6 I never punched anyone in the nineties (or ever). That just sounds more interesting than what I actually did in the nineties, which was watch a lot of Friends and not get laid.
7 He is not a Seattle rando. He is a very nice man. I was upset.
8 I took a test online that rates you on the Big Five personality traits, and he was right on both counts. I recommend you take it too! It’s illuminating. And sometimes depressing. But it might not be depressing for you. You’re probably perfect! Seriously, you seem nice.
9 Mill Ends Park is located in the middle of the median strip of Naito Parkway, a busy downtown thoroughfare in Portland, Oregon. At two feet across and a total of 452 square inches, it’s the world’s smallest park. I still haven’t hiked it.
10 In truth, it was more like a year and five months, but A Year and a Half doesn’t look great on a book cover. People like nice, clean quantities of time. A day. A month. A millennium. Who wants to ride in the Millennium-Ish Falcon? No one.
The Sensory-Deprivation Tank
In Which I Spend a Terrifying Ninety Minutes in a Bath of Warm Water
How would you like to spend ninety minutes in a tiny, pitch-black pod floating in warm water?
“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” some of you might say, or “Oooh! So relaxing! I’d love to have some time away from my screaming kids!”
Perhaps you’re people who enjoy spending time with yourselves. Personally, I’d had it up to here with my shit, and the thought of spending ninety minutes alone with me sounded like a not-so-fresh hell.
A few years ago, Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies our relationship to technology, did a TED talk that rang a little too true for me. In it, she said that we, as a culture, have turned being alone into “a problem that needs to be solved.” Whenever we’re alone for two seconds, we pick up our phones so we don’t have to hang out with our thoughts. In her book Alone Together she wrote that “we fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.” I agree that what we’re missing out on is reflection—actually considering our lives and the people in them. How we want to spend our time. Pursuing new ideas. Imagining a better, Angry Bird–less future.
And I do miss thinking, sure, but the reason I’ve given it up is that, for me, solitude is a chance for my brain to really immerse itself in regret.
Given the opportunity, I love to take time to regret how long it took me to become a “serious writer.” I regret allowing myself to get heavy in college. I regret being financially irresponsible and unable to buy a house before Portland’s housing boom began, back when I could’ve gotten a $500,000 house for $150,000. I regret not flossing. I regret the tax debt I incurred when I was freelancing. I regret the years I lost to heartbreak. I regret the bilevel haircut I got when I was a sophomore in high school.
I usually finish it all off by imagining what it’ll be like to die homeless and alone because of my mental illness and all the financial and personal mistakes I’ve made.
That sort of thing.
That’s why I take my phone to bed with me.
You cannot take your phone with you into the sensory-deprivation tank, which was a problem. Also, I am claustrophobic. I don’t know why. I do remember that when I was nine, my brother pinned me down by sitting on my chest and dangled a string of spit from his mouth over my face and then sucked it back in at the last second. (For those of you who don’t have older brothers, this is a thing they do. There should be a name for it—the Retractable Loogie? The Saliva Psych-Out? Literal Torture That Should Be Covered by the Geneva Conventions but Isn’t Because Families Aren’t Countries?) I remember feeling trapped and getting panicked back then, but who wouldn’t get panicked in that situation?
The only sensory-deprivation tanks I’d ever seen were the slightly-larger-than-human-size ones in the 1980 movie Altered States, and those looked like my worst trapped-in-an-abandoned-freezer nightmare. So the claustrophobia seemed like a problem.
And one last issue—I’ve been overweight most of my life. Which brings us back to regret and why it’s difficult to be naked with myself for long periods. (If it weren’t for the fact that I don’t own a pair of cutoffs, I’d join Tobias Fünke in the Never Nudes.)
