I spent so long wearing pain like a badge of honour. But what if happiness was simple?

an article by Kitty Drake published in the New Statesman

I thought struggle made me interesting. But in My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh insists that pain is not meaningful. It’s dull.


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The first time my mother tried Prozac, it was so fabulous, it felt like God. After 32 years of living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, the idea that pain could end just like that was simple in a way that felt almost biblical. She spread the good news: she talked about campaigning to have Prozac mainlined through the tap water supply. But Prozac wasn’t God, and so it didn’t last: three years later she was ill again, trying different medication. What did last, though, was that she no longer believed in the inevitability of pain. The real revelation of Prozac was that you didn’t have to experience suffering, as though it was some noble truth. You didn’t have to grope around in the darkness for an epiphany that would propel you out of it. The radical thing about recovery was that it could be about inaction. You could give up. You could rest.

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