You Shouldn’t Act So Crazy 
I kept a litter box under my desk for a year and I turned out okay.
When I was cleaning out our Brooklyn apartment in preparation for the big tropical move, I uncovered a number of items that I’d forgotten we owned. Among them: the plush vulva puppet gifted to me by a former author, tucked away in a hatbox; the “scorpion bowl”—a glass pipe shaped like its arachnoid namesake that we’d acquired on a family vacation to Mexico; and one wok, never used.
Under the bed, I found a cardboard box containing a small painting of an ocean view, framed in white like the window of someone’s beach house, and a piece of pockmarked driftwood.
You might be wondering why I, a person who considers decluttering to be foreplay and who foregoes sentimentality related to objects that have outlived their usefulness, would have held on to this box? Why indeed. It was a bona fide reliquary, wrapped in packing tape and stuffed with vivid memories of the worst time in my life and one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.
Leave your biofeedback at the tone
After several years of undiagnosed symptoms—including blinding headaches, stomach cramps, shortness of breath, and hives (Look! They’re spreading all over her body like the mounds of some exotic miniature skin gopher!)—when I was thirty-one, I finally had my first full-blown panic attack. Or at least I had a panic attack that was so bad it was impossible to ignore; I think there were probably a couple of mini ones in my past, like the tremors that presage a major earthquake.
That terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day resulted in me finally going to a doctor. And eventually finally listening to that doctor when she said I should try biofeedback as a treatment for the root cause(s) of my anxiety, rather than taking fistfuls of pain, nausea, and antihistamine meds to treat the symptoms.
I was skeptical. Biofeedback? What the fuck is that? Sounds like a fancy word for “YOU CRAZY, WOMAN.”
And once I found out what biofeedback was—having electrodes taped to my arm while the doctor asked me questions about my feelings and tracked my stress response on a monitor—I was even more wary. Painkillers and Zantac I understood. Those were treating my physical ailments. This course of action sounded a lot more like “mental help,” and boy oh boy I did not want to think I needed that.
Well, it is a VERY GOOD THING that I got over myself and gave it a shot. (Several contiguous months of pain and suffering will do that to a girl.)
The first session was eye-opening. My doctor patiently explained what the panic response is, how thoughts and perceived threats can manifest as physical reactions, and that there was nothing “crazy” about the way I’d been feeling.
Still, I was loathe to accept that any part of my brain—my big, beautiful, formerly dependable brain—could betray me, and it took a few visits to accept and process what she was saying. If you or anyone you know is going through similar mental gymnastics accompanied by physical suffering, I hope my talking about it openly will help you reach that conclusion faster than I did.
Eventually, she taught me how to “down-regulate” with breathing and other exercises. And she taught me that there was no more reason for me to feel like a failure because I couldn’t control my fight-or-flight response than for RuPaul to feel bad about being so naturally goddamn fierce.
I had been wrong to think that a mental health problem was any different from a physical problem that I would have gladly, unashamedly sought treatment for.
So what does all of this have to do with that driftwood under my bed? Patience, my pretties.
Life’s a beach*
So, among the assignments my [actual, accredited] doctor handed out was to list a few things that made me feel happy and calm and then incorporate those things into my life as much as possible. It might sound silly (especially when I tell you what my things were), but
a) it really worked
b) the whole point of this chapter is to NOT deprive yourself of help, health, and happiness just because it might seem “silly”—to yourself or anyone else.
We can’t let stigma win. It’s such an insufferable prick.
One item on my list was “trashy magazines.” For someone who spent her professional life reading and thinking critically every day, zoning out to Us Weekly was a balm for my overtaxed frontal lobe. My husband promptly bought me a subscription. (His application for sainthood is still processing, though I signed off on it years ago.)
Also ranking high: bubble baths. The fact that we had a tub in our Brooklyn apartment for five years and I didn’t start using it until it was prescribed to me, well, I count that as a gross personal failure.
But the big one—the thing I love to do most in the world and that decreases my stress level like a pitcher of margaritas decreases my ability to keep my shirt on—is to sit in the sun, looking at the ocean, with my feet in the sand. I’ve since made this a permanent condition, but at the time I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to beach it up. Certainly not during the workday, the very hours that were constantly sabotaging my nervous system.
So, I went out and bought myself a litter box.
