Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

by Rachel Aviv

In her book Depression: A Public Feeling, the scholar Ann Cvetkovich writes that if depression can be “conceived of as blockage or impasse or being stuck, then its cure might lie in forms of flexibility or creativity more so than in pills.” I am drawn to this idea, though I don’t think these two strategies are in opposition. 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.