by Cazzie David
Not eat, my young self reasoned. I was like Gandhi on a hunger strike, but instead of protesting colonialism, I was protesting the cruelty of a world where choking was possible. My mom tried just about everything to get me to eat. Every day, the principal of my preschool would come into my classroom at nap time and gesture for me to join her in her office. There, she would offer me peanut butter and doughnuts. At the time, I was a bit unclear as to why she was doing this. Why was I getting such special treatment? Why was I the only one allowed to eat doughnuts instead of taking a nap? Was I a princess? Was she a creep? As it turned out, since I had been refusing to eat—because if you eat you might die—my mother had asked the principal to try to persuade me to eat. According to my mom, I caused her to age a decade during this time. “Can you imagine your child refusing to eat food?” she asked. “Could you think of anything worse?” Genocide. Your child not eating because you can’t afford food. Thin smoothies. But I agree it wasn’t an ideal situation.
From that point on, everything I learned about (in order: vomiting, whooping cough, ghosts, amputations, the fact that I have a skull) terrified me. And when you’re five years old, you have the whole world to learn about or, in my case, fear. The same year I learned that you can die from eating, I heard about a sickness going around called the chicken pox. Chicken!? Pox!? What in God’s name was a pox?! And what in the fuck did it have to do with chickens? After hysterically interrogating everyone I knew about this pox, I learned that they are ITCHY SPOTS that take over YOUR WHOLE BODY and you’re not allowed to scratch them NO MATTER WHAT or they stay FOREVER.
After that, I refused to leave my room, fearful I’d contract the vicious pox right outside my door. My parents, trying to reassure me, said, “If you get the shot, you can’t get the pox!”
And that’s when I learned what shots were. Given that I was scared of everything, the idea of a needle painfully piercing through layers of my skin and injecting something into my bloodstream was going on the list. I cried and begged my parents to promise me (1) I would never get chicken pox, and (2) I would never have to get a shot. I couldn’t determine which was scarier, the sickness or the shot. No amount of comfort (or logic) could console me. Without the shot, pox. To stay free from pox, a shot. I went around and around in my five-year-old head, making myself sick. And I was only getting started.
Due to my growing anxieties, my parents couldn’t experience any of the exciting things that come along with having a child. Their kid’s first Halloween! What a fun time! Nope, terrified. First haircut? Cried hysterically. First time in a pool? Learned about drowning. The beach? Fish phobia. First time at the movies? My dad took me to see Shrek;what could possibly go wrong? It ruined all of our lives for months. Every sundown, I was petrified I would turn into an ogre. Even as days passed and I remained a human, I was convinced becoming an ogre was my fate. I’d sob and beg my parents to promise I wasn’t going to turn into an ogre, which, in theory, was a much easier promise for them to make than the others, but still, I didn’t believe their reassurances. Turning into an ogre didn’t feel that far out of the realm of possibility, considering everything else I was finding out about.
I can’t help but resent my parents a little for not thinking more seriously about what a mixture of their DNA could create in a child. They must have known I’d be their Frankenstein, a toxic combination of every anxiety one might inherit. Before having kids, they should have had to go in front of a board and be interviewed for hours. By the end of the assessment, the committee would surely have said, I’m sorry, but you two are not a couple whose genetics we can allow to blend. Your DNA together is combustible. If both of you were to find different spouses and come back, I’m sure we can allow you to have children, but certainly not together.
My father concentrates his neuroses around health and sickness. He’s gotten himself injected with stem cells and vitamins so he can have a superior immune system. He’s experimented with every heath innovation there is and has bought every medical invention available. His basement looks like a hospital lab. My mother, however, looks outward; she focuses on every kind of danger and global catastrophe that might befall people and the planet. She believes my lifetime of unease can be attributed to her being eight months pregnant with me during the 1994 California earthquake, but just having lunch with my mom can give an enlightened person an anxiety disorder. My mother is like a robot who can do nothing but speak of what terrible things might happen, will happen, or are already happening. She will see me breathe and inform me that “ninety-five percent of the air we inhale is polluted.” I’m always tempted to scream, Mom, what am I supposed to do with that information!?! But I don’t, because she’ll respond with something just as useless like “Get every young person to vote!”
My mother is the definition of a doomsayer, yet she believes she has had no impact on my obsessive negative thoughts whatsoever. In fact, she believes she is a comforting source of information. Which, if you don’t actually listen to the words she’s saying, she perhaps could be. Her tone is often nice and soothing, but the content is always unsettling. Kind of like a backhanded compliment.
“Did you hear about the E. coli outbreak?” my sister asked one day.
“No, what? Is it contagious? What is it? What happened? What?” I responded.
“It’s everywhere. People have gotten it from Starbucks, even.”
“Change the subject, girls! Positive thoughts! You have a higher chance of being raped at a party than getting E. coli!”