Yes—I, a human woman, purchased a cat toilet for personal use. Desperate times call for desperate measures, guys and gals. I smuggled it into my office along with ten containers of “craft sand” from an art supply store in Midtown Manhattan, set it up under my desk, and periodically (and surreptitiously) slipped off my heels to smother my feet in a simulated beach.
And it worked! But it didn’t stay surreptitious for long.
I don’t know how I thought nobody would notice A FUCKING LITTER BOX in my office, but stigma is a powerful catalyst for denial. Eventually my assistant asked me about it. She’d been out the day of my panic attack, so I told her the whole story and all about my list of silly, calming things.
The next day, I came in to work to find a surprise tableau on the shelf above my computer monitor: a framed painting of a beach scene and, to the right, a piece of bleached driftwood and a kit of “air plants” meant to be stuffed into the wood’s natural holes, little sprigs designed to survive under even the harshest of circumstances.
My assistant looked at me brightly. “Now you have a beach to look at when you put your feet in the sand,” she said.
Tears of gratitude streamed down my cheeks. Her gesture, and indeed its actual healing effects, would not have been possible if I hadn’t first overcome my own sense of stigma about needing and seeking help, and then chipped away at it by being honest with other people about my mental health. Nearly a decade later, I’m still grateful to her. (Also, she was an amazing assistant and she’s now an executive editor in her own right. Holla at Christine, everybody!)
When I moved on to my next job, I was doing much better anxiety-wise, so I didn’t transport all of my talismans on to the next office. I poured out the sand and put the litter box in the recycling bin, but I took the beach painting and driftwood with me—more as decoration than medication, but, eh, tomato, tomahto. (Alas, the air plants turned out to be less indestructible than advertised.)
And by the time I left that job—which signaled the end of a whole career and way of life—I packed up some “essentials” from what would be my last corporate office and, apparently, tucked them away under the bed.
By the time I pulled out that box, I didn’t really need my faux beach anymore. I’d already started building a house near a real one and was in the process of moving there permanently. I was calmer, healthier, and happier working for myself, and I’d been using the other techniques my doctor taught me (deep breathing, journaling, and a couple of prescription medications)—to manage my underlying anxiety and periodic bouts of panic.
But I hadn’t thrown away the painting and the driftwood. And it’s not because I hold on to gifts just for the sake of it. (Like a certain other guru, I believe a gift has fulfilled its destiny the minute it is gifted.) No, I think I kept them because they represented comfort and security. At that time, leaving them on the sidewalk would have felt like leaving my Xanax bottle in a taxi right before a transatlantic flight.
When I was eventually forced to make some decisions about what to put in a suitcase en route to the DR and what to leave on a Brooklyn street corner, I finally parted with my “beach.” I had made significant strides to procure another one, after all, and I could use the room in my luggage to smuggle extra boxes of Imodium.
What? I’m all about candor, guys. Surely you know this by now.
Owning the highs and lows of my mental health, talking about it openly, and getting professional help are what got me through a terrible, challenging time.
They’re what keep getting me through challenging times, such as, for example, writing a third book in less than two years. Or when my soon-to-be-canonized husband starts a grease fire in the oven while I’m writing this chapter and I have to take to the streets in my bedhead and yoga pants to down-regulate. HOWDY, NEIGHBORS.
I’ve survived precisely because I’m willing to “act crazy” in order to address my problems, head securely on and held high. I’m willing to breathe deeply (four in through the nose, six out through the mouth) in a stalled elevator full of strangers. I’m willing to fill a prescription for Zoloft in broad daylight and also dig through my purse in front of someone I just met to find, uncap, and dry-swallow the pill I forgot to take this morning. I’m willing to keep a motherfucking litter box under my desk in a corporate high-rise for a year if it means warding off another panic attack.
Whatever works, bitches!
So my advice to you is that it’s okay to “act crazy”—and it might even be necessary.
Yes, you may have to embarrass yourself a little in order to sidestep a lifetime of hidden shame and suffering. But if you’re like me, once you try it and experience the benefits of brazen self-care, you won’t actually be that embarrassed. You’ll be too busy feeling relieved. And empowered. And maybe even happy. Again, I don’t want to overstep my diagnostic or therapeutic bounds here, but I speak from experience.
My life got immeasurably better when I stopped worrying about LOOKING like a crazy person and started ACTING like one.
Maybe give it a shot? It’s got to be better than a kick in the teeth.