A POSTER OF MY BRAIN, FIXING ITSELF | Mallika Iyer
The body fights for life. If something disrupts the course of survival, our physical systems are programmed to collaborate and overwork and adapt to keep us alive, in every possible way they can devise. I knew this, only because I had the privilege to visit a doctor whenever I felt the need. When I stopped by the doctor’s office for any ache or pain du jour, I learned about anatomy and physiology from the diagrams on the wall; I imagined my own colorful and distinct cells signaling, promptly aiding muscles and organs, restoring me without second thought. I was readily prescribed the medicine that boosted my body’s natural effort. Success! I, like every living being, was protected by an internal machine in perpetual motion, primed to abort failure.
Then I developed a confusing and ugly illness where every cell of mine pleaded to just die. I had depression.
Can you recover from an illness when your brain won’t let you recover?
This question haunted me on another one of my long mornings buried in bed. The hours passed and then days passed and I never succeeded in getting up. In my bedroom, in my head, it remained night. Night. Night. The blackness of night dominated every part of my outer and inner environment— every fluid, sinew, cell. I could not explain how or why this interminable night descended; it was insidious at first, worming its way in. Yet before I knew it, the night had surreptitiously targeted my every spark for life until I was sack of tired bones that barely wanted to move. Make us die, each component of my system screamed in unison.
My psychiatrist pleaded with me to not believe these delusions of my brain. I remained in my pajamas while my parents drove me to her office, 1 twenty-minute appointment every other week. Every appointment, the psychiatrist urged that depression is not doomed to be a fatal illness and tried to cite notable people who had “recovered.” Then we went through her questionnaires assessing my symptoms. How was my appetite? My mood, scale of 1 to 10? Did I have thoughts of self-harm? The answers to all these questions were obvious with one glance at me: unkempt hair, wasting frame, pajamas, scratched wrists. Then we tried to figure out what was wrong with me. Was I under extreme stress or living a devastating event? Was I misusing alcohol or other drugs? Did I have a terrible secret? Was I miserable at school or work? Was I lonely? We made no progress into any of these possibilities, not because they didn’t apply to me, not because I had nothing to say, but because I couldn’t speak at all. I had lost the ability to say anything except “Fine” and “I don’t know.”
My responses (or lack thereof) told the psychiatrist exactly what she needed to know. My presentation was always bad enough to try the next pill on the list, or to increase the dosage of the current one, or both. Each time, I left her office clutching more purple Rx sheets, my expression unchanged. I didn’t believe these pills would work either. But I could no longer summon the tears to cry over it.
The psychiatrist was a healer. So were the scientists, who developed the medicines and treatment modalities that were supposed to help. So were my family members, who dragged me out of bed, drove me to the appointments, cooked my favorite meals, pulled me outside to take a walk, and everything else in their desperate power that could possibly improve my condition. So were my friends, who called me on the phone to try and understand and then simply ran out of things to say. It all just seemed to reiterate how incurable I was; that despite anybody’s hard-pressed efforts, I could never be a worthy, useful, satisfied, happy person. No matter the intervention, I got back in bed.
This was no way to live. Why stay alive?
This was the new question my brain asked, after months of weathering depression. After months of evidence that my internal system, despite carrying me through a lifetime of aches and illnesses, could not or would not rescue me from this ultimate peril. That all was night.
But I lived to write about it.
The only question that matters now: how?
I was introduced to the idea that writing is medicine by yet another healer: an English teacher who refused to let me out of her classroom, which had now come to double as an emergency room. My assignment? To write my story and write my future, with the only rule being that I couldn’t die. She explained that depression could make me fail out of her English class, but she was not going to let me fail myself; my heart was still trying to beat, and my brain was still trying to think, and writing would help me help them.
“I don’t know what to write.”
“It’s no different than an essay or story you would write in class,” she said. “But in the story you are about to write, dying is not an option. As you write, you will find a better solution.”
“I said I don’t know what to write.”
“This is not homework and neither of us are going home,” she said. “The same way you teach your brain a new vocab word to integrate and seamlessly use in everyday speech, you can teach your brain new strategies to live through the dark times that life sometimes presents. These strategies will become so natural, you’ll forget what it was like to not have them. So, to begin: what can you encourage your brain to do instead of die?”
“To accept help?”
“Perfect. Write it down.”
The first few times I worked with her, I only begrudgingly wrote a few words. It seemed cruel at the time: a list of concepts like enjoyment, fun, stability, peace, that seemed hopelessly out of reach for me. But I didn’t want to waste the time she was spending on me. She would stand several feet from my desk, cross-armed, curious and patient, wearing no white coat, prescribing no pills, determined to save my life. I have now come to think of her like God, or rather that there is some God to be untapped in everyone; that everyone can save a life through offering time and kindness. It’s not a power restricted to the divine.
Nor is it a power restricted to the physical body.
One day I told her about the anatomy posters at the doctors’ offices: “What if I could just be fixed?”
“Excellent. Describe the poster of your brain fixing itself,” she said.
What would it literally look like if my brain decided to be on my side again? Maybe my neurons reaching to each other in new and exciting ways, connecting to form thoughts and patterns that would provide me a happier place to dwell. Maybe my medicine dissolving and spreading, tapping each neuron to balance, lifting the landscape from deserted gray to light and airy. Maybe a brisk walk, the voice of my best friend, ballooning and expanding my brain so it could reach my heart again.
Writing is a high form of independence. With the conventions of grammar and syntax, you can apply logic and structure to experiences that defy logic and structure – like the bleakness of life, the ineptitude of your biology, the lies of your brain, when faced with depression. Maybe you can also find the person still fighting inside you who isn’t controlled by depression. You can use words to make her real and bold and victorious until you believe these words and you believe in yourself.
Open up to the therapist, even one word at a time. Take my medicine, one pill at a time. Breathe in, breathe out, day in, day out. My body would converse back if I wrote it a message. I could see the shape and substance of the message diffusing and bubbling and permeating my fluid, sinews and cells: I can survive this.
Write it down – imagine it real.
Mallika Iyer is a special educator and researcher, writer, and recovery advocate in Boston. She holds a BA from Johns Hopkins and an Ed.M. from Harvard. A recipient of the Fulbright fellowship, she writes about healing, spirituality and justice. Her work has appeared in Tiny Buddha, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Please See Me, Spirituality+Health and Braided Way. Iyer has experience as both a healthcare worker and chronic illness patient, and has published peer-reviewed research on risk factors for cannabis use and ADHD among children.