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The Camera My Mother Gave Me If you have a vagina you know that most of the time it is without sensation. How does your spleen feel? How do your kidneys feel? How does your pancreas feel? Luckily, we have no idea how these things feel. The vagina is mostly like a pancreas and feels nothing. If it feels something, it is either erotically engaged or ill. All this is obvious if you have one. But half of us don't. I have one, and something went wrong with it. Some days my vagina felt as if somebody had put a cheese grater in it and scraped. Some days it felt as if someone had poured ammonia inside it. Some days it felt as if a little dentist was drilling a hole in it. The strangest thing was that all these sensations occurred in one inch-long part on the left side. The rest of it was fine. [ skipped some sections ] Give me four, I told the pharmacist. I only want four. It takes at least two weeks to see an effect, she said. I'll see an effect in an hour, I said. I always do. I took the bottle home and put it on my desk and looked at it: Prozac. America's favorite drug. Here it was, in my house. I picked up the bottle and shook it, listening to the rattle of the pills against the plastic. Then I opened it and looked at them. I thought of all the arguments I'd had with my friends and my doctors and even with people I barely knew about this drug. This drug was going to change my life. This drug had changed their lives, or the lives of people close to them, or the lives of their other patients who were depressed. What was the matter with me that I wouldn't try it? And so forth. I sat there looking at the bottle. It was similar to standing at the edge of a pier looking down into deep, cold water and debating whether to jump in. Or worse, like standing on a cliff and debating whether to jump off. It was also reminiscent of standing at Checkpoint Charlie - something I'd done a few times back in the days of the two Berlins - waiting to enter a country where I didn't want to stay and wondering why I was going there. Checkpoint Charlie unnerving was the slight but real fear that the "other side" might prevent me from crossing back over, and that these were my last moments in the free world. My stomach hurt. And my chest hurt. The idea of taking Prozac made me so nervous that I was having trouble breathing. I took out one pill and held it in my hand. I went into the bathroom and got a glass of water and took it back to my desk. Then I put the pill beside the glass of water and looked at them. I realized that I had to break up with my boyfriend. It was the only way my vagina would have a chance to get better. I didn't want to break up with him. I still loved him. But he was driving me crazy and I couldn't make him stop it. I put the Prozac back in its bottle. Then I put the bottle in the drawer with my dildo and my pee basin. It had worked. It had changed my life. Susanna Kaysen's first novel, Girl Interrupted, was interesting enough to make me want to pick up The Camera My Mother Gave Me. This book took me only a few hours to go through but it left me completely unfulfilled. A few pages of vagina conversation might be interesting but an entire novel definitely isn't.

©2005 karenika.com