Well Effect
BY ALLISON FIELD BELL
I am a good student. This is just something true about me. Even as an adult, I yearn to please. I want the teacher’s praise, nod of approval. But right now, I am not a student, I am a patient. My aunt says the key is honesty. I don’t want honesty. I want everyone to clap for me in group. I want to smile with my fat full binder and tell them that today will be better than yesterday. My aunt says, you will ruin yourself, Alice. Yes, Alice, like in Wonderland. Except, the place I am in is not so wonderful. The place I am in is of my own making: a room with no door. Or maybe the bottom of a well: all that damp and dark, those seamless slick sides.
Let me start over. I live with my Aunt Alice. It’s confusing. Our names both Alice. Double Alice. I am named after her. Aunt Alice, Alice. I am named her. My mother never could have predicted the situation we’d be in, because my mother never could have predicted that I would need to live with Aunt Alice. But Aunt Alice was kind enough to take me in. I’m thirty-five. I shouldn’t need taking in. But when you’re thirty-five and bipolar, sometimes you need taking in.
This is what I rehearsed for my first day of group. “I’m thirty-five and bipolar, and when you’re thirty-five and bipolar, sometimes you need taking in.”
I thought it sounded very manic pixie dream girl of me. A little old maybe to be considered a girl. Manic pixie dream woman. If such a thing exists. Except I don’t think the manic part of the manic pixie dream is meant literally. No one actually wants manic. I was manic until I wasn’t. Now I’m at the bottom of a well.
~
My aunt lives in California. Everyone hears California and thinks I won the place lottery, and it’s true, there are worse places to be. She lives in a small town north of San Francisco where there are many vineyards and the ocean is only a short twenty-minute drive away. Sebastopol. I know the town well. I’m here, and I grew up here. My parents moved away to San Francisco when my twin brother had a baby, and the thought was: the city might be too much for me. Too many buildings, too much noise. I needed quiet, and my aunt has quiet. My uncle isn’t around much: he’s working a job up in Lake County, so he comes around some weekends, but says he doesn’t want to interfere with our project. I am our project.
Sebastopol is fine except before Sebastopol, I was living all the way in Tucson, Arizona. That’s where my life still is, where my job was, where my house was, my chickens, my friends, my lover, everything. And besides that, I love the desert. It’s late summer, and the monsoons should be rolling in. Clouds casting shadows across the landscape, water driving into the parched earth, leaving the desert with that fresh clean creosote smell.
Instead, I’m here. Summer means the beach is crowded and the fires are coming soon. Not that any of that matters for me. My summer: a series of doctors’ appointments and hours spent across from a therapist. My summer: the program. Our project.
~
My first day in the program:
Woman at the front desk hands me a daily check-in sheet. She says, “You fill this out every day.”
I say, “Is that why it’s called a daily check-in sheet?”
She does not laugh.
She shows me to what looks like a small classroom. I am a good student. I fill out my check-in sheet. It asks questions like: Did you take your meds today? Did you eat breakfast? How many hours did you sleep? Yes. Yes. 10.
I cross out 10 and write 9. 10 seems excessive.
More people trickle into the room. Of all ages. It alarms me to see older people here. And younger people too. I like to think of depression as something you grow out of. And also something that doesn’t plague such a young person. Eighteen and already at the bottom of the well.
The facilitator walks in, looks at her clipboard and looks at me. “Alice?”
“Yes, that’s me,” I say.
“Did you get one of these?”
She hands me a daily check-in sheet. I hold up mine, completed.
“Ah,” says the woman. “Teacher’s pet.”
I blush and stare down at the table.
“I’m Cat,” she says. “And this is my dog, Gunky.”
Sure enough a mop of a white dog starts nosing around my tote bag. I try to absorb the Cat-Dog situation seriously, while also willing my cheeks pale. It disturbs me that therapists are allowed to bring their dogs to the program. It disturbs me to know that therapists have dogs. I don’t want to know anything about therapists that make them more human. If they’re human, that means they make mistakes. I don’t want a therapist who makes mistakes.
After Cat’s introduction, a few other patients look at me on the sly. They’re curious. One older white woman says her name is Sadie. She says, “Get ready, this stuff is hard.”
An older black man who I later learn is named Javon says, “It’s like a colonoscopy.”
Sadie says, “Like the day before a colonoscopy”
Javon says, “A colonoscopy of the brain.”
They both laugh.
~
Second day in the program. My binder is not stuffed fat and full like some other people in the program because I’ve only had two days to collect materials. The expectation is: the fuller your binder, the better your disposition. I want a full binder, but I also want to impress them with my disposition. “Look at Alice,” I want them to say, “Binder only a quarter full and her mood’s already at a consistent eight.”
