I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together—the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night—can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out. But that was so long ago.

I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn’t one I’ll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it’s worth it.

I start to feel like I can’t maintain the façade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong.

Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is. I don’t know.

My dreams are polluted with paralysis. I regularly have night visions where my legs, though attached to my body, don’t move much. I try to walk somewhere—to the grocery store or the pharmacy, nowhere special, routine errands—and I just can’t do it. Can’t climb stairs, can’t walk on level ground. I am exhausted in the dream and I become more exhausted in my sleep, if that’s possible. I wake up tired, amazed that I can even get out of bed. And often I can’t. I usually sleep ten hours a night, but often it’s many more. I am trapped in my body as I have never been before. I am perpetually zonked.

One night, I even dream that I am in bed, stuck, congealed to the sheets, as if I were an insect that was squashed onto the bottom of someone’s shoe. I simply can’t get out of bed. I am having a nervous breakdown and I can’t move. My mother stands at the side of the bed and insists that I could get up if I really wanted to, and it seems there’s no way to make her understand that I literally can’t move.

I dream that I am in terrible trouble, completely paralyzed, and no one believes me.

In my waking life, I am almost this tired. People say, Maybe it’s Epstein-Barr. But I know it’s the lithium, the miracle salt that has stabilized my moods but is draining my body.

And I want out of this life on drugs