I’m sitting in my therapist’s office, looking at him as though he just told me to walk into traffic. “I’m sorry. You want me to do what?” I ask him. I don’t get too nervous because I’ve already decided I won’t be coming back here.
“I want you to lie down on the floor, on your back, and kick this pillow,” he says.
I look down at the pillow, then down at my legs. They are covered, from the knees down, with scabby, crusted sores that multiple dermatologists have diagnosed as probable psoriasis, but unlike any other psoriasis they’ve ever seen. There is no cure to offer me and only general remedies for the excruciating itching and the bleeding and scabbing that, because of the scratching, necessarily follow. Of course, for me, it’s a double-edged sword; I want it to go away, but the scabs have reignited a part of my OCD that seems to be taking a firm hold.
From a purely cosmetic standpoint, I feel deformed. Some clod in the parking lot on the way into work one day asked if I’d been in a fire, and, of course, I said, “Yes,” because that seemed as reasonable an explanation as any. I’ve been heading to the roof of the building on my lunch break every sunny day, stripping off my stockings, and letting my legs fry with the hope that the sun will cure them, but so far, no luck.
The other day, I read an ad from this therapist’s office, indicating he specializes in “stress-related physical issues,” and thought I might give it a shot. I’ve pretty much run out of dermatologists.
So here I am, lying on my back, frustrated to tears. He doesn’t want to hear about the fact that quitting drinking has been challenging, or that I’m in graduate school for journalism and working full-time in a stressful law firm. He probably should hear about the fact that I pluck out my eyebrows and eyelashes and pick at my skin until it bleeds, but it doesn’t even occur to me to bring it up.
Instead, I lie here, kicking a pillow as though I’m pedaling a bike. It’s supposed to force the negative energy from my body and, specifically, my legs, and release any pent-up aggressions and hostilities that may be causing my body to hurt itself. Personally, I feel quite stupid and embarrassed, but I keep kicking . . . and suddenly, I’m crying. Not just crying but sobbing. Kick, kick, kick, sob. When I finally can kick no more, I draw my legs up to my chest and lie there in a fetal position until normal breathing returns.
Maybe I’ll come back after all.
A FEW NIGHTS AFTER MY LIFE-ALTERING CAR ACCIDENT, THE EX-BOYFRIEND CAME CALLING.
He wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with me, still completely convinced I would come back—this, despite the fact that I’d been living in my own place for a year and a half. But the truth was that I still went back to the old place, and him, from time to time when I was weak and scared to be alone and wishing for everything that used to be but was no more. I kept a thread of the relationship alive because doing so ensured that I would not need to feel the underlying panic of disappointing him; that would trigger anxiety, which would trigger everything else, and I was trying so hard to cure myself of all of that once and for all.
Every now and then, I would give him a call and ask if I could stop over for a few minutes. I would walk into the flat, be instantly hit with the cloud of marijuana-laden air, and know I did the right thing by leaving him. But I’d usually also hang out for a while, just to feel that blanket of safety that he was somehow able to evoke.
Ironic, I know. The first man who ever made me feel safe and loved almost killed me.
He came over unannounced, which I hated. He was already wasted and he passed out on the couch; when he woke up a few hours later, I sat next to him there and told him that I couldn’t drink anymore, and, in order to do that, I couldn’t see him anymore. And that he had to leave. It was one of the most difficult conversations I’d ever had because leaving him was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. The concept of “the devil you know,” suggesting that it’s easier to stay in a less-than-ideal situation than to face the fear of an unknown future, is never more powerful than in an obsessive mind. Coupled with the realization that I was, without question, intentionally going to disappoint someone in this situation, the fact that we had been breaking up for a longer period of time than we were actually together makes perfect sense.
But leave he did. He went to another state to hang with his drug-running buddies for a few months, ostensibly to get over me. It was the best thing he could have done, really; cold turkey is always the best way for me, and my history would suggest that I wasn’t capable of quitting him any other way. So he quit for me.
FOR SOMEONE WITH A DRINKING PROBLEM, QUITTING DRINKING IS NOT ALL THERE IS TO IT.
Addiction and the lifestyle associated with it are integral facets of our lives. They’re not like a Monday night golf league that we can walk away from if we’re too busy, but are more ingrained, like our families, our jobs, or our best friends. Quitting is like lopping off a part of yourself that was just as at home in your body as your right arm. There’s a sense of loss, of grief, of anger, and of fear.
