Haley Jakobson

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here. Please share this essay as I feel it is tremendously important that we begin to shatter the stigma of mental health. Tweet, FB it, send to a friend, Instagram it. Whatever you can do.

By Haley Jakobson

There is something about New York City that makes me feel like I could die at any second. Then again, that could be the depression.

How are we gonna talk about it? Should we speak in scientific terms: the levels of serotonin in my brain are depleted, it can’t make them go up on its own, so I have to create them with chemicals? Or should I explain it in poetry: my skin with gaping holes sucking in the sadness of the entire island of Manhattan, find a stopper plug me up so I can breathe again? Which works for you?

I’ve been on this medication for four weeks now and it works, and it’s a miracle, and I’m still a mess and I still cry in public and I’ve written more than I have in months. I’m kissing boys in screenplays I wrote for myself and sketching poetry like a map of my twenties. My brain isn’t betraying me on every street I turn onto and I don’t look at my dogs and wonder if the human race has deceived an entire species out of their happiness. Now I can see that my dogs are actually pretty fucking happy.

So here is my Drug Manifesto: thank you tiny white pills for tweaking my wires back into place. For letting me laugh and put sparkles around my eyes, and thank you even more for letting me fall to my knees and cry. I started medication the week before you broke up with me and hallelujah for that because some force of light let me heal three days into my new prescription, not the 4 weeks I was told to be patient for. Three days and brightness shone. And then you broke up with me. And then wrenching devastation. But as I cried up and down the streets of New York fucking City, the day of the marathon, with thousands of people on my literal block, I was only heart broken. I was not depressed. I sat on a police barrier and sobbed. But I was not depressed. I bought a tiny plant and put it in my pocket and cried harder when the dirt spilled, but I was not depressed. I impulse booked flights to Aruba and I cursed the adrenaline coursing through me because I knew it was masking the sadness, but I wasn’t depressed. I was just heartbroken. I couldn’t get to my apartment because the road was blocked but I didn’t think I was dying. Because I was only heartbroken and not depressed. I celebrate this. I would have taken neither but I’ll take heartbreak this time. I’ll take feeling my own heart, mine, over the desperate unknowingness – the loss of my intuition, I’ll take it over depression. If those are the cards I’m dealt, I’ll take them.

Sarah Silverman says depression is feeling homesick except you’re already home. Losing the home inside myself will never ever be something I choose. That is mine and if a tiny white pill needs to remind me of that, then praise that glorious silver angel and the holy water that helps her sing. Continue Reading…