Backing up a little. I had that year been fortunate enough to find a woman, which in the beginning went well, but after a brief two month stint together, a growing sense of vulnerability erupted in outright panic and a rapid decline in my mental well being. Panic, aversion, depression, disgust....a set of sensations that is difficult to articulate, in short a full emotional recoil unless the narcissist in me exaggerates.
Coming back: a year or so later, after many visits to psychologists (the second of whom was to identify narcissism as the offender), and after breaking contact with the girl, suffering from exhaustion and insomnia, I sought the kind of help you can swallow.
It wasn't my first time. I had been an on-off patient of the psychiatric services for many years, culminating in a six week stay on a ward, during which I received ECT treatment. Since that time, my life had remained more or less on an even keel, apart from the ebb and flow of a dysthymic depression; until this latest bout of devilment, I had taken nothing stronger that a pain killer, but now, I felt, I needed something, and since a doctor's pen is always ready, that's where I went.
A hospital waiting area seems singularly designed to alarm rather than calm; like most waiting areas, say in airports, or bus stations, it has a purgatorial feel, which is essentially what it is, a place between places, a time between events. The chairs were made from steel and felt cold beneath you, that smell that all hospitals have, that ambience, the conglomeration of so much illness and disease under a single roof, hope and dread and every little quirk of human feeling magnified.
There was only me and a single other soul there in the waiting area, as well as the administrative nurse, to whom I gave my name before taking a seat; everything so functional, pragmatic, bureaucratic, with little thought of comfort. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long before the doctor, the cubist lady, came and called my name.
After a little while rifling ceremoniously through my file she announced, in a hushed and gentle voice that was none the less authoritative,
"Dr. C seems to have had trouble coming up with a diagnosis. Why don't you tell me what has been troubling you?"
And so began an hour and half long conversation, the longest I had had with a psychiatrist, at the end of which, again a first, she didn't want to medicate me, saying my depression was not a clinical one, a disruption in the flow of neurotransmitters, but rather caused by my sense of isolation, owing to the problems I was having relating in love, owing to this narcissistic personality structure, as she called it. I tried to protest: I didn't recognize myself in the online descriptions.
In truth, I am ad-libbing here, which fits in cosy with what she said next, referring to some objections I had with the work the psychologist and I had been doing.
"You sometimes think you know better than everyone else."
It seemed like a fresh observation from someone who had spent only an hour with me, and yet I can't deny it; but how do you get from arrogance and frivolity to the kinds of sensations I had been having, the total physical response I had had to something so simple. That she told me, was an issue for me and my therapist.
I made a final plea for pills, something to help me sleep at least, and this time she agreed, turned a page in her notepad and scribbled a prescription; I thanked her and went away, feeling at once relieved and cheated. I wasn't happy with the assessment, had gone running to the web and tried to make the pieces fit, and some did, but from this personality structure to the feeling I had been having...I didn't get it.
Then, I have a tendency to think I know better than everyone else. At least, I knew what I was feeling, or did I? In fact, I wasn't so sure anymore. Everything that surrounded me, everything inside of me, every little detail, no matter how simple and obvious, seemed somehow doubtful, all smoke and mirrors.
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