I was terrified. I thought I was the person that alcohol made me—funny, outrageous, vivacious, and engaging—and I thought I was going to lose all of those qualities by being sober. I was afraid I would be dull and lifeless and that my personality would go down the drain with the booze. Alcohol fueled my insanity; absent that insanity, what would I feel?
More importantly, I’d recently started writing professionally—for newspapers, magazines, any place that would buy what I wanted to put into words. And I always, always had a lot to say because I perceived my life as an interminable, drawn-out drama: a lengthy and ongoing suicide note to the world. Take away the alcohol, take away the drama created by it, and what would I have to write about? If I were no longer tragic, manic, depressed, drunk, hung over, panicked, or anxious, from where would my words come?
And it goes even deeper. For those of us a bit short of our self-esteem goals, the innate sense of failure with which we live is really quite nicely camouflaged by addiction. So is everything else that makes us so unhappy—in my case, OCD symptoms and the attendant anxiety. If you take away the drinking, those things don’t necessarily go away with it; what, now, will mask them? The question then becomes, how else can we numb ourselves?
These were my thoughts as I sat on my couch—my cocoon—every day after quitting.
I got up for work earlier and earlier each day, eventually arriving at the office by 6:00 a.m. and staying until 5:00 p.m. I then went to my twelve-step meeting, at which I usually either cried or was silent for an hour, and then went home to my couch. Once settled in, I chain-smoked and listened to my mellow music: the sad songs that reminded me of “better” times—times, at least, when I knew what to expect every day and that, therefore, bestowed a level of comfort that evaded me on that couch. I eventually made my way to bed each night, and, like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain, I would start again the next day.
This went on for several months, and I could not understand why I felt so bleak. I did the two things I needed to do if I wanted to survive—I had quit drinking and left the boyfriend for good—and yet I still didn’t feel like surviving. When exactly was that supposed to kick in? I had nothing to look forward to, nothing to do, and no one to do it with, anyway. Since I’d stopped hanging out at my bar, I had no friends except another young woman from my twelve-step meeting who helped me through the rougher patches by engaging me in movies and bowling and other activities I’d dismissed in the past as too tame. I was burning out and miserable at work—my boss was much more difficult to handle when my head was clear—and the only aspect of my life that seemed somehow controllable was my weight. Obsessing about what I ate was becoming a central part of each day.
It’s hard to explain to someone without the obsession how gratifying it is to starve oneself. Try to imagine someone in the eye of a tornado with all of the elements of her life swirling out of control around her. The only thing that is calm and still in that storm is a plate of food. Now imagine that girl taking that plate of food and holding it, while the rest of her life swirls around her, and realizing that she controls that food. It does not control her. She can choose to eat it or not eat it. And if she chooses to not eat it, then she also controls her body. She maintains the calm in the eye of the storm. If she chooses to eat it, it swirls away and joins the chaos around her. She loses control. She loses the calm.
And so I didn’t eat. I was able to go four, five days without eating solid food. Sometimes, I broke down and ordered a Pizza Hut pizza and ate the whole thing, but then I had to throw up, which I knew I was capable of but could no longer stand to do. So I perfected the starving and allowed myself the occasional screw-up. It seemed to be a pretty even tradeoff. Quitting drinking made me feel as though I’d lost control of life as I knew it; by not eating, I’d latched onto the one thing I knew was still mine: my body.
Sometimes I would lie in bed, caress my hip bones, feel the concave of my stomach between them, count my ribs, and encircle my bicep with my thumb and forefinger—and I would think, Yes, this is good. If I can do this, if I can just get down to skin and bones, rid my body of every ounce of fat, then maybe I can start over.
I never got past that point, never tried to figure out exactly how I might start over—or what that might even mean—but lying there feeling all of my bones, I felt hope.
I attended twelve-step meetings during the week, and tried to make it through the weekends without killing myself because my home group only met Monday through Friday; weekend meetings would upset my established order of things, which was one of the elements of my life that was keeping me sane. One month into the program, I still wasn’t leaving my couch except for work and meetings. Two months into the program, my older brother got married and I couldn’t get myself together enough to attend; that is something I will regret forever, although I still believe there is nothing I could have done. I was not well physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. And for a worthwhile wedding reception, you really need at least one of those.
I BEGAN SEEING THE PILLOW-KICKING PSYCHOLOGIST IN A LAST-DITCH EFFORT TO CURE THE RASH.
