inhabitations

There are so many stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: we come of age; we overcome obstacles; we fall in love; we become parents; we lose parents; we struggle against odds; we triumph over disease; we come to power. We narrate and we order, we align and we reconfigure.

I’ve been thinking about the stories I tell myself about myself. As I was cleaning my closet a few weeks ago, I sifted through a box of amber pill bottles. Oh yeah, I remember that back injury, and god, do I remember those muscle relaxants. Oh right, that kidney infection and that case of pneumonia. Oh and those damnable allergies that never go away. I was wishing that twenty or thirty years ago I started saving all of those bottles. Had I done it, I’d start gluing them together into a structure, a house made of pills, a pharmaceutical autobiography. The late ‘70s could be the portico of infant illness, the ‘80s the entryway of youthful maladies, and then a bedroom for each decade thereafter. I could build a house made of amber bricks, all signifying an ailing moment, a glimpse of pathology.

The room I’ve really wanted to build lately, though, is an entire living room of the pills I’ve taken since 1994: Trazodone. Prozac. Lexapro. Wellburtrin. Celexa. Zoloft. Paxil. I could then enact a bit of performance art in said room: miming side effects at a medicinal sideshow of sorts. I’d build this room and then open it to the public. I’d let people wander through and judge me if they liked.

I’d build this room to make sense of sixteen years of little white pills. I’d build this room to make all those pills into something beautiful. Imagine the amber glow. Imagine the way it could radiate the heat.

Mostly, though, I’d build this room as a way to understand what it means to stop taking these pills. This is what I’m building now: a body not dependent, a mind not reliant, a braver self willing to go without. I’ve tried this before—though not very often—and this time feels decidedly different. Not different because I’m somehow stronger or more able, but different because I seem more willing to sit with the anxiety, to feel the panic that’s sure to come, ready to try to endure in new ways.

I wish others talked about this process. I wish there were more open houses made of amber.