Evelyn looked like she slept eight hours a night, and I’ll pay for advice from anyone who has figured out how to do that. She didn’t talk much, which is very triggering for insecure people like me. Silence makes me so uncomfortable that it usually causes me to launch into a vagina monologue of jokes, apologies, and excuses for my existence. Most of us, without realizing it, are in a constant state of apology. I once tried to go twenty-four hours without apologizing and I lasted thirty minutes, basically as long as it took to encounter another human. I said to a receptionist, “Sorry I’m early.” Early.
Evelyn truly doesn’t give a shit if people like her or not, which of course makes everyone like her. Evelyn speaks only when she needs to and doesn’t fill silences with nervous, insecure drivel the way a lot of us do when we need the approval of others. Her self-assured silence of course made me think she was mad at me, which is ridiculous, since she didn’t even know me. When someone isn’t talking, my brain tends to fill in the blanks with how I feel about myself, so I made the assumption that she was disappointed in me and I did what I do best: apologized when I had done nothing wrong. When I apologized to Evelyn, she looked deeply confused. After hearing my hemorrhaging litany of apologies, she made eye contact with me and sincerely asked, “Why?”
I immediately burst into tears.
Then, like any child conditioned to “calm down” and “stop crying,” I felt the muscles in my face automatically clench up to stop the tears from coming. She looked even more confused.
“Why are you stopping yourself from crying?” Evelyn asked very gently. This was not a rhetorical question. She seemed genuinely confounded. Then I was genuinely confounded. The whole thing felt like a trick. What did she mean? We all stop ourselves from crying. Crying is pathetic, lame. It’s a sign of weakness. I mean, crying in your car in a parking lot at two A.M. while eating old Hershey’s Kisses you found half unwrapped in your purse is one thing, but in public with another person? Unconscionable.
“Crying is a solution,” she said. This statement blindsided me, because I had always thought crying was a sign of failure. In our culture we’re made to feel ashamed of showing our feelings, of being vulnerable. If a woman cries, she’s crazy, emotional, has PMS, or whatever the most current pejorative dismissive term is. As I write this, “psycho” is pretty popular, but it seems like “hot mess” is making quite a comeback.
We’re brainwashed with garbage idioms like “Big girls don’t cry.” Guys who “cry like a girl” are told to “man up.” Or “She’s crying like a baby,” as if only babies have a reason to cry, which makes no sense to me, given babies have the fewest problems out of all of us. They don’t have mortgages or jury duty, and they get the fun end of the whole birthing situation. The mother is the one who is pushing and bleeding and tearing, and the baby basically just gets to jet down a water slide. I think the ole “crying like a baby” idiom should be reversed: What we should say about babies is “Jesus, that baby is crying like a grown-up!”
The sessions with Evelyn were very uncomfortable at first. She had me get naked save my (granny) panties. I immediately apologized for those. Then I apologized for apologizing for them. By then she just ignored my apologies and moved on to staring at my feet for a ridiculously long time, which made me squirm due to how ugly I think my feet are. I mean, Western European people evolved to run from bears and balance on glaciers, not to be foot models. Seriously, I don’t know if it’s my Viking DNA or my mom’s GMO-laced breast milk, but my feet look like a basket of french fries. To make things worse, I had fallen in love with a pair of New Balance shoes with Velcro straps a couple weeks prior, but they had only a size 9.5, and I’m a size 10 when I’m not bloated. That didn’t stop me from buying and wearing them so much that one of my toenails straight-up fell off one night when I was onstage. I painted over it with nail polish, thinking nobody would notice. Right as I was about to trick people into thinking I had ten toenails, I made the blunderous choice of red polish, making my toe look like a Craisin.
I lay down on a padded table and Evelyn proceeded to beat the living shit out of me with one finger. Usually if someone is using one finger on you, it feels awesome, but this was literally an intolerable amount of pain. Now I know what they mean by the adage “location, location, location.”
Evelyn jammed her finger into the side of my hip, the back of my shoulder, and the area between my jaw and ear because she discovered that’s where I hold my tension and repressed emotional pain. She explained that since our bodies react to stress faster than our brains can, our bodies will tense when a situation reminds it of a previous trauma, which signals the brain to release the stress chemicals adrenaline and cortisol, which is what makes us feel anxious. Her goal is to neutralize these areas so your body halts that reaction cycle and you stop turning every benign situation into a fight-or-flight scenario. For example, when you’re at the grocery store and someone leaves her cart in the middle of the aisle, you don’t feel the need to end their life because of that time you got left in the car too long as a kid. This practice can also help you stop making every guy you date your dad and every girl you date your mom, because unlike what the popularity of MILF porn may indicate, that’s not a cute look on anyone.