It had taken over my legs, since all of the dermatologists I’d seen were at a loss to explain it. I knew I was going through a rough period, even for me, and that stress could certainly be a factor. I met with him once or twice a week for months, and talked about all sorts of childhood issues and addiction issues—issues from the past. I never once, in all that time, mentioned that I compulsively picked at my face and pulled out my hair. I never brought it up because it didn’t occur to me to bring it up.
Instead, I focused on the cultural phenomenon of the day: repressed memories of sexual abuse. People were popping up everywhere with success stories of unearthing such memories in therapy. I became convinced that this, finally, would be the answer to my lifelong mental issues—that this was the only reasonable explanation for my feelings about myself and for my need to sublimate my anxiety into physical attacks on my own face and body. I simply must have been sexually abused as a child, and all I had to do was remember by whom and I would be cured.
I spent weeks on this mission, trying to regress and force an epiphany that would fix my life. The shrink went through the list of usual suspects: my father, who never laid a hand on me except when it was wrapped around the occasional hairbrush, and uncles, babysitters, and older neighbors, none of which triggered any memories. I was getting more frustrated by the week, and I didn’t understand it. I had to have been molested. It would explain everything. So what if I have absolutely no recollection of it; it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Then I started thinking about a family friend named George. He was my dad’s best friend and just a nice, nice guy who tried to help my dad and my family through some of the tougher times. He adored us and we adored him, and he always signed his birthday cards “Georgie Porgie.” One day, he was supposed to come over and didn’t come, and, after receiving no answer on the phone, my dad went to his house to see what was wrong.
The house was locked and the garage door closed; my dad, thinking maybe George had just forgotten and made other plans, came home.
It turned out George was in the garage the whole time, with a hose leading from his muffler into his car window.
George’s suicide devastated my father, and I’m sure we were sad, too, although we were probably too young to understand. As an adult, however, I grabbed onto that suicide as the Holy Grail for which I’d been searching: George must have molested me and killed himself out of guilt. It all fit so neatly. I was cured.
Except, of course, I wasn’t—for several reasons, not the least of which was because George never touched me. I wasn’t molested. There was, at the time, no simple cause for the way I felt about myself, and therefore no simple cure. My “afflictions”—being a drunk and pulling out my eyelashes, among others—were certainly a driving force, but I hadn’t yet identified the blanket of shame that perversely comforted me each day. In any event, I decided from this experience that I probably had enough demons in my own head to last a lifetime, and maybe I should stop looking for outsiders.
I allowed the psychologist to work his magic in helping me rid my body of whatever stress was causing the leg rash and then stopped treatment. In my mind, it was done. There was nothing left to talk about.
After about three months sober, I began to see a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Actually, what I saw was a light at the top of what I envisioned as the dark pit in which I existed; I felt myself begin to crawl out, ever so slowly—but wanting, finally, to find the top, to see what was up there and out there for me. I saw vague glimpses of me wanting to live again.
IT BECAME APPARENT THAT I HAD TO GET MY LIFE BACK IF I WANTED TO SURVIVE.
I applied to graduate school to study journalism, took my Graduate Record Exams, got loans, and started school eight months after I quit drinking. I was working full-time at the law firm and attending classes. When I realized I was headed toward mental burnout, I went back to what I knew would re-energize me: tending bar. Foolhardy though it may have seemed, tending bar gave me a sense of confidence, and therefore a positive energy, that no other job had managed to provide. I stayed sober, earned the extra money I needed for school, and also got the energy boost I needed so desperately.
On the other hand, between classes, the law firm, tending bar, and my twelve-step meetings, I was running on empty. It would seem I simply traded obsessions. And I was about to do it yet again.
My law firm’s annual Christmas party that year was on a Friday night at a local restaurant, one I hadn’t been to before. Situated between the restaurant and the parking lot was a karate studio; I glanced in as I passed by and was instantly transfixed. Something about what they were doing in there grabbed me by the soul—that’s the only way I can explain it. I’d never done anything physical in my life, had never played organized sports save for a year on the bench of the JV girl’s basketball team, and was loathe to step out of my rigid routine, particularly alone. But the next morning, a Saturday, I went back to that place, walked in by myself, and joined.
