The poet Jane Kenyon describes a similar metamorphosis. After years of feeling as if “a piece of burned meat / wears my clothes, speaks / in my voice,” her doctor proposed that she try an antidepressant. “With the wonder / and bitterness of someone pardoned / for a crime she did not commit / I come back to marriage and friends,” she wrote. “What hurt me so terribly / all my life until this moment?”
