Of all the tape segments in my archives, the handful spanning the next twenty-four hours have a unique distinction: they’re the only ones with their own movie score. Pianos. Violins. Loud, resonant organ chords. Overblown music to punctuate the string of soap opera sequences that make up these classics.
Time has messed with my recordings of these crucial hours, quite possibly giving them more significance than they ought to have. And yet to this day I can think of no more dramatic scenes from my life than the ones that begin here, with me curled up in a ball on the living room couch, knees tucked to my chest, arms wrapped tightly around them …
Numb me, damn it, numb me. For God’s sake, please, I beg of you, numb me.
At least a half-hour now I have spent balled up and waiting. Nothing. No effects whatsoever from the little blue pill I have swallowed. Not even with all of my pleading. I know the benefits of Zoloft can take up to six weeks to kick in, but I haven’t got that long; I need relief now. I also know that Zoloft is not a “numbing” drug—like the ones the serious nutcases take in the movies—but it’s the only drug I’ve got at my disposal, and I’m certain that numbing is what I need at this moment, so numbing is what I beg for as I slowly come to accept the real reason I have dug out my dusty bottle of pills.
Still nothing.
I pass the time the way I always do, playing and replaying the OCD horror films that Doubt demands I review. There are so many tapes to cue up tonight, and ultimately, I fast-forward each to the same bitter end, to that familiar final scene at the virtual madhouse I’ve been visiting ever since Jackie first led me there nearly three years ago.
With the words hospital stay still pinging back and forth between my ears, I imagine myself in a small, blinding white cell on a generic psych ward, waiting for Samantha and the girls to arrive for their weekly visit, and pleading with my hospital medication to further numb me from the pain of my plight and all the tapes I continue to loop in my head. The images grow ever more vivid and disturbing as I slip into and out of the fantasy time and again, always embellishing on the basic scene I’d first conjured up for Jackie in her little exposure-therapy exercise.
Jackie. I think about her now and all the years we spent together. So many breakthroughs and successes and triumphs big and small. So much genuine progress earned over so many hours of gut-wrenching therapy. And yet in the end, this is where it all got me: a fetal-position breakdown on my living room couch. Damn you, Jackie, for failing to fix me.
Dr. X.
Dr. Y.
Dr. Z.
Dr. Smith.
Dr. Schwartz.
Reverend Manning.
Damn all of you, too, for coming up short.
But most of all, damn you, you lousy piece-of-shit pill, for failing to numb me.
The night wears on and an ugly reality sinks in: as terrifying as my nuthouse fantasy might be, it is also somehow perversely alluring to me. That’s why Schwartz’s sarcastic quip about hospitalization is still ringing in my ears—because some part of me wants to hear it. Because the cruel truth of the matter is I want to be in the hospital cell I can see in my mind, sheltered safely from society and all my friends and relatives and colleagues and listeners who just assume I am normal. And this, I now understand, is why I swallowed the pill—because in my black-and-white obsessive-compulsive world, choosing to take my little Zoloft tablet is tantamount to checking myself into a mental institution, retreating to the one place in the world where I can finally put an end to my elaborate charade of normalcy and accept my lot in life as a rank-and-file member of the mentally ill.
Five years. Six therapists. Two medications. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of OCD episodes. Countless hours of excruciating tape reviews. I have had enough. I want out. And so, at long last, I allow myself to finally quit the fight, to let all the exhaustion shut me down, right here on the couch.
Now I am numb, inside and out, as I advance my very worst horror film to its final few frames: Sam and the girls are in the hallway just outside my hospital cell, mere inches away from their first sight of me as a pathetic drugged-up lunatic. Brianna is crying as they step up to the doorway …
“No! Stop the tape!” I scream the words silently at the brink of my last waking moment, a single heartbeat before something deep inside of me gently begins to whisper:
This isn’t the way. This can’t be the way.
I open my eyes and it’s morning now. I am still curled up on the living room couch, but the very walls that had morphed themselves into an asylum cell around me last night are now open canvases for silhouettes of flowers and birds shaped by the slants of sunshine beaming through our sliding glass window. Sam and the girls are nowhere in sight, and the house is so quiet it’s eerie. Stranger still is the rare silence inside my head, the distinct absence of Doubt’s thundering presence. And oddest of all is the timing of my newfound peace. I’m certain it’s not the result of six hours of sleep, and I refuse to accept that it’s the byproduct of a mere fifty milligrams of Zoloft.