That’s the mood scale. We rate our moods every morning. (The daily check-in sheet.) I can’t help exaggerating mine. When I’m a six, I’m really a three. When I’m a five, a two. And so on. The problem is, I don’t look like a six. I look like a three. It’s just so difficult to take a shower some days. And to pull on jeans. And there’s no way in hell I’m even touching mascara. Or a hairbrush. I get it, I’m a liar. I’m not unaware of the situation. I’m self-reflexive. And also, at least this is positive thinking. If I say to myself and out loud, I’m a five enough times, maybe I will be at least a four by the end of the day. Maybe not.
~
My aunt and uncle’s house is on Olsen Avenue. It’s a small country house, and maybe someone from the city would say it needs new siding here or flooring there, but I love it. The house is my childhood. It’s a small three-bedroom, one bathroom with lots of plants and fish tanks and a working fireplace and a large backyard with lots of garden. The first day I arrived, my aunt had put a vase of flowers in the bedroom where I am staying—my older cousin’s childhood bedroom. The flowers were from the backyard: sunflowers, zinnias, roses. The roses smelled like roses, heirloom roses.
I noticed the flowers, yes, but it was like noticing them through a camera lens. Like I couldn’t quite feel they were in front of me. They had some kind of filter on them. Or they were kept at a distance. Or they were blurry. Or I was.
I have since learned that this is a phenomenon of depression. The depression filter. The bottom-of-the-well effect.
~
Day five. After check in, I am assigned a group to learn a DBT skill. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I’m thrilled because we are getting a new worksheet for our binders. The handout has two concentric circles, one circle has the words REASONABLE MIND and the other has the words EMOTIONAL MIND with the center overlap: WISE MIND. The goal is to get to WISE MIND. The process is mindfulness. The therapist leads us in a guided meditation where we think of a decision we’ve made in the past few days: what mind were we in?
I think about how I decided to purchase a pair of earrings. I don’t need new earrings and I don’t have any money to purchase earrings. Still I purchased the earrings. On a credit card. I was in emotional mind. Almost all of us were in emotional mind when we made our decisions. Of course, we were. We’re depressed. The therapist then helps us reimagine the scenario in wise mind. We play along, mostly. In wise mind, I don’t purchase the earrings. One woman, Jessica, does not play along. She has her eyes open the whole time. I know because I open my eyes briefly to check. She’s staring at the table. She’s too depressed to play the mindfulness game, to play the good student game. She thinks this is all bullshit and why isn’t she just in bed under covers with the lights off. Or maybe she just doesn’t like closing her eyes in a room full of strangers.
~
The lover I left in Tucson: he was a good man. Fernando. He tried to help for weeks. I was unmanageable. He wasn’t just a lover: we were partners. We talked about marriage, children. He wanted the marriage, the children. I wanted him. And then the mania hit. It started small: a few creative projects—I started painting, I began a novel, I purchased expensive photography equipment because I figured I might as well have a side hustle. He was supportive until the photography equipment. It was all my savings, plus some on a credit card. He didn’t understand how I could be so reckless. I snapped at him. Then I slept around on him. A lot. With men, with women. With whoever looked at me at a bar. I went to bars. I stopped going to work. I worked at a nonprofit. A good environmental one. They were lenient with me. They entered PTO for me. They didn’t want to fire me. Fernando made excuses for my absences, told them I was sick, which wasn’t a lie. Eventually, they placed me on leave. A soft firing. At least, this is what Fernando told me after I arrived in California. I didn’t know or care or hear what was said to me in Tucson. In Tucson, I drank mezcal and fucked like that was my job. Fernando was not mad. Was not mad either when I stopped fucking and crawled into bed for a week. Downward spiral commenced. He called my parents. They came to Tucson. They guided me into a car and took me away from the desert. Then I walked into my aunt’s house, into the room with the flowers, the roses that smelled like roses. I remember that smell. That floral perfume. A shock.
~
The program is for the depressed. I am the depressed now. I was the manic and now I’m the depressed. Just like that. It happened overnight practically. Too much mezcal, too much fucking. Or just the chemicals in my brain burning out. My parents and my aunt helped sign me up for Medicaid in California—MediCal. By which I mean, they did it themselves, while I sat on the couch. They shouldn’t have to do things like that. “You shouldn’t have to do things like this,” I said to them. They said, “We love you. We want you to get better.”
I made myself throw up in the bathroom. Not because I have an eating disorder, just because I am dramatic, and sometimes I think I need to punish myself.