Joining the karate class signaled the beginning of the end of my twelve-step program days. My favorite meeting conflicted with my karate schedule, and, rather than choosing another meeting that would accommodate me, I chose to substitute karate. Karate took care of both the mental and physical issues from which I was overtly suffering, serving the dual purpose of keeping me away from happy hours and forcing me to eat well or risk passing out in class from the exertion. Fortunately, I’ve always been keenly competitive and am satisfied with nothing less than my best, and, with karate, that meant maintaining my nutrition and energy. My need to win beat out my need to starve, most likely saving my life in the process.
I threw myself into karate as I threw myself into anything else: obsessively. It was the perfect place for me. I was actually encouraged to push myself until it hurt, encouraged to punch and be punched, kick and be kicked. Ostensibly, the goal was to become so proficient at the martial arts that we would never actually have to use them—but working toward that goal? Pure pain; I loved every minute of it. I worked out four to five days a week, rising quickly through the belts.
The only problems I continuously struggled with were the skin and eyebrows; I was still picking and plucking, and, because I have historically sweat like a man, I had to be very careful about my makeup sweating off during class. I kept an eyebrow pencil handy in the locker room and found opportunities to sneak in and touch up every chance I got. Oddly enough, that, to me, was the problem. Not that I had open sores all over my face or no visible eyebrows, but that I couldn’t keep them camouflaged in karate. That fact alone should have been enough to compel me to research these behaviors; that I was still unable to stop doing them even after I entered recovery for alcoholism was more frustrating than I could have imagined. But I didn’t research them. It still did not occur to me that they were quantifiable, recognized behaviors—of OCD or anything else. I thought they were simply mine.
After finishing graduate school, I moved to a little apartment near the karate dojo that harbored no ghosts of lives past, ex-boyfriends, or traumatic life events. My writing was coming along as I covered board meetings and local events for a weekly newspaper, and it seemed for all intents and purposes that I was finally beginning to live the life of a relatively normal, sane person. Oh, sure, I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, wore cake makeup in a failed effort to conceal the damage I was doing to my face, and I still would not swim for fear my penciled-in eyebrows would wash off, but all in all, life was good. I’d been sober a couple of years and was looking ahead and seeing light.
I MET MY HUSBAND IN THE PARKING LOT OF THE KARATE STUDIO.
He’d seen me in class before because his class followed mine, and he waited on the sidelines for his to start, but I hadn’t seen him until that day. We were cutting through the parking lot of our karate studio to get to the Corporate Challenge, an annual charity 5K run that began in the park behind the karate studio, and he caught up to me and introduced himself.
We flirted a bit on our walk to the Challenge, and I remember thinking that he was handsome and obviously successful, and, therefore, clearly out of my league. But he called me for lunch, and I was hooked. Our early dating days had some tense moments, complicated immediately by the fact that it was bad form to date a lower belt, but if I’d learned nothing else in recent years, it was to go after what I wanted.
At some point, I gave him the Cliffs Notes version of my complicated past, and he liked me anyway. I saw in him a chance for a normal life, the kind of future I’d imagined, with kids, dogs, maybe a mortgage along the way. Having now been sober for three years, there had been a gradual shift in my expectations and needs in a relationship that I hadn’t even been aware was occurring. This was a different kind of relationship for me—not necessarily based on the “safe and loved” requirement as much as on a “Will we be able to talk over breakfast in fifty years?” condition. And I decided we could.
Though we had our differences and scary moments like any other couple, one day I began to realize that we were having many moments that weren’t so much like any other couple; I was sabotaging the relationship with my craziness. It seemed that even though I’d gotten sober, my moods and anxiety had not, as I’d anticipated, dissolved with the liquor. In fact, they were becoming more pronounced as time went on.
I also started suffering from anxiety attacks, which I’d probably had all along but were masked by the depressive qualities of alcohol. They were mild at first, meaning no one noticed but me, but, one day, people noticed. My boyfriend and I attended a publicity event for a national motorcycle daredevil and were invited into the trailer where the promotional crew was lounging. I didn’t know anybody except my boyfriend and his friend, who’d invited us to the event, and the trailer was crowded. Suddenly, I became so claustrophobic that I couldn’t breathe. It felt as if my lungs were going to burst right out of my chest if I did not get out of there immediately. And I fled.
I got out into the air and started to settle down a little; I was no longer hyperventilating. Tears were streaming down my face, although I didn’t remember wanting to cry, and when the first few people came out to check on me, they were concerned I was having a heart attack. When my boyfriend made his way out to me, he tried to understand what had happened but didn’t, really. I told him we needed to leave immediately.
