First off, check out this Sex and the Ivy-related point and counterpoint on Gadfly, a blog written by “a bunch of people who went to Harvard and now have many opinions.” Full disclosure: I am acquainted with both writers and the author of the defense is my very tall and Canadian hubby on Facebook, though I assure you there was no prodding on my part.

Second, I’m too busy with papers and writing projects to write a proper entry, so here is a piece I wrote a little over a year ago about the last time I came apart at the seams. It is very fitting for the current situation, but I dare say that I am doing better this time around than the last. (Well, at least I’m not completely ignoring my friends.)

“At a place where everyone delivers without fail, how do you tell people you just can’t deal?

On Thursday evening, I had my life under control. I went to office hours. I went to makeup sections. All my assignments were done. My TFs didn’t hate me. My iCal was organized. My email had under 100 messages. I changed into a cute outfit to kick off the weekend. I saw Vix for coffee. I made my dinner date with Nate. I met HN and Rody at the Fogg, followed by a gay mixer at the law school with CK. I boozed and schmoozed and met lovely people. Someone called me “fabulous.” Life, around 10pm, was pretty fabulous.

Flash forward several hours to Friday morning. I woke up hungover, topless, and missing a few crucial memories from the previous night — namely, the violent outburst that rocked Mather’s thin walls. By noon, I pulled myself together … mostly because I had to. I saw my therapist. I made it to mentoring. I met my committee at Toscanini. I had dinner with JB. I went to Death Cab. I came home to a party, drank generously, and then called it an early evening after the subject of my aforementioned tirade called it quits for the fifth time in as many weeks.

I was piss drunk and pissed off. By 4 a.m. I was also awake, answering the first text message I paid attention to all night since passing out. I should’ve slept past it, not called back, not answered the door, or for that matter not done a whole series of things leading to a monumental error in judgment.

Since then, I’ve been dropping the ball on basically everything. I have not really left my dorm room at all — not for work or class or meetings. Cumulative time spent outside of Mather since Saturday night? Four hours. Four non-Mather hours in four freaking days.

My goal is to get my life back on track by tomorrow evening. Starting with class today.”

– “Day Four” November 8, 2006

Several of my friends have expressed pretty serious concerns about my, uh, mental state, so here’s an update: I wrote my therapist Anna a very lengthy email last night, basically saying that I only have about a week left at home and I need to stop fixating on everything that’s arisen and concentrate on my work (plenty that I’m behind on) and actually go out with my friends. I think even my mother is a bit alarmed by the fact that I’ve more or less stayed in bed for a week. It’s not crippling depression; I think I’m just really … tired. It takes a lot out of you to get angry at someone, to get over being angry, to get angry all over again at someone else, and then to get over that. And that doesn’t even take into account the horrendous bureaucratic maze I’ve had to make my way through in terms of police and lawyers, etc. All in all, the past few days have been altogether draining (additionally so because of another unexpected, unneeded crisis that erupted on Christmas night).

It’s also really frustrating because the people who best understand the insanity that’s been going on are my friends from school, specifically my blockmates, who are all over the place. I’ve been calling Tiffanie nonstop because we’re in the same time zone (she lives in Irvine) and this isn’t really healthy. Even my ex-boyfriend from high school told me the other night to shift my mindset and pay attention to what’s in front of me, not what’s thousands of miles away. “When you’re home, you should leave everything you have going on in the East Coast on the East Coast,” he told me. And that’s fair, though I feel in this situation, it’s an impossible request to ask of me, since I can’t reasonably divorce my thoughts from the people or the events or the relationships that have all changed quite dramatically over the holidays. The timing sucks. I’m not coming home again until June at the soonest and I can’t even devote myself completely to California.

In any case, I lack the emotional and mental energy to really be productive. On the bright side, I finally have time again, which is nice so I guess I just need to get my mind somewhere peaceful. I am finishing crucial forms at the moment, trying to concentrate on papers, and embarking on a first step toward a potentially great project. I am only beginning now to return all the emails I received last weekend, so if I have yet to get to yours, my apologies.

