264. Prophesy - Brooke Siem
Hilma af Klint, The Swan No. 12 / Group IX (1915)
Where a pivotal choice is not a matter of influence or circumstance, but of a fundamental knowing that the life we created can no longer be.
At my birth, an astrologist declared I had the soul of a wordsmith. Something about half the solar system taking up residence in my Third House. As a kid, possibly in an effort of unconscious fulfillment, I collected journals. But each one only ever earned a few scribbles. The words never seemed to flow. I would start, stop, and come back again. Over and over until one day, in the aftermath of my father’s sudden death when I was fifteen, I simply stopped bothering at all.
Perhaps there is more to the story: after my father died, I was taken to a child psychiatrist who prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants. The immediate effects of the drugs remain unknown to me, the line between pharmaceutical intervention and puberty so intertwined that I still don’t know where I ended and Pfizer began. What I do know is that for the next decade and a half, I didn’t write a word unless it was part of a job description. And at the turn of my 30th birthday, still on the same drugs I was given as a teenager, I pushed my body halfway out the window of my Manhattan high rise apartment and calculated the time it would take to hit the ground.
It is rare, I find, to experience moments where we truly face our fate. Where a pivotal choice is not a matter of influence or circumstance, but of a fundamental knowing that the life we created can no longer be. In that instant between emotion and response, between perception and reality, there is a prophecy. An is-ness. A glimmer of who we really are behind everything we thought we’d never be.
I chose to pull myself back in from the window. Saw a doctor. Fought to be given the chance to experience the world without powerful psychiatric drugs—for the first time as an adult. The decision plunged me into a year of terrifying and dangerous antidepressant withdrawal that was far worse than the depression had ever been. I shed my entire life, leaving my business, my apartment, and my country in favor of existing without an address at the edges of the earth, where no one could find me if I needed to be found.
And I wrote. Five hundred words a day, of the most mindless, self-involved drivel you’ve ever encountered. The kind of kvetching that could make even Dostoevsky say, “My god woman, get a grip.”
I didn’t write to make my way back to myself. Or to find answers. Or heal some perpetual wound. The practice just was. Is. When the haze of antidepressant withdrawal lifted and I began to craft what would become my debut memoir, May Cause Side Effects, writing wasn’t like therapy. Still isn’t. I do not crave it. I do not worship it. In truth, I do not understand it at all.
Perhaps that’s the power of prophecy. It is never really yours to begin with. It simply appears in the place it has always been, boundless energy forever humming, indistinguishable and as inseparable as life from breath.
- Brooke Siem
