“Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor?
Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest.
Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart?
Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.”
~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I memorized this exchange between Macbeth and the doctor who is supposed to cure his wife, in college during the long months I spent locked in my dorm room, reading for my English classes. I only left to go to class (sometimes) and eat somewhere away from the other girls. (I never learned a single one's name.) My head was heavy and I was stunned. I'd fallen in love with my roommate the year before, and she'd dumped me. I was an experiment; when it was over, she returned to her boyfriend. I cried a lot. In fact I had tears on my face, new or dried, every day and night. I cried myself to sleep and dreamed about crying. I woke up crying. I slept all day and worked all night, crying, receding from the world. I was losing my bearings.
One weekend, I determined to swallow a whole bottle of aspirin. I went to the bathroom after midnight and took about five. Waited, took another five. Waited a longer time, because they were sickening, and took another five. I had to stop there; more would not go down. Then I returned to my room, and nothing happened. I'd envisioned going to sleep and never waking up. But I did, the next day, slightly nauseous, still broken-hearted and teetering on the edge.
And I knew it. But my "counselor" didn't seem to; I trooped over to his office at "Psych Services" every week, where he asked about my thoughts and my grades. I never mentioned the aspirin or the constant tears. Then he sent me back to my dorm. There, I said less and less, but wrote a lot: either hysterical gibberish and screeds to my ex-roommate, or insightful term papers turned in on time. Somehow I managed to keep my academic life viable, but everything else was sinking. I knew it was Depression; I'd been hospitalized for it in sixth grade, and I'd never forget what it felt like. Yet I couldn't do anything about it. I was paralyzed. That's the first rule of Depression: You cannot act to help yourself. And you cannot ask for help. Depression forbids it. I saw my counselor, I read, I wrote. I kept up the pretense of living.
But I felt like I needed something to get me through: words that spoke to me directly, but from a distance. Comforting words, but also sharp to cut to the heart of the matter like a honed scalpel. They would remind me that somebody else had felt like me, and someone else had understood. They'd throw me a rope in my sea of loneliness and anger, grief and fear.
I think I just went looking for them through the plays and sonnets in my green Norton Anthology of English Literature -- 1000-plus pages in tiny type on crinkle-thin paper. One day I came across this exchange between Macbeth and his wife's doctor, who was called in when Lady Macbeth'guilt had unhinged her. When I lit on it, my heart seized. It leapt off the page and punched me in the gut. Here was a rendering of exactly what was happening to me, 500 years later, in my cinder block room with walls so narrow a bed on one side and a desk on the other left 4 ft in between. It was a tomb.
The words were beautiful and vehement, sorrowful and angry. They were exquisite. So I took to repeating them to myself when I went to sleep, and I wrapped them around me when I returned "home" from whatever foray I had made into the "outside world." They gave me silent comfort, like running your tongue over your teeth. Pretty soon I knew them by heart. I kept them there, urging it to beat.
Macbeth is enraged at the inadequacy of medicine to heal his wife's disordered mind. "Cure her of that!" he yells with all the urgency and outrage families feel when their loved one suffers -- and no one has an answer. He demands some "sweet oblivious antidote" that even he seems to know doesn't exist. Lady Macbeth, is plagued by "perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart" he laments, enraged -- and so was I. So are a lot of people, then and now. There are some drugs for it, but not the right ones; some other treatments that fumble and guess but fall short also. "Therein, the patient must minister to himself," the doctor finally says, throwing in the towel. As if we could. As if we weren't sick, seized by awful images and wanting to die. As if we weren't bound by Depression's first rule: You cannot help yourself. You cannot ask for help.
Not much has changed in 500 years. The outside world has changed tremendously, but the inside worlds of people suffering "thick coming fancies that keep them from rest" are just as they always were. That could be cause for despair, but for me the written evidence of how nothing's changed was comforting. Words of course are not enough to "pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow" -- even furious and beautiful ones. The roots of such sorrows run too deep. But the words did describe me! Somehow they knew me and the "written troubles of my brain," and that was enough. They sustained me, kept me company, and in a strange way gave me hope. They got me through till I could finally leave my room.