I don’t know when or if I’ll blog again about anything significant until mid-January nor do I really want to write about any of my current romantic interests. There are a couple guys I’m casually seeing (or like five, haha, depending on who you ask and whether you count non-Bostonians) but I haven’t discussed the blog extensively with any of them nor do I care enough to write about them or even ask if I could write about them. I’ve been going at a snail’s pace with guys lately and been altogether reserved (sexually and definitely emotionally). I’m really excited about one person in particular , but … I don’t know. I don’t think I’m opening up very well for someone who plans on making a career out of introspection. I guess I’m just really caught up in being me and dealing with my issues without anyone’s help. Even writing to my therapist was a HUGE leap and her job is to help. Relationships require that you let the other person in. In a way, having a ton of drama that none of my friends or family can fix for me has made me more determined to forge ahead on my own and it is very hard to revert back to my old mindset. I guess we’ll see.

I was going through my phone the other night and I determined that my entire life can be summed up as one long series of text messages from Adia. This is completely unrelated to what this entry is about.

I wrote on my private blog yesterday (yes, I do have another) that I’ve had to make a series of changes this year in order to adjust to the unexpected consequences of Sex and the Ivy: “It’s not even about the public scrutiny and recognition and inability to make new friends or meet new people. It is about old friends and their scrutiny and my attempts to make a space for myself that is my own. The past semester has been about drawing the line between public and private, narrowing the list of people in my life to a handful I want to invest in, and separating my professional endeavors from my college existence.”

I’ve explained this to several people already but I think it’s important to get it down into words: I don’t want to make new friends, I don’t like strangers, and I never want to date another guy who knows about my blog. It almost sounds cold but the handful of people (and I really do mean handful) who I have become better acquainted with this year are almost all friends of existing friends. It’s hard to trust people’s intentions unless you have others vouching for them. Frankly, I’m not interested in befriending or dating someone who finds me intriguing merely because I write a controversial sex blog. Obviously, it’s a different story with fellow writers and bloggers, but when it comes to typical peer interaction, “What’s Kyle’s real identity?” should not be on the top of the get-to-know-you list. It almost makes me wonder if I was considered at all interesting before I started writing this thing.

Along the same lines, I’ve found myself becoming much more private even with my close friends. It doesn’t mean that I’m shutting off in the slightest. But for someone with such little privacy as it is, it’s not asking much to be left alone when I want to be. I’m tired of being interrogated every time a new male figure emerges in my life or someone comes over to hang out. Sometimes, it’s not even about my privacy but the other party’s. Living in such close quarters with five other girls last semester was extremely stifling. Between my blockmates, friends, and readers, I had almost nothing that was left to myself. My romantic turmoil, depression, insecurities — all of it played out in the public sphere. I felt anxious all the time, could barely focus on my work, and finally, pulled away violently from everyone. Months later, the solution, as it turns out, is to actually not tell everyone everything. Surprise surprise.

Another change: I’m less patient nowadays. I’m remarkably blessed to have such solid friends in my life and I’m not exactly in need of extra company. This isn’t the first day of freshman year. I have no patience for dealing with shitty personalities. Being thrust into the spotlight has made it spectacularly clear that it’s quality, not quantity, I should be looking for in terms of friends and that in order to get to the few good ones, there’s a lot of judgmental, superficial assholes to weed through. I spent the better part of freshman year putting up with undeserved criticism and general bitchiness. I get enough of that bullshit from Sex and the Ivy critics; I don’t need it in my day-to-day life. Quite honestly, if you’re not going to get with the program, then get the fuck out.

I forgave two people recently. One simply disappeared from my life after an unexpected personal crisis; the other drifted away slowly but deliberately. I felt rejected by both at the time and never really understood what happened. But once I heard their respective explanations, I felt compelled to forgive them. The former was someone who treated me with respect right up until disappearing without a trace. The latter was responsible for my making it through the college transition. There is something to be said for being human, making mistakes, owning up to them, and apologizing. Sometimes, “sorry” is just about enough. I’m still waiting for a “sorry” from more than one party.