Once the health insurance was figured out, my aunt pulled some strings to get me into the program. She works at Planned Parenthood, and I guess the medical world is connected like that. The program is expensive but because I have MediCal, it’s free for me, which is important because I spent all my money on photography equipment. Fernando is trying to sell my photography equipment online to get me some money back, but it’s not going well. The professionals are taking advantage of him, and I bought all the highest quality.
The program is for the depressed. We are all depressed here. It’s a sad lot. But we laugh sometimes. Like when Javon said the thing about the colonoscopy. We laughed. Some people think you can’t laugh when you’re depressed. It’s not true at all. The world is just as funny. It’s just that when I laugh it feels wrong. Empty somehow. Dry. Like sawdust.
~
Day Nine. I am most excited for group therapy. I like sharing my story to a captive audience. I don’t know why. Maybe we all do. I thought I would hate it. I thought I would feel like attending an AA meeting. Hi, my name is Alice, and I’m a depressed person.
But no, it’s so much more than that. It’s like finally rising to the surface of a dark body of water and taking a deep full breath. You submerge again, of course, but for a moment, you’re at the surface, breathing and looking around.
Today, I talk about an incident with my brother. He called this past weekend to ask how I was doing. I told him, “Not great.” I told him, “I’m depressed.”
He became frustrated with me. He said, “Aren’t you more than that? Aren’t you more than just your depression?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “Can’t you just pretend to be a little normal? A little positive? You know, fake it till you make it sort of thing?”
I said nothing.
He said, “Sorry.”
I said, “It’s okay.”
He said, “I better go. Baby’s waking up.”
I love my brother, but sometimes he knows how to say the exact wrong things. I tell the group about the bottom-of-the-well feeling and how it felt worse after the conversation. “I realized I am not more than my depression,” I tell the group dramatically. “I am my depression. My depression is me.”
The group claps, and I feel that wave of satisfaction. That wave of not-depression. Endorphins maybe.
The therapist running group, however, corrects me. She says, “Thanks for sharing, Alice.” She says, “Remember, everyone, that depression is something happening to you, not who you are. You can and will defeat it.”
I don’t like this therapist. She always reads an inspirational quote to close group too. Something like, “Without rain, we wouldn’t have rainbows.”
She’s a California therapist through and through. No one in Arizona would tolerate her. Except maybe a few hippies in Sedona.
Still, everyone in group bows their heads in shame for clapping. Or at least, I imagine they do. I cross my arms and lean back in my chair.
I hate that therapist. I say it over and over in my head. I hate her. I hate her. I hate her
~
Fernando. Once we hiked up in the Tucson Mountains, and he surprised me with bubbles and cheeses and figs. Fresh figs. I had barely even tasted a fresh fig, and there they were in front of me at the top of a mountain. Brown Mountain. A short loop studded with saguaros. It was sunset and there was Fernando with his figs. We drank the bubbles straight from the bottle. Difficult to drink bubbles like that. So bubbly. Fernando’s first sip frothed over onto his shirt and the ground, so I followed in suit: I swished some bubbles around in my mouth and spit them out into the dirt. We both smiled, laughed. He opened the cheeses. He forgot crackers, but neither of us minded. Just the bubbles, the figs, the bites of brie and gouda.
~
After two weeks in the program, on a Friday, Aunt Alice and I drive to San Francisco to have dinner with my parents, my brother, his wife, their baby. It wasn’t my aunt’s idea; it was my mother’s idea. Always saying I should see the baby now: he can roll over on his own! He can hold himself up! And I am supposed to react with enthusiasm. Yes, wow, I usually say, trying to fake it. Or on worse days, I say, what’s that, Mom? I can’t hear you—bad service. And then I hang up. Anyway, today is the day we go to dinner. In the car with Aunt Alice that evening, I can’t keep my feet still. They want to run or press as hard as they can on the dash. My aunt says, “Alice, what’s wrong?”
She’s talking to me, but she could be talking to herself. Double Alice. Everything’s wrong. We shouldn’t be going to dinner. Two months into living with Aunt Alice, and I understand she likes to stay home. She’s comfortable there: there’s no stressful drive or fighting over who pays what bill. She likes her space, and she likes to share it with very specific people. Me, for example.
I forget to respond to her question. “Alice?” she says again.
“Yes, yes, fine. Everything peachy. All good. Yep.”
My aunt switches lanes and glances at me with a concerned look.
“Is it the situation with Fernando?” she asks, her voice gentle.
The Fernando situation. I think about him, about the news he told my aunt just this morning. I can’t think about it or him or the news.
