Panic

BRIT IS PANICKING BIG TIME. I know because she has started discussing eating disorders with Meg, and even asked for advice, which is a sure sign she’s not coping. She has been the one who up until now has separated herself from Meg, saying that Meg’s the one with the problems. Now she is turning to Meg for help.

It seems that Mr. Candy Cane of neuro-linguistic programming fame has not helped as much as she hoped. Her enthusiasm and empowerment are gone, and she is desperate and flailing and seems to have given up on ancient mystic goddesses and ’70s psychobabble, although she still reads Messages From the Body like there is no tomorrow. I may have to confiscate it soon.

“I am eating like a horse right now,” Brit says miserably. “I have eaten a chocolate every single night and then last night I sat down to watch a movie and I got up in the middle of it to go buy myself a chocolate. I don’t know why this is happening. Am I addicted to chocolate? What should I do?”

She is feverishly flipping through the Messages, looking for answers.

“And I can’t sleep,” she says. “I lie awake all night. Oh my God, listen to what the book says about insomnia.

Yellow alert; they are into chronic vigilance and implication anxiety. They have a deep fear of letting go and surrendering and they don’t dare to relax because they don’t trust the process of life. There is an inability to release the affairs of the day, a feeling that they have to have hands-on control or all hell will break loose.

They have a disturbed mental condition, due to subconscious shock, grief and despair arising from a rather severely dysfunctional family. They labour under a great deal of guilt and fear over imagined wrong-doings and failures and their consequences, as a function of being the ‘sane one’ and therefore being in over their heads at all times, along with being targeted with the blame for all the misery. They have an inability to love themselves, to trust love, and to trust life.

She groans and lays her head on her arms. She looks up in despair.

“That’s me,” she wails.

“That’s all of us,” Kenneth comments dryly. He has been standing at her desk, listening. “Nice Chanel suit by the way, where did you get it? Nieve would kill for it. Don’t let her see you in it or she will rip it right off you.”

Brit is in a vintage, genuine Chanel number, and she is looking very Jackie Kennedy. Except for her mascara which has run panda rings under her eyes.

Kenneth hands her his handkerchief.

“I can’t use it, it’s clean,” she wails again and starts crying in earnest.

Kenneth laughs. “Brit,” he says, “blow your nose and tell me where you got the suit.”

“I don’t know,” she sniffs. “Chris got it. I’ll ask him but he won’t tell me, I know he won’t. Tell Nieve to give him the chance to style a shoot for Cosmo and then I’m sure he’ll tell her.”

“Wily, very wily,” Kenneth says. “Okay, I will. Hey, everybody. Update. We are getting a new sales person.”

My heart lurches, and I wonder if we’ll be inheriting big, blond Max and if so, how I’ll manage that.

I don’t have to worry though. We are getting some girl called Colleen.

Of course we are, I think. Kenneth likes his girls.

I feel a bit embarrassed about my heart-pounding Max-reaction but decide not to think about it. I acknowledge that I have a bit of a crush on him, but so what? These things happen, and just because one is married doesn’t mean one is dead, as they say.

I look over at Brit who is miserably wiping her eyes with Kenneth’s now-destroyed hanky. I have no idea what to say to comfort her. I have watched her eat piles of carob-covered rice cakes for breakfast and I wanted to yell warning cries from across the room; rice cakes, particularly carob ones, are triggering and totally loaded with fat and calories. But of course I couldn’t say anything.

With regard to her night-time chocolate fix, I tell her maybe her body is craving chocolate and that she should eat it until the craving goes away. I think she wants to hear that and I also think it’s the truth, although it’s not something I would practice myself.

“‘Craving,’” she says and starts flipping through the book again. “They don’t have ‘craving,’” she wails. I get up and take the book away from her.

“I think you need a Valium,” I say. “Or get an Ativan from Kenneth.”

“I don’t believe in self-medicating,” she says miserably. “It’s all falling apart, oh, God.”

I wish I could confide in her, tell her things are definitely deteriorating for me, too.