In sex-related news, I have been off of birth control for two weeks and I’m seriously considering just going without it indefinitely. I am having such a difficult time with the mere conception of a hookup, much more sex, that I don’t see the purpose in taking the Pill. Of course, I can’t foresee the future and who knows what a summer in New York will hold. Besides, prior history (i.e. Summer Guy) has demonstrated that relationships occur when least expected. Nonetheless, I am determined to stay abstinent and I know that I won’t have sex using only a condom. I have only had bad experiences with relying on one form of protection (had to resort to Plan B with both Summer Guy and Aidan) so third time is definitely not the charm. If I’m not popping the pill, no one’s popping the regrown cherry.

Life isn’t really as terrible as it seems. I have to remind myself of that constantly, but trite as it is, it’s true. Everything happens for a reason, and even if it’s difficult to make sense of it at the moment, events that later unfold eventually elucidate the past.

April is Mental Health Awareness Month. After my entry on depression hit the Internet, I felt like I had become the poster child for mental health at Harvard. It was a role I was unprepared for, but I’m glad it landed on my lap. I wrote way back in November, “Sex blogs and dating columns are entertaining endeavors, but what I have wanted most is to make a difference by putting into words what some people are unable or afraid to express for themselves.”

I didn’t think at the time that I was doing precisely that by posting about my own experience with alienation and sadness on this campus. In the weeks immediately after my entry went up, countless readers reached out via comments, emails, instant messages, just about any medium you could think of. Some of them were speaking from an older and wiser perspective, many were current or former Harvard students who understood disillusionment well, and others were just young people elsewhere in the world who shared the same struggle. Even today, months after having written that post, I still get the occasional email every couple weeks from someone who is trying to make sense of what is going on in their lives and empathized with me enough to put their feelings down into words. This is the single most resonating piece of writing I have ever produced.

When I wrote it, I was beginning therapy just as my life was beginning to unravel. The blog had become overwhelming, stifling, much more than I could handle on my own. My personal life had all but imploded. Things with Aidan ended, my friends didn’t understand anything, my best friend just started a new relationship, and I couldn’t tell my mother the truth about a single aspect of my life. I was, for all intents and purposes, alone.

I wrote the entry partially because I was miserable, partially because I needed to articulate what my day-to-day struggle felt like, but mostly because I resented everyone for regarding me as some sort of sex-crazed freakshow when really I was just a girl who couldn’t quite get a grip on life at Harvard. At the time, all I could think about was running away, whether it meant from Mather to the Quad, from Boston to New York, or from Harvard to Penn. On campus, I lived in a constant state of panic and anxiety. I was too paranoid about being recognized to leave my room. I stopped eating. I couldn’t talk to my friends without having difficulty breathing. I told more to Kyle, someone I had casual sex with, than I did to my roommates. I had no idea how to make it to the next day.

It wasn’t until January, when I had gained perspective from a weekend in New York and a trip back home, that I finally reached a leveling off point. Somehow, through the tumultuous holidays and a few therapy sessions, I had learned to keep my emotions under control, to deal with the unexpected consequences of celebrity, to pick and choose who I wanted to have in my life. I also came to learn that even though a lot of my problems stemmed from my blog, what I went through (and am still going through) was both a unique and a common experience. Expressing that experience and sharing my journey with a public audience has been more gratifying than almost anything else I’ve done.

I am better now. I am in a better place today than I could’ve imagined six months ago, than I could’ve ever thought possible as a freshman. And despite the unfortunate events that have transpired in the past few weeks, despite the multiple conversations I wish I never had to engage in, despite frustrations and disappointments, I am more capable of managing life on my own than I have ever been. I did not ask a lot out of therapy. Happiness was never a request of mine. Today, I simply can function. And that is a blessing that I cannot even begin to explain.

I write this now because I spent the past two months becoming invested in someone who turned out to not be who I thought. I spent the past week getting to know someone else who was just as deceitful. In four months, I have met more distraught ex-girlfriends than I care to meet for the rest of my life. Perhaps this is karmic; perhaps it is bad fortune. Whatever the case, it’s hard for anyone in this position to not begin thinking that they’re cursed.

Which brings me back to my point. Putting it all into perspective, this website is one of the best things that has happened to me despite my having to change the way I live in order to cope with its consequences. Depression was one of the best things that has happened to me because I needed to feel that low in order to get the help I’ve always needed. I understand that now. Months and months later, it has all been worth it and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I fell hard for someone recently and he made me believe in things I never thought I would. He told me that I was beautiful, that I was much more than a sexual object. He appreciated my intelligence, my ambition, my devotion to those important in my life. He wanted me to realize my own worth, to not give myself away emotionally or physically so easily to others, to respect myself. Not too long after I actually began to take his words to heart, I found out that he had been lying to me for weeks about his involvement with another girl. He had been lying to both of us. I haven’t spoken to him since.