Evelyn taught me that crying is a healthy release and should be a part of our daily lives since we have so much repressed pain stored up in our bodies from our past. As corny as it sounds, I took with me the expression “You gotta feel it to heal it.” When we repress our feelings, they build up and will eventually explode in random situations or end up getting expressed in unhealthy ways, like addictive compulsions, self-sabotage, or general assholery. Another adage that’s always stuck with me is “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” So when I suppress my feelings today, I know that it’s a negative contribution to my future because it’s eventually going to cause an inappropriate reaction where the punishment does not fit the crime. If I don’t cry when my body and brain want to cry, you better believe that in two years when a form at a doctor’s office innocently asks for my relationship status, I’ll internalize it as a personal attack and have a full-on tantrum.
Today, crying is a part of my routine to maintain emotional equilibrium. We all carry a lot of grief around, and there’s so much sadness in the world that we empathically take on but don’t have the time to release on a daily basis. I look at crying like cleaning the lint out of the dryer before using it again so it can function better. I try to make crying a routine maintenance thing like vacuuming, emptying the garbage, or masturbating. But maybe don’t cry and masturbate at the same time, because if the CIA really is watching us though our computer cameras, that footage is seriously going to thwart your political ambitions.
Crystal Balls
Look, I don’t not believe in psychics. My theory is that they aren’t necessarily divinely clairvoyant, but that they’re just some of the few people that actually listen when someone else talks. Suppose I say, “The thing about James is, well, I don’t know, he’s just like . . . I don’t know. You know?” Any truly awake person listening to me can tell that James and I are not going to live happily ever after, given how ambivalent I am when I talk about him. Whenever girls talk about guys with an expression like they just smelled a dead body, it’s pretty clear that they aren’t that into him or there’s some red flag they’re in denial about. So unless your friend has had a shocking amount of work done, it doesn’t take metaphysical witchcraft to figure out what’s going on by her facial expressions. I feel like being psychic might just be the natural result of what happens when you actually just listen to someone without being a distracted spaz plotting your next Instagram post during a conversation.
I go to the same psychic once a year. Again, I’m not sure I believe in psychics, but I do believe in this particular one because much to my chagrin, she has never been wrong. I won’t give you her real name because I’m worried everyone will start booking her and I won’t be able to
get an appointment. I didn’t say any of these healers made me stop being selfish, folks. Let’s call her Beatrice. Beatrice’s waiting room is full of lamps that look like rocks and seemingly endless yoga magazines, my least favorite magazine to have to flip through. To me, the only thing more boring than stretching is reading about stretching.
Beatrice records all of our sessions with a tape recorder. You heard me. Whenever I get skeptical about her psychic powers and assume she must have just looked me up online to get such accurate information, I remember that she still uses a tape recorder. The Luddite who still uses that obsolete a machine probably doesn’t have too strong of a Google Alert game.
Here’s how the session goes down. First, you have to give her a piece of your jewelry, which she cups in her hands during the session the way Gollum held the gold band in The Lord of the Rings. Then you tell her what you want to know about—that is to say, a guy, a job, a guy you wish had a job, whatever. She then closes her eyes and begins talking to your “spirit guides.” From what I gather, these are spirits who guide and protect people, sort of like guardian angels or invisible bouncers. I wasn’t a huge fan of my spirit guides at this point in my life because I felt very lost and like I had no guidance, invisible or otherwise, but Beatrice spoke to them regularly. She’d close her eyes, rock back and forth, then start reacting as if five people were sitting in chairs around her. As they speak to her, she quickly scribbles down notes as she nods and talks to the air. My guides seem to be a real gaggle of weirdos because sometimes she ends up arguing with them; other times it seems like she’s flirting with them. The only thing more insane than someone flirting with ghosts? The fact that I’ve actually gotten jealous.
One time after chatting with the invisible people, Beatrice told me about my “past life regression,” which is basically the idea of why you are the way you are based on who you were in past incarnations. Up to this point in my life, this was the craziest thing I had heard aside from recently learning that we have tons of bugs living in our eyelashes and that Jason Schwartzman is related to Nicolas Cage.
Beatrice told me that in a past life I had fought in the French Revolution and stood up for the proletariat who were starving to death while that selfish biatch Marie Antoinette pounded her pound cake. Apparently back in the day I was a voice for the voiceless, which I still do in other ways now through my stand-up and work with rescue animals. The whole ordeal mostly just made me feel old, but it did make a little more sense that I had dated two broke French guys.
One of the times I went to Beatrice, I was in a particularly sticky situation. I was in a very happy relationship and was blindsided by falling in lust with someone else. It was that instant electric, cellular connection that makes us throw around misleading words like soul mate and love, when it’s probably just a confabulation of a bunch of adrenaline, fear, childhood conditioning, and your lizard brain thinking the person is your father. Beatrice told me the reason we were so magnetically attracted to each other was because we had died together in a volcanic eruption at Pompeii back in the day. As you can probably imagine, when I told my boyfriend I had fallen for someone else, the whole “but we died together in a past life” thing didn’t go over particularly well, but I’m sure it helped him get over me way faster.
