My Year of Rest and Relaxation

The sedating pills symbolize both the narrator’s desire for rebirth and her avoidant tendencies. Despite her staggering social and economic privilege, she is “plagued with misery, anxiety, and a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body” (18)—but instead of taking truly therapeutic measures, she seeks pharmaceutical escape. Based on the narrator’s lies about insomnia, Dr. Tuttle provides her with a myriad of pills. These are not only sleeping pills but include an outrageous variety of drug classes, from anticonvulsants to antipsychotics. They do, however, all have their own sedative effects (hence their prescription), and the narrator soon becomes heavily reliant on drugs including but not limited to Ambien, Rozerem, Ativan, Xanax, trazodone, lithium, Seroquel, Lunesta, valium, and the fictional Infermiterol. At first, the narrator sees the pills as a means to “drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything” (17). However, her dependence shows some characteristics of addiction when she can hardly get through a small portion of the waking day. Her reliance on the pills as an escape from reality becomes even more dangerous when she begins Infermiterol, a drug that causes her to black out for days at a time and do things—go out clubbing, buy expensive clothing, call her ex-boyfriend, etc.