I also realize that I’ve endowed my pill of choice with mystical capacities—it contains the things I’m not but wish I was—and merely the idea of swallowing such a thing has healing power. I wish I had a more flexible approach toward my feelings of inadequacy (“I want to be someone better than me,” I had written in my second-grade diary), but I also feel closer to that space of flexibility when I take Lexapro; it seems to relieve the cognitive rigidity that often accompanies anxiety and depression—the sense that one’s story can unfold only one way.