But I still believe every word he said to me.

Such a large part of our relationship was a fabrication that it would be easy to discount what we had altogether, but I would never take it back if only because he taught me such valuable lessons. He is the reason why I only want to sleep with someone I really care about. Given some perspective, being with him served a very important function, one I could’ve never predicted and one I value despite the way things played out.

I’m writing this entry to someone specific, someone who I think understands precisely where I am coming from, who knows what it means to hurt and to need. Perhaps this is just me being romantic, but I think that there must’ve been something that you could’ve taken away from the two of you that was vital and important. There must’ve been something he made you feel, something he added to your notion of self. Whatever it was, I don’t want you to lose that. Months from now, I hope whatever happened between you still matters and has some impact no matter how vague.

People speak of regrets far too often. I am too drained to regret what has already been done. Take it. Change it. Be better for it.

Everyone needs to have their defenses broken down sometimes. It’s the only way to figure out what you’re really after, why you’re not happy, and whether you’re running down the path of life in the wrong direction with the wrong company. The problem is that we have defenses for a reason and most of us aren’t comfortable living unprotected. For me, therapy is a safe space where I can be vulnerable, own up to my insecurities, and admit my faults. My hour with Sarah is the only time when I feel normal at Harvard.

I’ve been seeing Sarah since late October. To be honest, I made a snap judgment the second she shook my hand at our pre-screening. I didn’t think we’d click. And at first, we didn’t. Our first meetings consisted of talking on my part and nodding on hers. There wasn’t anything particularly insightful I gleaned from the biweekly sessions. But recently, I’ve realized that what she says about my personality and inclinations makes sense. Maybe it’s because she’s making more accurate assessments with time. Maybe it’s because I’m more willing to listen.

If I were Sarah, I wouldn’t like myself very much. There is absolutely nothing to pity about my situation. No one died. My grades are fine. It’s not even like I can complain that much about my love life. I just can’t get my emotions under control when crisis strikes, boo-fucking-hoo. In my initial sessions with her, I pretty much gave a list of hang-ups and expected her to form an accurate diagnosis. Typical Friday morning inquiries would go something like: “So Sarah, what do you get if you combine an eating disorder, predisposition for addiction, impulsive behavior, alcohol dependency, promiscuity, and unhappy childhood with an overachieving, extroverted Type A personality?” I went in with the attitude that I was overachieving at life — whatever my problems were had to be chemically induced. I wasn’t particularly helpful, just demanding. Pills? Electroshock? Lobotomy? I was game for anything — just fix me in time for recruitng.

Obviously, I’m a handful. I’m no different when it comes to Sarah but that’s okay. With her, I unload all my baggage and I don’t feel guilty about it. My friends don’t have time to deal with my depression, but my therapist? It’s her job. So I let my pals finish their problem sets and let Sarah listen to my problems. Mental Health Services is highly underutilized, and therapy is highly underrated. Not unlike promiscuity, it is at once taboo and trendy. Thus, it’s easy to discount its real value. But even for me — someone whose writing depends on introspection — I find myself making revelations every time I go in.

The morning after I hurled something at Aidan’s head, Sarah asked me about my father. In the midst of my most recent heartbreak, I had never thought to ponder my first. My dad was the first man to disappoint me: divorce, neglect, irresponsibility … I could go on for days about what my father didn’t do and what he screwed up at.

“I know he loves me because he’s my father. And I love him,” I told Sarah. “But he was a man who just wasn’t very good at fatherhood.”

I started talking abeout my family dynamics and was in the middle of ranting when she cut me off to ask the obvious question of what this meant for my romantic interactions. Sarah wanted to know what I was looking for in my relationships with men. Though mid-tirade just moments earlier, I suddenly found myself at a loss for words. It was the first time since I started therapy that there was silence in the office. Several seconds after my prose broke off, I finally managed to speak.