Soon I was having similar attacks when forced to wait in line too long at the grocery store, or at a party when a specific end time had not been set in advance, or being made to wait in a doctor’s office. I would start to feel panicky and claustrophobic, and, wherever I was when the attack hit, I had to get out. The attacks would send me spiraling into a low period, once again fueling the anxiety, which once again fueled the compulsive rituals.
While I believed I was doing some of my best writing through all of this, I also realized it probably wasn’t healthy to rely on panic for inspiration. Suffering variously between these intense mood swings and full-blown anxiety attacks, I knew that any hope of a “normal” relationship was fading fast.
While my highs and lows were a challenge for my boyfriend, they were more so for me, and sometimes the extremes took their toll emotionally. I often spent days at a time in bed, too depressed to move. It never occurred to me, despite my usual affinity for all things medical, to consult a physician about this. This was not physical. This was mental, and, even with my history of hypochondria, this didn’t count. After the particularly frightening anxiety attack at the publicity event, however, I decided enough was enough and went to the doctor.
“It’s like this, doc,” I said. “I can actually stand back and watch the needle on my mood-o-meter go up and down. Seriously. I can intellectually watch my emotions skyrocket and plummet with no discernible rhyme or reason. I can feel the walls closing in, feel my lungs closing up, and I can’t control it. All I can do is sit back and watch and hope I don’t do something immeasurably stupid while it’s happening. What’s going on here?”
My doctor, who I inexplicably still adored despite his earlier advice for my anorexia—“Relax. It will go away.”—replied, without so much as shining a light in my eyes, “It’s just PMS. Learn to live with it.” He may as well have patted me on the head as he sent me, dumbfounded, on my way.
His nurse practitioner was in the exam room with us. After the doctor left, as I sat on the exam table sobbing in frustration, she put a prescription in my hand. “Take this,” she said, almost conspiratorially. “It’s an anti-anxiety medication called Zoloft. I think it’ll help you. Call me in a month and we’ll see where you’re at; we may need to adjust the dosage to get it right.” I took the prescription, hugged her, and knew I would not be coming back to this doctor.
I filled the prescription and immediately went home to do my Internet research on anti-depressants. From what I could gather, the goal was simply to shave off the extreme highs and extreme lows, kind of like a teacher dropping the aberrant test scores on a high school exam. What would remain would be a calm, likable, middle-of-the-road set of moods. I would be able to handle the everyday events and occurrences that had been my button-pushers in a more level-headed and logical way, e.g., no more threatening the lady ahead of me in the grocery store with bodily harm if she didn’t get a move on.
It all sounded good on paper, but I was consumed, again, by a burning dilemma: If I take away my highs and lows, how will I write? How will I create? If I was worried about losing my personality when I quit drinking, I was even more concerned about losing it now. My words came from my conflict, my strife, my extremes, my highs, and my lows. Where would they come from if I took still more of them away?
And yet, if I didn’t take the chance, I knew without question I would blow this relationship. There was a lot of baggage and history and issues about which I could do nothing, but this—the anxiety and the mood swings—was different; this was something I might be able to manage. I owed it to my boyfriend, and to myself, to give it a shot. I wanted to get married, have kids, play ball in the backyard, and hit some golf balls in my old age with my husband. I was thirty-three years old and ready to start my life. I started taking the pills.
At first, I didn’t notice a difference. Gradually, however, I realized that I wasn’t snapping at the littlest thing or suddenly euphoric over the price of tea. Things were just . . . normal. Calm. There were no crises; there was no need for any. I realized that if I’d found this wonder drug in middle school, my life would have been much, much different; but, then again, if I hadn’t gone through what I went through, I wouldn’t be where I am . . . or who I am.
Reintroducing myself in a gentler, saner form helped our relationship immensely. It’s always reassuring to know your girlfriend’s head won’t spin completely around, “Exorcist-style,” at, for example, a company dinner. I moved into my boyfriend’s quaint stucco house on a tree-lined street in September. On moving day, as he cleaned the remaining vestiges of my existence from my apartment, I sat alone, sobbing on the front steps with my last little box of stuff. I knew that life as I had known it was over, and, though it was a good thing, it was also heartbreaking. I’d spent a lot of time and energy on the old, sick, unhappy me, and I’d developed a certain fondness for it. Once again, I was finding it painful to let go of the devil I knew; I actually grieved for its passing.