The utter stillness unnerves me at first. I imagine Doubt hiding at its edges, waiting to ambush me at just the right moment, as it’s done so many times before during the hush of a pitch black night or the sacred silence of prayer. For some reason though, I find myself feeling especially bold. I decide to go for it, to climb inside the silence, to see where it takes me.
Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go. Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go.
This is the way all my books say to do it.
Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go.
A deep blue spot takes form in the center of my mind’s eye. It grows and grows in pulsating waves. I try to focus my attention on it and block out everything else.
Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go.
Soon there is just blue and the sound of my breaths. No what-if’s to ponder. No tapes to play. No OCD monsters of any kind to feed. No words to describe the bliss of this freedom.
Seconds pass, or are they hours?
And then I get it: This is the now. The present. That infinite slice of time wedged between the past and the future.
It is the place of unlimited, unfathomable possibility, and because of this, it is the one place Doubt cannot exist.
Suddenly everything begins to make sense. For five interminable years from hell, my nemesis has steered me clear of each and every precious moment of my present, feeding me one compelling cause after another to obsess about my future while compulsively reviewing tapes of my past.
Rewind. Play. Fast-forward. Rewind. Play. Fast-forward. Day after day, I’ve been locked in this cycle, entirely incapable of ever getting out.
I’ve read enough to know the power of free will exists only in the present. Choices simply cannot be made in the past or future. And this, I decide, is precisely why Doubt loves to lead me right from yesterday’s mistakes to tomorrow’s catastrophes, leaving me no time at all to take control of my life.
It’s a vicious cycle.
And yet there was that profound quiet voice last night that was trying to …
“Hello. Thanks for calling. We’re not home right now. If you’d like to leave a message ….” The moment is gone, disappearing along with the pulsating blue spot at the Beeep of our answering machine.
I open my eyes, almost relieved to be back in the mundane world of telephones and voice mail. I have again pushed the borders of my fledgling spirituality way beyond my personal comfort zone.
But the notion of free will haunts me as I sit on the couch and stare out the window at nothing in particular. I think about a diagram I once saw in a Stephen Covey book that was meant to show the key distinction between humans and other species. There were two boxes, one marked “Stimulus” on the left, one labeled “Response” to its right, and in between them the words “Freedom to Choose.” I think about the diagram now, and I think about Jerry Jampolsky’s “dueling directors” model, and I think about Dr. Schwartz’s “impartial spectators” and refocusing techniques.
There’s an obvious theme here, and it’s anything but lost on me as my mind moves next to the parade of therapists who tried to help me. How many times did I catch myself waiting for one of them to wave a magic wand and make me all better? How many dire reminders did Jackie offer that my progress would only come when I was willing to do the hard work, to make the tough choices? How many pills did I take for all the wrong reasons—to numb myself, instead of to help make me stronger?
But all that’s in the past. I am now living in the present. This moment is rife with possibility and potential. Unfortunately, it’s also a good half hour after I was supposed to leave the house. I’ll have to pick up my unusually lucid thinking tonight.
I am on a roll, and I know it. Plato has nothing on me.
Some ten hours later, I sprawl out in a backyard hammock beneath a bazillion stars overhead. It’s a sticky August night and a chorus of crickets is about the only sound I can hear. I am more excited and invigorated than I can remember being in years, and I’m not too sure I understand why.
I do the breathing thing again, but it gets me nowhere this time. No blue spots or pulsating waves, so I just open my eyes and stare upward until I lose myself in a flickering star.
Soon I am again contemplating the power of free will, fumbling with the Believer dog tag around my neck, thinking how true believing must involve the boldest of all choices, since when it comes right down to it, you’re choosing to trust what you cannot see. I flash back to the handful of times in my life when I managed to do this—somehow put my faith in something bigger than myself—and I remember how powerful the results always were. I think about my old AA friends and all their tales about surrendering their addictions to some Higher Power and coming to trust their own “greater good” guidance, and how they’ve used those inspiring stories to help so many others.
And then without any warning or logic, I catch myself making what feels like a bargain: Okay, it’s your turn, I mouth upwards to the stars, unsure of just where to direct my pronouncement. Show me how to turn around this crazy life, and I’ll share my story with anyone who will listen.
A strange sense of certainty washes over me next, and I know in this instant that nothing in my world will ever be the same. With a mixture of fear and excitement, I also come to realize that Wayne Manning wasn’t kidding with the last words he’d left me with in his office back in May.
For as preposterous as it strikes me at this moment, I now know I am indeed “writing that book.”