“I just want to be loved.”

I said it quite simply and half-shrugged, shaking my head, my eyes welling up. It was a moment of clarity, and I was almost shocked. I didn’t expect to make any revelations — certainly not one as seemingly simple as this one. It was the closest I ever came to crying with Sarah.

Two nights later, I finished in my dorm room what I started in her office and cried in front of Aidan. It was appropriate. He was the only person other than Sarah that I’d been as honest with this fall. At the moment, I couldn’t stop sobbing and I thought that it was because he hurt me. In retrospect, it was 19 years in the making.

I am so far from perfect in a place where perfection is the minimal expectation. Yet I get the feeling that very few people ever meet that self-imposed standard and that perfection is a poor substitute for happiness. I don’t think I will ever quite be good enough, but for the first time since just about ever, academic performance and professional success are not what matters.

It was in therapy that I finally realized neither made me happy. It was in therapy that the void in my life stopped being something I thought Harvard could fill. And it was Sarah who stripped me down to the most vulnerable I’d ever been. It was her who saw that at the core of this ambitious young woman was really a girl who just wanted to be loved.

New rule: No alcohol, period. Rita, the UHS psychiatrist in charge of deciding my fate (well, my prescription), was not pleased with my weekend visit to Stillman. “How can we accurately assess your condition if you’re using mood-altering substances?”

I didn’t have a good answer for her. “It was the only way I thought I could get through the night,” I explained. She told me I needed better ways to cope. I didn’t disagree but it’s not like she had a better suggestion for working through it.

Rita told me two weeks ago that I should limit myself to “one weak drink” per night. This time, she means it. This time, I need to take her seriously. No one seems to be able to pinpoint exactly what I am, and it’s crucial that I don’t fuck up a diagnosis with substance abuse. After I have a session with my therapist Sarah tomorrow morning, the two are going to “powwow” (actual quote) and determine if I should be a) medicated or b) institutionalized. Hopefully, I escape unscathed and without a recommendation for a dosage of anything but love.

Initially when I started therapy, all I really wanted was a prescription, a quick fix that would keep me productive, prevent me from slipping during all the wrong times. But now? Pills are the last thing I want. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being on medications; I’d do it in a second if I really believed I needed it. But I’m not so certain anymore. Sure, there are days when I can feel myself losing it, but I almost always recover so I can’t tell if I’m battling depression or angst. Sure, I can be happy without reason at one instance and completely wind down the next, but does that make me bipolar? My symptoms are so imprecise that I bristled at Rita’s suggestion that I begin taking a low dosage of antidepressants. Even she can’t say conclusively what it is I am. And further, I don’t know how these things are prescribed — at the request of the patient or the judgment of the doctor? How much does my own desire for medication influence her decision to give it to me?

“The thing is, I’m a writer,” I told her. And immediately, she understood. Beyond the qualms I have about my vague diagnosis, I’m scared that the pills needed to dull the aches of my heart will be dulling my creativity as well. Sometimes, I feel desperate enough that I’d throw in the towel when it comes to writing if it means getting through another day. It shouldn’t be like that. There has to be a better way. I asked Rita why it was so hard to stay okay, why the normality that other people took for granted was something I had to fight for on a daily basis. To others, it seems like I’m doing just fine but I’m really treading water, barely keeping above the surface, and constantly scared of sinking. This isn’t fair. It shouldn’t be this hard. I’m not even asking to be happy; I just don’t want to be sad.

Today at Urban Outfitters, I bought one of these memo pads (displayed below). Part of cognitive behaviorial therapy involves changing the way I interpret situations. But I ditched the UHS-xeroxed mood charts Sarah gave me after just two days. Following a terrible Harvard-Yale Game (which I left after a mere 20 minutes), I filled out the chart for the first time and immediately decided it was stupid. I don’t have any desire to rationalize my radical thoughts or to create more balanced interpretations of events. I’d much rather talk about how shitty I feel all the time and this kitschy notepad lets me do just that. I know, I know - -I’m self-defeating. But I can’t help the fact that I would sometimes much rather wallow in this sorrow than really work on getting better. The effort seems futile, because I simply don’t know what it’s like to be just normal. Of everything I’ve experienced in life, “normal” has been last on the list.