All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [27]
At last, here was an explanation, a name, an actionable thing: depression!
Inspired, I moved faster than I had in days. I practically clawed my way to the telephone to call a therapist I casually knew in Franklin, Tennessee, to suggest a doctor who could prescribe medication. Franklin was the closest thing I had to a fixed address. I had been essentially homeless for the past three years, after the house I’d been renting in Malibu burned to the ground in a wildfire, with all my possessions inside (except Mamaw’s pearls, which I had thankfully been wearing at the time), while I was on the Ruby in Paradise press tour. Because I was constantly working at the time, I was living out of hotel rooms, rented homes on locations; and between jobs, because my farmhouse restoration was a long-term project, squatting either at Mom and Pop’s or at Sister’s.
As soon as I returned home and dropped my bags in my mom’s guest room, I went to see the psychiatrist my therapist friend had recommended. I remember feeling incredibly vulnerable in this strange new setting as I shared what I knew then of my story. I waited expectantly to hear her verdict.
“You have mild, anxious depression.”
My first thought was, If this is mild, I cannot even imagine what major is. I am nonfunctional, and this is mild?
“Where does it come from?” I asked.
“Unresolved childhood grief.”
Silence.
“Okay, what do I take for that?”
I wanted medication. I had suffered enough that I was willing to try it. I was radically grateful for anything that resembled a viable solution to the problem I had lived with for so long, which until now had not even had a name. She gave me a prescription, and I went home and read the molecular formula and studied the insert. Would it work faster if I took it in the morning? Or at night? On an empty stomach? Or a full stomach? Following the doctor’s suggestion, I started a mood journal to keep track of things so I could give her clear data during our check-ins. Then I just lay in bed, waiting to see if I felt different.
A few days later, I started feeling wildly restless and insatiably hungry. I needed so much food during this time, I would eat raw tofu straight from the package (I was a vegetarian then). In spite of eating like a horse, I continued to lose weight, and I eventually bottomed at 112 pounds, which is far too thin for my five-foot-seven-inch frame (a healthy weight for me is 130 pounds). In the middle of one night, I heard a distinct, piercing cry and bolted straight up from a dead sleep before realizing the noise was coming from me. I had started wailing like a banshee. Mom and Pop’s dog, Banjo, who was asleep next to me, went flying off the bed in a panic—I nearly scared him to death. I probably would have terrified myself if I could have considered that disturbing stream of anguish, what it was and where it was coming from. I was purging grief. It lasted over an hour. Confusing words erupted out of me unbidden, things like “I was just a little girl, it wasn’t my fault” and “Why did you leave me at school? I was so little, I couldn’t get home!” and the plaintive refrain of my childhood, “Where is everybody?”
I told my doctor about it the next day, and she said that was something called “freeing of the affect.” Apparently, with the medication beginning to work, emotions that I hadn’t felt because I was depressed were beginning to be released. She said it was normal, and that I would continue to have these episodes, although they would be shorter and less intense over time. Indeed, I started feeling a bit better. But I was by no means out of the woods. There was no way I could start to recover while I was living under my mother’s roof.
Mom loved having me stay with her, and there were some good times. She still shows the guest bedroom to people and says it’s my room. But it was not healthy for me to be there while I was so depressed.