The Cold, Imperious Beauty of Recovery

Before I started on Lexapro, I thought that writing was a purely intellectual exercise. With enough skill, one can feign the emotional immersion necessary to engage a reader. I soon realised I was mistaken.

It had been months since I last wrote a personal piece. Now, every sentence I write feels cold, imperious, and foreign. The ability to think without being consumed by emotions occasionally leaves me in a state of chilled awe: Is this me?

I stare at my hands, scratch my arms, and poke my belly. Is this the same person who could not make decisions without being overwhelmed by emotions? Who got rejected from job interviews because I appeared “too manic”?

The one solid pleasure I gained from losing my all-encompassing feelings is the absence of guilt. For once, I did not feel like I was taking up too much space. For once, I could care about other people instead of centring my feelings.

The realization that my feelings were not everything and viewing them in relation to the environment, such as expressing what is appropriate given the situation and honouring other people’s feelings, felt liberating. I no longer need to feel like a “bad person”.

But it also felt like I was writing with a blunt pencil. Every time I tried to sharpen the tip, it would break before I took it out of the sharpener. There was never a moment that my emotions felt “sharp” enough, the kind of feeling that would make words flow like ink from a fountain pen.

How do I feel about this situation? I’d ask myself when I encountered something I felt would be previously worth writing about: My mom threw away my hentai collection. One of my close friends turned out to hate me all along. Middle-aged mothers are calling me a whore again. My ex ran away with my money. Or even things I usually would have been elated about: I sewed a jumpsuit. I thrifted a good-quality tweed coat. I scored very beautiful batik tulis at a bargain.

Before I started taking my medicine, I was the type of person who was “all or nothing.” I rarely was neutral about something. Either I felt a two or an eight. Either I despised something or loved it to eternity. I would love something so much that thinking about it made me cry. I could also hate something so much that thinking about it made me cry. I was always crying.

Now, the world is beautiful but cold. It was still mesmerizing, but not so to the point that writing about it felt justified. The writing felt reductive. After all, am I not experiencing the world like everyone else?

Is it not imperious to assume that I have a perspective so unique that it is worth spending time reading about instead of experiencing the world directly?

The world stopped making me cry. I did not feel so strongly about it that it was worth weeping about. The world is beautiful but cold — its beauty is “obvious” in a manner that was not worth writing about.

Why sketch on an opaque surface when you could have held up a translucent one to see the world?

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This post was previously published on Celine Hosea’s blog.

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