“I mean,” I say. “I’m depressed, you know. Still depressed.”
She grips onto the steering wheel tight. “I told your mother—” she begins, but trails off quickly. She tries again, “This will be good for both of us.”
I watch out the window: golden hills stuck with the occasional oak tree, gnarled trunks squat and close to the earth. Then a vineyard. I stare at the rows of grapes—an optical illusion, each row folding in on the next. I feel dizzy and close my eyes.
~
In Tucson, the environmental nonprofit I worked for takes a strong stance on endangered species. Every species, they have decided, is worth saving. They prioritize the living, breathing creatures who cannot protect themselves, no exceptions. I worked in fundraising. I didn’t love the day-to-day, but I agreed with the mission. Or I think I did. I didn’t enjoy calling donors and asking for more money, but I was good at it. I could turn on the charm. Something to do with my mania perhaps—always there waiting in the wings. This is something I’ve always liked about myself: riding that high, feeling like I could talk anyone into anything. I remember one New Year’s Eve in my early twenties, I convinced nine men to give me their ties at a club in San Francisco. Then I left the club, ties piled in my arms. I chucked them all in a dumpster outside down the street and skipped off to the next club. There, I only collected three ties, but one was some brand that the man was very hesitant to relinquish. “Promise to bring it back,” he said, gripping my arm a little too tight.
I smiled and pulled the tie over my head, disappeared into the crowd. His tie—a silver silk thing—I flattened to the ground with my heel right outside the club, sure he would see it.
~
We arrive to my brother’s house in Twin Peaks. It’s a gorgeous house—no question. The whole place done up in pearl white carpets, white walls. No art. My brother always had art in his old places but not this one. The one piece of art is his television: one of those screens that turns into a crystal-clear artwork when you’re not watching. Today it’s Van Gogh. The sunflowers. I feel like it’s cliché to display Van Gogh’s sunflowers, but I wonder if they even have a choice. Then suddenly, I’m amused. Van Gogh to make me more comfortable: the depressed for the depressed. And I can’t help saying something. “Ah, depressed art for a depressed person,” I say. My brother’s wife hurries to change the artwork. She looks at me concerned. She changes it to a bright colorful image by Chagall.
~
In the program, I have a psychiatrist and a case manager. I feel somehow special, having a case manager. Special and also terrible. Like I am a special case in need of management. My case manager is a woman named Paula. My psychiatrist: Dr. Weinsveg. They’re my team, Paula explains to me. I have a team. Dr. Weinsveg put me on meds right away. A mood stabilizer first, he said, to temper the bipolar. He plans to add an anti-depressant soon. He tells me not to drink alcohol, not to do drugs. Coffee and sugar I can have in moderation, he said. But basically: lay off the hard liquor. No more mezcal. I agree with him: I’m a good student.
~
At my brother’s house, my father keeps his distance. A cautious space around me, like I might be contagious. I know it’s not true, but that’s how it feels. He’s not a bad father, he’s just rightfully concerned. It was not his idea to invite me. Still, I want a reaction. Or attention, like a child. In fact, I am jealous of the actual child. He’s in my aunt’s arms and everyone is looking at him with adoration. He is a cute baby as far as babies go. If you’re into babies. I’m not into babies. I find them boring and disconcertingly fragile and a bit smelly. Fernando used to joke that I was heartless and also the ideal woman for a man in his twenties. Neither of us were in our twenties when we met, so it was mostly an insult. Still, I’ve always been a late bloomer. Can’t help it. Maybe someday I’ll wake up adoring babies too. In the meantime, I have to fake it.
“He’s so cute,” I say over and over again.
My aunt looks at him like she’s melted and I decide to say something outrageous.
“Someone in group said this whole process is like a colonoscopy,” I say. “Like the day before a colonoscopy.”
My mother looks distressed, my brother annoyed. My father and my brother’s wife study the ground at their feet. My aunt is the only one who makes eye contact with me. Her eyes say, I feel for you but don’t do this. She’s the only one who can really hold me accountable. But I know she won’t say anything. I know, right now, she pities me more than ever: “The Fernando situation.”
The baby gurgles and distracts everyone. No one has to say anything to me.
I say, “He’s so cute.”
