One night when I was 17 years old, I was watching television with my mother when an intense dizziness shot up from my toes and knocked me sideways on the couch. I couldn’t breath or feel my hands; my vision darkened at the edges. Made intensely paranoid by birth control commercials warning against the dangers of hormones, I immediately thought that the Orthotricyclin Lo I had recently begun taking had lodged a blood clot in my neck. I tried to stand but my knees gave out. My face lost all color and my skin turned clammy. Terrified and confused, halfway convinced I was dying, I looked up at my mother and choked out, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

It wasn’t a blood clot, but I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and hooked up to an IV. At the hospital, the doctor told me I had had a panic attack, which explained the physical symptoms: the numbness in my hands and feet and my blood pressure’s sudden rocket upwards. But emotionally, it didn’t make any sense. I had been a pale and anxious child, buried in books, best friends with my laptop. I had had plenty of panic attacks before, but I had experienced none like this, none so acute and sudden. None that had landed me in a hospital bed while my parents, white-knuckled and frantic, whispered worriedly above me.

What was different about this panic attack is that it was the final warning sign in a series of events I had been previously content to ignore. Its shocking arrival—that tightness in my mother’s jaw! That flurry of fear that popped in my breastbone!—was the last straw. That year, my 17th, was the last I’d spend unmedicated.

Looking back, my behavior was probably not very different from that of other angsty teens. I cried a lot, and fought with my parents. I hated my small suburban town, its perfectly hung Christmas decorations, our gossipy neighbors. I had anxiety attacks over small things, like a sudden interruption in my morning routine. When I read my diary entries from that time, I wonder how different they are from every other teenaged girl’s diary. There are a lot of rants against the conformity of suburbia, detailed descriptions of lengthy make out sessions, angry missives demanding my parents treat me more like an adult. But the depressive pattern runs powerfully. In retrospect, it is so much more obvious than when we were in the thick of that time: as a teen I was more than just average-sad and I was having more than just an average amount of mood swings.

When I ruined a perfectly nice family vacation with sustained sobbing fits and tantrums that culminated with broken glass in our Rome hotel room, it became very clear that something deeper was awry. I was only 17 and I viewed life with the dark seriousness of a French existentialist. I did not want to get out of bed in the morning or in the evening. For a very long time, I did not want to get out of bed at all.

Depression is hereditary, so it’s unsurprising that my mother suffers from it too. When I picture the vision of her I carried around as a child, it is always the same grim scene: she is slumped against the washing machine in our cold basement, thin fingers raised to her mouth as she pulls furtively on a cigarette. Bones protrude at her hips and wrists; her clothes emit the subtle scent of tobacco and Yves Saint Laurent perfume. There is nothing alive where her eyes are, no ambient light or endearing crinkles, just a blankness I would eventually recognize in the mirror behind my own green eyes. Later, when I was in high school, she began to take medicine and slowly got better. But parts of me never forgave her for the way her sickness forced my sister and I to creep carefully around the house, so terrified of setting her off.

My hatred for this dark part of my mother is what kept me from realizing for so many years that I was suffering from the same disorder. Frequently, when I would break out into tears over something as small as being unable to open a jar, my mother would gently suggest that I go see a doctor. At 15, no one wants to become their parents, especially if the vision of their parents is as poisoned as mine was at that time. I was desperate to disassociate from her, desperate to chalk my crying jags and tantrums up to typical teenaged behavior. My parents had gotten divorced when I was in middle school—surely my poor behavior could be excused by that fact, or by my swirling hormones or discontentment with my suburban surroundings. Always a control freak, I thought I could control this too. I might be sad, but I would not allow this to be chemical.

Of course it was and always has been chemical: The inability to crawl out of bed in the morning, the inexplicable rage and midnight sobbing. Every outburst, every crippled friendship, all of it.

It has been five years since that panic attack, and every day for the last five years I have dutifully swallowed the same pill with the hope of eventually seeing the world the way those with normal brains do: In brighter hues, with stronger, more beautiful aliveness.

I couldn’t write for a very long time after I first went on Zoloft. I used to only know how to write by accessing this dark, painful space between my ribs—it was there where all the powerful words lived. Sometimes, when people I loved would touch me just above my sternum, I would start to cry for what seemed like no reason. That is the place where all of my feelings knot, where all of my honesty hides. For months after I started taking my medicine, I couldn’t get to that place. It was still there, but I struggled to reach it. Eventually I trained myself to go there only when necessary, and to leave before getting stuck. It’s dark there, and comforting, but I only go when I have to, now, when life demands it of me.

My mom went off of Welbutrin last summer, and I wonder how much of that has to do with the desire to possess organic emotion again, or to extinguish the suspicion that any surge of happiness might simply be attributed to an artificially stimulated chemical reaction. Maybe my mom felt that struggle too, the internal battle that is automatically waged when your brain becomes simultaneously the enemy and the shelter from that enemy. That it is chemicals measured and quantified in a laboratory that have given us the ability to feel again is a concept that innately conflicts with our human hubris. The notion that we have grown better because and not in spite of the pills we take every day is difficult to accept without feeling defeated, somehow. There are many things I can’t do while on my medicine, but the list of those I can’t do without it is far longer.

Our generation is often criticized for being overmedicated, and I do worry sometimes about the long-term effects of a drug so new to the market. Friends who disagree with pharmaceuticals are often skeptical of how much I believe they helped me. I admit to courting some skepticism myself: I do not want to take Zoloft forever. But these friends didn’t know me before the medicine kicked in and my ethos slowly grew less toxic. I was selfish and angry then, completely warped by sadness. It has been five years since that panic attack and I am much better now: to them, to myself, to everyone.