But even with all these reasons not to sign up, and despite my trepidation, I was a little intrigued by the idea when a friend who knew I was looking for activities outside my comfort zone suggested I try a sensory-deprivation tank. I did not run screaming but girded my loins. This seemed perfect for early in the Okay Fine Whatever Project. I’d heard it was relaxing and that there were a number of benefits, particularly for “creative people.”1
Supposedly, when you cut out all sensory input, you can deactivate the lizard part of your brain,2 the part that’s always on the alert for a dude with a knife or a co-worker with a metaphorical knife or a lump somewhere a lump shouldn’t be. Once that “Holy crap, I’m gonna die” part of your brain quiets down, the rest of it is free to imagine great things. Or, in my case, to wonder why Pharrell Williams thinks a room without a roof is happy. (There are only three essential components to a room—walls, floor, roof—and it’s missing a really important one. If that room is happy, that room is kidding itself.)
I chose to go to a place in Portland on Hawthorne Boulevard, a former hippie enclave. It was called Float On, and it billed itself as “America’s Largest Float Tank Center.” (There were six tanks to choose from, so apparently the bar isn’t that high, America.)
I walked into a warm, inviting, deep blue waiting room with plush couches and tea on offer to calm me down before I went in and calmed down. The vibe was a lot like that of an acupuncture studio or a spa. It was quiet. Too quiet.
In terms of float-tank size, I was in sort of a Goldilocks situation, if Goldilocks were claustrophobic. There was the Oasis Tank, which looked like a combination of a space pod and a giant George Foreman Grill. I imagined if I got into one of those, I’d immediately have an anxiety attack. Which felt like the opposite of the point, so I skipped that one.
The next size up was the Float Pool, which allowed for a more open experience, if by open experience, one meant “as if you’d built a nice, clean mini-pool in the crawl space in your basement.” That did not feel relaxing to me either.
The last size, the one I chose, was called the Ocean Float. It was about five feet by seven feet and allowed a person to stand when entering and exiting, so it was great for claustrophobics like myself or for anyone who’s ever been locked in a car trunk and so might be a little jumpy. (Pro tip: If you’re going to be abducted and thrown into a trunk, choose an abductor whose car was built in 2002 or after—all of these cars have lighted interior trunk releases. If your abductor’s car is pre-2002, use your extra smartphone, which you’ve placed in a zip-lock and shoved into an orifice just in case, to Google How can I escape from the trunk of a car? There’s a wikiHow on it. For reals.)
Back to my float room: I was surprised at how clean and inviting it was. I walked into a ten-by-five anteroom with an open shower on one side and a set of wooden shelves with a lamp and all the supplies I’d need on the other. Supplies included earplugs to keep the salt water from getting into my ears, petroleum jelly to cover any recent cuts, and a white robe hanging on the back of the door, because you’re supposed to float totally nude. (Side note for those who think floating in a pool other people have been in is gross: This particular location filters the water three times after each person and uses UV light to sanitize it.)
On the right side of the room was the space-age-looking pod door to the tank. It was about four feet tall and sat about two feet up from the floor. As soon as I opened it, the purple-blue glow of the UV light poured out. I peeked my head in to see a deep blue pool, stone-tile walls, and a blue ceiling covered in tiny lights that looked like stars. This was comforting for me, as I’m still a little afraid of the dark. Especially when I’m in pitch-black pools of water that could suddenly fill with miniature eels that swim into your ear canal
s and eat your brain.
I took off the robe at the very last possible second, crouched down, and stepped into the tank, the bottom of which was smooth, like a giant bathtub.
Marco at the front desk had told me that once you pull the door to your tank closed, get in, and turn the lights out, you’re in complete blackness.
Well, you are if you remembered to turn the light in the shower room off like Marco reminded you to. If you forgot that, you’ll step into the tank, lie down, turn out the tank lights, notice that light is seeping in from outside, say, “Fucking goddamn it,” get up, step out of the pod door sopping wet and, risking electrocution, flick the lamp switch, get back in, and lie down again, and then you are floating in complete blackness. And steeped in slight annoyance, now tinged with anxiety because of the pitch-blackness.
