house as a sophomore in college—and rented an apartment with Nikki and Rianne a block from campus—I became deeply depressed. I’d always imagined that when I was able leave home, I would feel liberated, but, as Toni tells me, this isn’t unusual for people from very dysfunctional families. Years later, I wrote about this time:

“I’m remembering the desperation that used to send me running out into the night in that first apartment—the loneliness of being barely adult and not ready, of needing there to be some place to go, and knowing, when I faced the street, there was no place. The sense of void was unendurable, and I walked or ran until the sharpness of my desolation was blunted…somehow.”

I also wrote about a dream I had at the time:

“I had a dream

And the grief and panic I felt in it were so awful

That I cried in my sleep

Waking before the anguish had faded from my mind

I knew with alarm that these feelings churned

Beneath my carefully constructed and maintained composure

Somewhere in my mind

Half exposed to the eye of my consciousness

Were overwhelming fear and sorrow

Responses of a child’s wounded heart”

“I went to the student hospital to ask to see a therapist, but when I heard a couple of staff members laughing and joking in the front office, I walked out. I suppose the darkness of what I was feeling inside and their levity made me feel too vulnerable in that moment.

“When I look for the sources of what I was experiencing, I still can’t gauge how much was ‘intrapsychic’—that is, related to my childhood—and how much was situational, beginning with the fact that my relationship with Britte had become a rollercoaster, it stirred up such deep and conflicted feelings in me. To me, she was a surrogate parent, friend, and mentor all it one. Early on, I’d sometimes wished she would hold me, even kiss me, but that’s as far as my longings went, though I wondered if this was because anything more was forbidden. What was most painful to me was being at social gatherings with her. She had a way of wooing other people wherever she went that would leave me feeling completely disregarded. In these situations I would lapse into silence, unable to utter a word I was so jealous and hurt. Later I would anguish over my behavior, convinced that she was going to dump me eventually because I was so screwed up. And then there was the fact that I still had turbulent feelings about Steve and couldn’t avoid him at the language lab, that my Spanish professor was called, in the Slate Supplement, ‘a vicious tyrant to be avoided at all cost,’ and that Nikki and Rianne, who both were in sexual relationships, were forming a deep bond and once again I felt excluded.

“By spring I was so depressed I felt like I’d died. I lost the capacity to feel anything positive so absolutely that I wasn’t able to experience even the faintest or most fleeting satisfaction in things I would normally have enjoyed—rocky road ice cream, a good movie or book, the company of a friend. Nothing, it seemed, could touch me. I remember getting drunk one night on gin and tonics when Britte was over (I threw up—the only time I ever did) and feeling like I was something that had been flayed, that there was nothing left of me but bloody pulp.”