See what I mean? She’s like an alien monster in an action movie who sucks up other people’s energy for more power, except that instead of energy, she sucks up information and then uses it solely to make me more fearful. She keeps a baseball bat next to her bed “just in case.” (Intruders, burglars, thieves—one never knows.) And after Bush won the presidential election in 2000, she stayed in bed for weeks crying, “It’s over! The world is ending!” as my dad paced in circles around her, wondering aloud which diet would help you live the longest, vegan, paleo, or antifungal.
Alas, my parents didn’t ask to be alive either, which is probably why they had children—the usual desperate attempt to find meaning and happiness. According to the many adults I’ve asked, one of the only good things in life is being a parent. I assume it’s because you get to create a person (like Build-A-Bear, but it’s a person!). A cutting-edge anxiety pet that’s obliged to keep you company the rest of the way, to be there for you once your parents die and you’re sad and old and everything is going to shit. The ultimate insurance policy against loneliness and a sad death.
* * *
I never understood people advising others by saying “it’s okay not to feel good all the time!” Who ever said that wasn’t okay? Who is so okay to the point where they need to be reminded that it’s okay when they don’t feel okay?! When people “reveal” they “get really bad anxiety,” I’m dumbfounded, because I’ve never not been anxious long enough to “get” anxiety. It doesn’t leave. Not ever. You know when you’re wondering where your friend is and then you check your Find My Friends and see they’re at home so you think to yourself, Oh, they’re at home, so they’re just chilling? I am never chilling. Not when I’m at home. Not when I’m tucked in bed. Not when I’m in an aromatherapy bath surrounded by candles. I’ve never gotten excited that a weekend is approaching, because it’s just one more week closer to whatever inevitable cancer is waiting for me. My permanent state of being is that time your boyfriend hid behind a door when you didn’t know he was home and jumped out and scared you. Panicked to the point where your bones are rattling in your body so fast you can’t feel them vibrate.
There’s no other way to be when the world is a twenty-four-hour-a-day minefield of possible dangers and pitfalls, and at any point you might mysteriously suffer from something crazy and die. People say you can never be too careful, but that’s not true because I am. I don’t sit for too long, so I don’t have a high risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
I never eat sugary cereal anymore even though it was probably the only thing that ever brought me joy. I sometimes wear a magnet in my pocket to deflect rays from technology. Anytime I enter any room or building, the first thing I do is clock the exits and figure out an escape plan for multiple scenarios. My first thought when I hear a plane overhead is that it’s about to fall on top of me. When I hear a faint whistle, I assume it’s a code between two people to move ahead with their plan to kidnap me. Every time I walk down a flight of stairs I picture myself at the bottom of them with my head cracked open, which encourages me to walk in slow motion down each one. When I go to take a shower, I have a twenty-minute debate in my mind: Do I lock the bathroom door and risk keeping someone from saving me if I fall and hit my head? Or do I leave it open and risk an intruder coming in to rape and murder me? Or what if it’s locked and I can’t tell there’s a fire and I burn to death? I live every day like I’m dying, but not in the fun way where you live life to the fullest; in the miserable way where you live it to the emptiest.
For years, I believed my unruly catastrophic imagination was protecting me, which is why I never fully addressed my generalized, social, panic, phobia, and panphobic (fearing everything) anxiety disorders beyond therapy and one try at Zoloft. What could possibly be done to change the inevitabilities associated with being alive, choking, privilege, and my DNA? I planned to continue living like this until death, even after my friends held an intervention where they informed me they were no longer going to be able to indulge my Is Everything Gonna Be Fine? days.
“What’s an Is Everything Gonna Be Fine? day?” I asked.
They explained they are full days where I relentlessly ask them, “Is everything gonna be fine?” without really listening to their promises that everything was going to be fine. I didn’t realize that I did that, let alone that my Is Everything Gonna Be Fine? days had become, well, every day. But I could go on without my friends’ reassurance, I decided. I’d reassure myself if no one else would, all I’d have to do is repeat a 24/7 mantra of I am alive and it is fine. I am alive and it is fine. Yes, you have fingers, and that’s fine; you don’t need to freak out at the idea of having fingers. You are a human with thoughts and it doesn’t matter that there is no explanation of how we can think things and hear them and that absolutely nothing about being a person makes sense. You are fine to just walk around not understanding anything. You will get sick someday and you will die. Yes, all of that is fine.
The only thing that ended up convincing me to seek more serious help was my mother telling me my negative thoughts would cause ulcers and cancer, and so my biggest fear became my own personality. When you’re as scared as I am, it’s a dark day when you realize your own mind can kill you. I added phobophobic (fear of having phobias) to the list and signed up for an intensive psychological treatment program.
My mother was thrilled. Maybe too thrilled. She was the reason I’d been in therapy since I was five years old; she strongly believed that I should be on medication and that if I wasn’t, my brain would implode. My father, however, had always believed therapy was a complete waste of time and that medication would destroy my brain. Anytime I tried to talk to him about my mental instability, he said the same thing:
“You’re lucky you’re unstable! Embrace your instability! You don’t want to change one thing about yourself! That’s your mind!”