~
In Tucson, Fernando and I used to drink. Not a lot but kind of a lot. I had a decanter full of whiskey and a bar full of bottles. Before we moved into our house together, he’d show up at my apartment and pour himself a drink automatically. We would drink and then have sex. Then we’d sit out on my porch and smoke cigarettes, and he’d tell me how he wanted to own his own mechanic’s shop someday. That’s his job: car mechanic. But he’s a car mechanic for some shop off Speedway and he wants to be his own man. A self-made man. That sort of thing. I thought it was sweet, until he brought kids into the picture. He wants two of them and a wedding to go along with them. I just smiled and took deep drags of my cigarette, staring off at the palo verde tree beside the porch. Its branches a bright and brilliant green, still stuck with what looked like spines though, like most things in the desert. The color: I wanted to drink it up or eat it. Make it part of my body.
~
In San Francisco, it’s foggy, but my brother’s house is high up enough in the hills that he’s above the fog. There are blue skies and, if you’re from San Francisco, you might even say it that it’s warm. I shiver in a fleece and long for Tucson. My brother’s wife bustles around the house, setting out plates and a steaming dish of lasagna. I know I should help her, but I’m so tired. I plop on the couch and close my eyes. The baby gurgles some more, cries a little. My brother’s wife excuses herself with the baby. “Dinner time for him too,” she says.
My mother and brother and aunt finish setting the table while my father sits near me. He reaches for my hand to pat it awkwardly. “I’m glad you’re doing better,” he says.
“I’m not really,” I say.
He pauses for a minute, cautious again. “Well, better here than Tucson.”
I think about Fernando. About how he could have taken care of me himself, and how he chose to call my parents instead.
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“Well, because you’re with family now,” he says slowly. “And that’s a good thing.”
“Is it?”
He looks at the kitchen, no doubt longing for my mother to call him over so he can end this charade with me.
“Oh, Alice,” he says.
And for the first time I realize how exhausted he looks. His eyes with dark circles, his face drawn and weary. I’d blame the baby, but I know it’s mostly me.
“Sorry,” I say.
I think about Fernando in Tucson. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
~
When I left Tucson, Fernando told me he would wait for me. Told me he loved me. Told me he forgave me. Told me to get better and then come home. I haven’t talked to him in two weeks. He calls and calls. And now he talks to my aunt. He’s a good man really, but I don’t deserve a good man. Or a good woman. I deserve to be alone. No, I want to be alone. I want to curl up under blankets and sleep forever. My therapist says this means death, but I think forever is more complicated than that. Sleeping forever is stasis. Hibernation. And besides, people say forever without meaning forever. Fernando told me he would wait forever for me. It’s barely been two months and today, he told my aunt he had started seeing someone new. That’s the news. He still cares about me, he said, but he wants to live his life. Get married, have children. Who can blame him?
I can.
I don’t expect people to love me despite my illness, but I still want them to.
~
In my brother’s house, the smell of lasagna fills the kitchen and the dining room and the living room. They’re all connected. You can see everyone and everything from the kitchen where the stove is, where my brother stands. At the helm. He calls my father and me to dinner. And there’s my aunt looking at me, a question on her face. I know the question she wants to ask. It’s a question she wants me to ask the rest of my family: will they come to the program with me? There’s a special support day every month where family members can come and meet my team, where I can tell my family what my plan is, what I need from them. My aunt is already planning on being there, and she wonders, will I invite the rest of them? I tilt my head at her and smile. She smiles back: she thinks yes. We all sit down to dinner, except my brother’s wife who’s still feeding the baby. It’s the perfect opportunity. I look around, I take a deep breath, and then my brother interrupts me.
“Dad,” he says, “can you pass the salad?”
I look at my brother. My twin. He looks exhausted too. This time, I know it’s from the baby. That damn baby. Our future generation. The one living thing I could cherish as practically my own. My nephew. I don’t have an epiphany or anything, I just realize that maybe the baby is more important after all. That maybe I’m depressed and depressed people don’t like babies. Babies look at you like they think you can fix whatever it is that’s making them cry. A dirty diaper. Hunger. Fatigue. But I can’t even fix myself.
My aunt looks at me expectantly. “Alice,” she says, “were you going to ask something?”
I close my eyes, see the light dance red on my eyelids. I see the well: its slippery sides. I feel the cold edges of it. Everyone at the table holds their breath. I know I’m inconsolable. I know they know this. They have to deal with me. They want one dinner. But first it’s one dinner, then it’s a day, then a week, a month, a year. I’m not ready for that commitment. To get better, be better. I’m not ready for any commitment.
I’m depressed.
“Yeah,” I say to Aunt Alice, and then turning, I say, “Mom, can you pass the lasagna?”
Aunt Alice sighs, but the rest of the table exhales, smiles. My brother’s wife returns with the baby. My nephew. He looks at me and drools. I’m a good student. I’m a good student. I say this to myself. A mantra. An affirmation.
Out loud, I say, “He’s so cute,” and then we all begin eating.