Beatrice also told me some pragmatic things, like that I had anemia and candida. I mean, psychic or not, anyone who saw me back then without makeup on could fairly easily ascertain that I was anemic, and I’m pretty sure we all have candida. She also told me I needed new brake pads, which was true, but you didn’t have to be psychic to figure out that one. I was twenty-seven and it was obvious I couldn’t swing the thousand bucks for new brakes, considering the last three checks I had written to her bounced. Back then, I justified not paying her by rationalizing that if she was really psychic, she should have known that I couldn’t afford her services, and if she didn’t know because she wasn’t truly psychic, well, I deserve a refund.
Head Games
In my twenties, I was promiscuous with therapists the way most twenty-somethings are promiscuous with sexual partners. Quite frankly, I was a therapy slut. I tore through therapists with no strings attached, a different one-hour stand a couple days a week. Ultimately, the reason I couldn’t land on one is because I realized I was so triggered by people, especially authority figures, that it was hard for me to be vulnerable with them. I’d go into a therapist’s office and try to charm him or her, and make the therapist think that I didn’t need to be there. I treated meeting new therapists more like a job interview than a time to reveal my struggles. Weirder, if a therapist didn’t see through my performance of pretending to be normal, I’d lose respect for them and never go back.
I know. The whole thing is very dark. But in those days, I truly wasn’t ready to admit I had flaws, much less fix them. I was way too paralyzed by my own denial and survival mechanisms to even know what the truth was, but what I did know was that I was sick of being crazy because, frankly, being crazy isn’t cute once you turn thirty. Tweet it, blog it, retweet it, re-blog it, make it your screensaver, then take a photo of said screensaver and text it to all your friends. I mean, being crazy isn’t particularly attractive in your twenties either, but at least you have an excuse.
One therapist I went to for a while was particularly annoying because he never gave me an opinion or suggestion. This meant he either wasn’t listening or thought I was too fragile to hear the truth. Based on what some ex-boyfriends have yelled at me in fights, it was probably a little of both.
In retrospect, he was probably just trying to keep me dependent on him, which is especially cruel given one of the main reasons I was going to therapy was to stop being dependent on manipulative men. I could tell he’d try to be neutral, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, which essentially enabled my self-destructive behavior. I was in a very unhealthy relationship and he absolutely should have told me to get out of it ASAP, but every time I would ask for advice, he’d say, “What do you think?” This sort of talk therapy may work for some folks or may have been proven to be effective by very smart people, but it triples my crazy. I hate when psychiatrists ask me what I think I should do, because usually what I think I should do is wildly inappropriate and sometimes illegal. I just wanted someone to tell me what to do, because left to my own devices I was either acting like a sociopath or dating one.
After many Dr. Wrongs, I finally came across a Dr. Right. Someone that I respected enough to go back to a second time. The first sign that we were meant to be was that I could make appointments with her via text. If I have to call and leave a message, then wait for you to call me back, I’m already experiencing the very anxiety a therapist is supposed to be mitigating. I feel a therapist’s job is to make a person feel safe enough to be able to come to terms with their wounds, so if I have to pick up the phone and call you, you’re just creating more emotional wounds we’re gonna need to heal.
When I first met Vera at her office, she was wearing a T-shirt with a wolf airbrushed on it. So. This probably goes without saying, but that’s really all I needed in order to hire her on the spot.
Vera was the first therapist I had ever met who taught me about neurochemicals and helped me understand my brain on a biological level. She’s very solution-oriented, whereas the therapists before her all seemed just fine talking about the problem ad nauseam. Instead of listening to me blather on about my delusions and further embed my negative thinking, Vera put me to work by starting EMDR (eye movement desensitization reprocessing), hypnosis, and giving me books to read about addiction and neurology. She was the first person who seemed to really want me to get better. I became the second.
I obviously had a lot of neural rewiring to do, which would take some time, but right off the bat she noticed that my picker was very off when it came to men. According to Harville Hendrix, we tend to be attracted to people with the negative qualities of our primary caretakers, and I was no exception. Althoug
h changing who you’re attracted to takes a while, in the meantime Vera at least helped me stop the bleeding. She started by trying to keep me out of another draining relationship by giving me a psychology test created by Carl Jung. It’s very simple, yet mysteriously profound. It’s a couple of questions that can give insight into someone’s psyche and values without having to ask them directly. Unfortunately, it’s not socially acceptable to ask someone on the first date, “So are you a sex addict? It would be great if you could just let me know now before my brain starts producing oxytocin, which will make me all chemically attached to you, thanks!” Vera told me I’m required to perform these tests on the first and second dates with guys to find out who someone really is before I’m in too deep and putting some guy’s name on my car insurance even though he has two DUIs.
On a date, ask the server for a piece of paper and a pen. If you don’t have a server because you’re at home watching Netflix for the first date, immediately leave the house and go to a public place because that is way too casual for a first date, ya nut. Also, do not bring your own piece of paper because that will make you look very crazy for being so prepared. You should play this game only if you’re feeling safe and have clean motives; it should be spontaneous and fun. Your date should not feel like he or she is being interrogated by Tommy Lee Jones in a movie from the nineties, and you should not look like you’re an insurance adjuster with a clipboard in your hand, investigating mold.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 2