Then again, my dad thought all you needed to do to cure depression was take a shower.
“What if I’ve already taken a shower?” I’d ask.
“Then take another.”
“What about a bath?”
“No, baths are too contemplative.”
I managed to get his blessing when it occurred to him that going could make for promising “material,” and I entered the program the summer of 2014.
The first thing I noticed about Joanne, the main psychologist I would see for three hours each day, was that she carried a Céline bag, which made me feel stupid and guilty for how much my parents were probably wasting on this pricey stint in anxiety camp. The next thing I picked up on was Joanne’s therapy dog. He was impossible not to notice because he was a French bulldog, and they are constantly struggling to breathe. Why they were created, let alone why someone would buy one and keep the bulldog industry alive, is beyond me. Bulldogs aren’t happy. They can barely move around and have severe respiratory issues. Also “They’re so ugly they’re cute!” is not really a concept I understand. If I had been given the choice as a fetus, I would have volunteered myself for the disaster that is life if it meant sparing the existence of bulldogs everywhere.
After I gave Joanne my simple explanation for why I entered the program (“I can’t believe I’m a person. I don’t want to be a person. Why am I a person? What is a person? How do I accept that I am walking skin, blood, cells, and bones? I don’t know how to be a person knowing I will get cancer one day or have to get surgery. I don’t know how to be a person knowing everyone else has cancer or has to get surgery. I can’t be a person knowing I will grow old and die. Or not grow old and just die. I wish I had never been born so I wouldn’t have to die or grow old”), Joanne decided the solution was to give me a series of exercises designed to help rewire my brain so I would stop living in the future and be in the present.
“There is no way to be happy if you dwell on things you have no control over,” she said.
“Happiness is really not a priority for me. It’s, like, last on my list. Who cares about being happy? I find that insane.”
“What is a priority for you?”
“Not aging. Not ever going to a hospital. Not being a person. Stuff like that.”
I could see she was already on the brink of exhaustion.
One full hour a day was spent brain-spotting. This involved me staring at a blank wall and thinking about one of my worst fears while Joanne alternated between playing classical/calming music and what I can only assume was the soundtrack from The Shining. In those moments, I thought about my phobias in what looked like a bat mitzvah montage, but instead of embarrassing pictures lovingly curated by my mother of my friends and me with braces, they were nightmarish flash images that could only have been put together by Lucifer. Seizures, fevers, time passing, anesthesia, blood clots, blindness, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, MS, Alzheimer’s, that dead mouse I accidentally stepped on barefoot when I was seven, my body, toxic shock syndrome, vomiting, my body, heart attacks, knowing what happened to Otto Warmbier, knowing what happened to anyone, animals suffering, children dying, me dying, anyone dying, everyone dying.
After a few minutes, Joanne turned off the music and asked, “How did the calming music make you feel when thinking about your fears?” with the kind of fake expectant look on her face that you see on every therapist in every television show.
“Obviously, more calm,” I said.
She nodded, jotted a note on her clipboard. “And how did the intense music make you feel?”
“Obviously, less calm.”
“Interesting.”
I did not think this was interesting. Therapy can be truly worthless if you have a low threshold for bullshit. I couldn’t help but express my frustration with the blatant obviousness of her experiment. So Joanne tried to explain it to me in a way that would override my skepticism but every time she got to “the neurotransmi—” I stopped paying attention. It’s hard enough to listen to scientific explanations generally, even more so when there is a dog gasping for air in the room.
After wasting time with Joanne every morning, I’d go to neurofeedback, where I’d sit in a chair in front of a TV that played a prerecorded video game with sensors attached to different parts of my scalp. This, I didn’t even care to understand. After neurofeedback, there was “inner-child therapy,” which I desperately tried to get out of based on the name alone, but it was mandatory, I guess. Fortunately, the instructor, Mandy, looked like a chubbier Monica Lewinsky, so I was able to tolerate her because I love Monica Lewinsky—her TED Talk is a mu
st-see. In this course, you’d “go on a journey through your mind” and talk to the child version of yourself. In my case, I was instructed to tell my young self not to be afraid, which sounds easy but was actually the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do because it was the stupidest thing I’d ever had to do. Mandy ignored my groaning and eye rolling and eased me into my childhood bedroom, where I found myself (pre–choking incident) lying on my bed, disagreeable Jew-fro awry and gaunt limbs aloft, reading Betty and Veronica comic books to escape the sad, frightening world. As a kid, I needed so much self-soothing via comic books that I eventually had tall stacks of fifty, each one balancing on the other, like Jenga towers all around my room. I sat down next to me on my green floral bedspread and told her not to be afraid. With a deadpan expression, she looked up at me and said, “What the fuck are you doing? You’re embarrassing us.” And I was like, Yo, Mandy, this shit works! That was for sure a young me.