More or Less Maddy

by Lisa Genova

Her mother texted her a very preachy, when-are-you-going-to-learn lecture. You know your sleep is going to get all messed up. You always forget what happens, and then you just keep repeating the same hell over and over. Maddy nodded, her face forged with seriousness, and responded, Says the woman who had three children Maddy’s face then exploded with laughter. She’s sure her mother’s face did not.

Hours ago, she was on an unstoppable quest to become the next Taylor Swift. Winning a Grammy was her manifest destiny. She was a national treasure. This would be funny if it weren’t so utterly stupid and tragic.

As a stepfather, he’s like that abstract painting at the top of their stairs, a fancy big deal when he first arrived in their lives, but after a while, he became easy to ignore. He loves Maddy, Emily, and Jack, but it’s an arms-length, neatly-worded-holiday-card kind of sentiment.

she tunes out and looks around the room at the couples and families eating their dinners. They seem happy enough. But are they? Is this what she’s supposed to want and strive for? Dressing in matching costumes, chitchatting about nothing, married with children, perpetuating this mind-numbingly meaningless nightmare, this endless loop of absurdity? These people are all breathing miracles of DNA in bodies that took 13.8 billion years and an impossibly unique and unbroken chain of events to be here, and this is how they choose to spend the days and nights of their precious existence before being snuffed out forever? It all feels so pointless to her.

She has afternoons to chill out and is in bed every night by ten, tired from having lived the day rather than tired of living the day.

that’s about all she takes in before her panicked eyes dart around the room, desperate for something else to focus on. She can’t look at him examining what she herself has never seen.

He doesn’t say sorry. He doesn’t look back or even break stride. She wants to walk faster, to keep up with the rest of the world and get to class on time, but everything in her feels slowed down, as if someone has reached into her brain and turned the master dial three clicks to the left. People pass her as if they can’t see her, as if she’s not really there. Maybe she’s as invisible as she feels.

Staying at Adam’s dorm for the weekend is challenging, as she doesn’t dare cut herself here. He shares a bathroom down the hall with five other guys, not enough privacy. When the numbness begins to fade before she can cut herself again, she drinks. And since drinking herself into a boozy stupor is a perfectly normal, socially acceptable means of self-annihilation, she can pound six beers right in front of Adam and his entire dorm without a raised eyebrow or hint of shame. No bracelets or locked bathroom doors needed.

The slip of paper he’d handed to her had felt like an unprovoked assault on her character. She could barely stand to carry it home in her pocket. She felt accused, violated. How dare that crackpot school doctor, who’d never even met her before, label her with depression, when all she did was have the courage to vulnerably ask for a little support. Her request for help, in and of itself, demonstrated that she was being reasonable and responsible, doing what an emotionally healthy person would do. She hated that asshat doctor for labeling her with his totally unprofessional rush to judgment. Based on what? A single conversation? Ridiculous. Two days later, she walked into Duane Reade and filled the damn prescription.

She feels a slight lift in energy and outlook, excited about writing comedy. Is she allowed to feel excited? Is feeling good dangerous?

Her diagnosis has changed the way her mother sees her, or rather doesn’t. Maddy has been healthy, functional, and thriving for a while now, like she was in high school, better even, but her mother can’t acknowledge it. It’s as if everything about who Maddy was before November—dependable and predictably ordinary—has been erased from her mother’s memory, and through the lens of her selective amnesia, she can now only view a Maddy who is unstable, fragile, and likely to melt down in any kind of bad weather. Maddy could stay home forever, and her mother would worry. It doesn’t matter where she is or what she does.

Yet she’s confident she will feel okay in a bit. After her first few bombs at the beginning of the month, she held her breath, waiting to hear depression’s footsteps at her door. Does feeling bad mean she’s depressed? Does feeling good mean she’s manic? Is any intense emotion a prelude to her next hospitalization? But depression never came. And so even though she feels pretty rotten right now, it also feels pretty damn good to know that what she’s feeling is temporary, safe, and normal.