In the same way I can’t really explain my claustrophobia, I’ve never been able to explain my discomfort with pitch-blackness. Had there been another person in the room with me, I would’ve felt fine, like there was someone in there to protect me from whatever my lizard brain imagined was in the blackness. But alone in the darkness? That always made me feel like I was in a room that I knew had a spider in it somewhere but I couldn’t see it.
It’s an odd sensation when your heart starts to move up toward your throat even though you’re doing something that’s specifically designed to calm it down. And you can’t just tell your body it’s going in the wrong direction and should pull a U-ie.
I lay there in the (calming?) blackness and I breathed deep into my belly until my heart was back where it belonged. I know it drives people crazy when they’re upset and someone tells them to breathe; it drives me crazy too. But at this point, we all need to suck it up and admit that the whole inhale-exhale thing is not woo-woo; it’s science. Deep breathing triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, which tells your fight-or-flight response that everything’s okay. It also oxygenates the blood and causes the brain to release endorphins, those same feel-good hormones that convinced you that you were in love with that guy who played opposite you in South Pacific in high school.
After about ten minutes of deep breaths ’n’ calming thoughts, I felt like I was finally starting from where a “normal” person might start. Just eighty minutes to go.
I checked in with my body.
The pools are filled with water heated to 93.5 degrees, which is skin-receptor neutral, making it difficult to feel where your body ends and the water begins. If this freaks you out, you can reach over with one hand and touch your other hand to make sure it’s still attached. I didn’t need to do this because I’m not afraid of spontaneously losing a limb. Just the eel thing.
The water is mixed with eight hundred and fifty pounds of Epsom salt, which causes you to float in a decidedly “Sandra Bullock in Gravity but without the terror of impending death” kinda way. As someone who has struggled with weight issues her whole life, I cannot stress enough the relief that weightlessness brings. It’s a version of what you get in a pool, but it’s effortless (you can float a bit in a normal pool too, but eventually, unless you’re on a raft, you’re going to have to tread water). You just lie there and the water holds you up. And you can’t look down and see what’s sticking out of the water and kick yourself for that last burrito.
I could feel where the water ended on the spots where my body was exposed to air (the air was supposed to be the same temperature as the water but felt slightly cooler to me), but I couldn’t see these areas, which I was grateful for.
And suddenly I remembered that I used to love swimming more than just about anything—the freedom from carrying all that excess weight, the ability to move in any direction, flowing with the water. Most people are graceful in a pool, as long as they know how to swim. (Drowning people are not very graceful. No offense if you’re currently drowning.)
I loved swimming, that is, until one day in high school when French Club spent the day at a pool in Salinas, California. (Yes, I was in French Club. We were like the cool kids if the cool kids had been very uncool and spoke broken French.)
We were all taking turns doing silly dives, and as I stood on the diving board, bending my knees in preparation for a jump, Tom Fletcher, who would’ve been crowned high-school Snark King if that’d been a thing, began singing Thomas Dolby’s 1980s techno-nerd anthem “She Blinded Me with Science” but changed the line “It’s poetry in motion” to “She’s cellulite in motion.” (Nice meter match, dick.)
Cool song. Miserable memory.
I vaguely recall I’d felt pretty that afternoon until then.
Now what I mostly remember is the humiliation right before I hit the water. And then wanting to stay under until everyone went home. I did stay under for as long as I could, but I finally had to accept that this wasn’t really a feasible solution to the problem.
Once I came up, I could feel the heat of shame on my face while my body remained cool and, more important, hidden under the water.
I asked my best friend, Jennifer, to bring my towel to the ladder at the deep end.
“Whatever, Your Highness,” Jennifer said as she handed it over.
I flashed back to another diving-board moment seven years earlier when we were visiting family in Florida and my cousin Sarah yelled, “Look out! The elephant’s about to jump in the pool!” That one stung too, despite what a lame dig it was. An elephant jumping in a pool? Elephants don’t even spend that much time near water. What about “Look out! The whale’s about to breach!” or “Oh no! They’re lowering the Titanic!” She had so many water-related-insult options.
But even dumb insults have power. I rushed past our parents, who were drinking daiquiris in the kitchen, and spent a wet, cold hour crying behind a chair in her family’s dark, air-conditioned living room. I kept replaying the moment in my head—mostly the part where my brother hadn’t stood up for me.
I remember wanting so much to make Sarah feel as terrible as she’d made me feel. At the time, I was nine, so my go-to burn was not thanking a person in my future Oscar speech: And I definitely don’t want to thank my cousin Sarah…
Cut to a few decades later, and through the magic of family reunions and a horrible thing called Facebook, I would come to learn that both my cousin and Tom Fletcher had gained weight. It was exactly what nine- and sixteen-year-old me would’ve wanted, but I didn’t feel better. I just felt bad for all of us.
I want so much to be one of those women who feel great about their bodies, no matter their size. These women are self-actualized. They’re badasses. They’re miracles, in fact. To be able to flout a lifetime of messages that your thighs are an abomination unto God, that your dimpled cheeks are adorable but your dimpled ass is gag-inducing, and that your pretty face is wasted on your big body is, to me, miraculous.
I was always a hypersensitive kid, which I now attribute to my GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Without GAD or another disorder working its magic, if someone says something horrible to you, you might find it easy to laugh it off. But the anxious person hears a dig and the brain goes immediately to She’s right. Of course she’s right. How can I fix this? If I don’t fix this, no one will ever love me.
So it made perfect sense to me that in a spacious, belonging-to-everybody world, the fact that I took up too much space was an affront to everyone. And it also made sense that my punishment for this affront was to be invisible when I wanted to be seen and all too visible when I didn’t. (“You’re fat, but I’ll fuck you!” a man once yelled at me in the middle of a crosswalk on West Fourth Street in New York. It was the most concise insult/threat-disguised-as-a-compliment I’d ever heard.)
At various times in my adult life, I’ve been a size 12, a 24, a 14, and an 18. I’ve run the size gamut and I’ve lost weight healthfully and horribly.
Ever hear someone say “I wish I were as fat as I was the first time I thought I was fat”? That sentence evokes every photo ever taken of me that I hated at the time but look back on with yearning, envying the person I was.
Thankfully, I eventually lost my train of body-shaming thought in the tank, but not before I noted that diving boards were just a horrible milieu for me. I obviously needed to stay away from them.
I’d be amazed if someone were able not to think about her body in the tank, because floating while sensorially deprived is the strangest mix of being disconnected from your body, in that you don’t register gravity or see its shape, and being more connected to it than you’ve ever been.
More connected, because when everything else goes away, all that’s left is what you feel, inside and outside your skin. All you can hear is your own breath—and not the almost-silent version you get while walking around day to day. It’s the super-fresh amplified dance mix you get when your head is underwater, like you’re listening to yourself huffing into a microphone for ninety minutes. And in that fraction of a second when your breath runs out, you hear your heart.
It was a soul-soothing soundtrack.
I moved my leg to feel the soft whoosh of the salt water as it passed over my skin. I adjusted my neck and heard every tiny crack as my spine shifted and my body got acclimated to weightlessness. My arms bobbed at my sides, and I did my best to remain motionless so I could feel what it was like to lose touch with the edges of my body. What would it be like not to live in a body? To just float through the world without a sense of where I began and ended? What would I have to obsess about every day? What would I count instead of calories?
I pulled my right arm out of the water and placed it on my stomach, feeling the cooler air as my belly rose and fell. After a few minutes, I could feel my skin tighten as the salt dried. I put my arm back in the water and mentally visited every body part, telling it to relax. I generally walked around in a state of constant tightness, like every muscle was scowling, flinching, waiting for a blow that never came. So each body part, after being visited and asked to calm down, noticeably relaxed toward the floor of the tank.
Okay Fine Whatever Page 3