by Anna Berry
I fold it into a compact packet, seal it shut with a price sticker I peel off the back cover of a history textbook, and slide it under Todd’s door. I honestly believe that letter will break down all the barriers between having emotional intimacy with Todd and having sexual intimacy with Todd and bring the two together into some kind of interstellar explosion. I believe those nine soggy sheets of folded paper will somehow bring that impossible, cosmic fantasy to life.
Of course, they don’t. Why would they? The letter is filled with the nonsensical, hormonal rantings of a moody nineteen-year-old girl who has mostly lost touch with reality, and its intended recipient is a self-centered, immature, and randy jerk who prefers to do things his own way and on his own damn time. I could have predicted it would all go badly, but I’m far too deep into my state of denial to expect anything other than wild success. Surely, he and I will be jetting off on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean for spring break, where we will make love on the beach and plan our future lives together. No other possibility even crosses my mind.
I wait for word from Todd with great anxiety—I crave and fear his reaction so much that it makes my body ache as if stretched on a rack. I hear nothing for the rest of the weekend; Todd seems to have disappeared from the dorm entirely. The following week is finals. The only time I see Todd is at our Survey of American Literature exam, before and after which he will neither talk to me nor meet my eyes. I try to follow him out of the exam, but he ducks into the student union and I lose track of him in the midday crowd. I have two more exams that day. By the time I make it back to the dorm, it’s late afternoon and the hall director tells me Todd has requested permission to leave campus for spring break two days early.
I finish my exams and leave for spring break in a depressed trance. I don’t remember much of what transpires over the next nine days of break, but I remember what happens when I return to campus all too well.
The RAs have to be back at the dorm two days before the start of spring quarter to undergo refresher training and to redecorate our assigned floors for the spring. At the first back-to-campus meeting with our hall director, Todd makes a point to sit as far away from me as possible, and he refuses an assignment to head up a social-program committee with me. The hostility leaking from his body language is as viscous as used motor oil.
I can’t take it anymore. After the meeting, I march up to Todd’s room and confront him. He answers the door wrapped in a bedspread. It’s obvious he wears nothing underneath. I hear Marcia’s voice in the background, behind the half-closed door, wanting to know “why that crazy bitch is bothering us again.”
“Yeah, I got your letter, Berry,” he says. “Still kind of mulling it over.”
“What do you mean?”
Todd wraps the bedspread tighter around himself. “Well, you know. I totally get what you’re saying and everything, and I feel like we do have this like, strong spiritual connection, but I’m not sure I wanna go physical with it. ’Sides, I’ve still got a pretty good physical thing going on with Marcia.”
It’s exactly the reaction I expect. And yet, it makes me feel as sick as I would if I’d just learned that Todd is dead. And he is, in a way. The soul-to-soul communion that we’ve shared over so many late nights is gone, in an instant.
“What should we do now?” I ask. “How can we go on now?”
“We’ll just keep on as usual,” he says, and lets the bedspread drop enough for me to glimpse his rippled, hairy chest. That only makes things worse. “Keep on meditating, Berry. Self-reflection. That’s the way for you to even yourself out. Meditation and sutras. Enlightenment is the answer, Berry. Enlightenment. ’Night, Berry.”
Todd shuts the door in my face.
Todd and I try to keep on as usual, but it’s torture. Our late-night rap sessions become a cruel joke. He goes out of his way to flirt with me—to even touch me suggestively by “accident” whenever possible—only to pull away the minute I feel the inkling of a physical connection form between us. The resulting emotional roller-coaster ride only makes me feel even worse. I become like the walking dead. I stop fulfilling my RA duties. I file no weekly reports with the hall director. I forget all my floor residents’ names. I drop two classes and take a less-than-full course-load for the first time ever, and even flunk two midterm exams because I’ve lost all motivation to study. The dean calls me in to his office and asks if anything is wrong, and I of course say no, because to admit that something is wrong could put my scholarship at risk right away, even before I’ve had a chance to pull up my grades. I stop talking to my mother by phone once a week. (I’ve become close to my mother again during this time. I also think it’s probably my mother who finally calls my bosses at the dorm and asks them to intervene.)
In the middle of spring quarter, Regina and the senior hall director take me aside. “We’re worried about you, Anna,” Regina says. “We think you need professional help.”
My bosses refer me to an on-campus counseling service and tell me I have to start going or I’ll lose my RA job, which provides me with free room and board. It’s the same service I’ve referred my own floor residents to when they’re depressed and anxious—at least, I did it when I still gave a damn about being an RA. I have no choice but to get help, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. In tribute to how little I care for the whole system by that point, I show up for my first counseling session ten minutes late.
My therapist is a middle-aged bearded man who wears badly wrinkled polyester suits. I’ll call him Dr. X.
Dr. X asks me why I’m so depressed.
“Because I can’t get Todd Naismith to have sex with me,” I tell him. Over the course of several sessions, I give him the details of our entire friendship, from the late-night pizza-and-Beat-poet sessions to the cruelly manipulative physical flirting to the angry outbursts he’s been having with me lately whenever we’re assigned RA duty rounds together. I leave out the sordid details of the letter I wrote him, because I’m too embarrassed to admit the truth. My story is skewed heavily in my own favor, which I’m sure doesn’t help me, but I’m too selfish and immature at the time to care. I’m angry at Todd, and what I say in this tiny, confidential room is the only chance I’ll ever have for revenge.
“This Todd Naismith person is obviously a narcissist,” Dr. X says after he’s heard the whole long, sordid story. “He enjoys toying with you. You’re nothing but a plaything to him. Don’t you think so?”
I shrug. “He tells me all the bad feelings will go away if I just meditate.”
Dr. X laughs. “And he’s right, ironically. But that doesn’t mean you should take his advice. As I said, the man enjoys toying with you. Women are toys to him. You see this sort of thing among young men a lot, and it’s a phase most of them fortunately outgrow. But don’t wait around for him to outgrow it. I advise you to cut off all contact with him.”
Dr. X gives me a free copy of M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, and he tells me to read it. He says it will make me feel better. He also says I need to find another man, a man who is interested in having sex with me. He says that will make me feel better too.
“Can’t I just have some antidepressants?” I ask. “That would be easier.”
“No,” Dr. X says. “I don’t trust them. Read the book. Find a man who is interested in you and wants to satisfy you sexually instead of just playing mind games. And no matter what you do, don’t let Todd Naismith toy with you ever, ever again.”
I skip my last two appointments with Dr. X. I don’t like him very much. But I do take one piece of his advice—I end my friendship with Todd Naismith, who responds by slipping long handwritten letters about how much of a histrionic bitch I am under my door.
We’re a real pair, Todd and I—two self-centered, dysfunctional teenagers who try to act like mature, sophisticated adults but just end up devolving into silly tantrums delivered by letter. We’re no better than seventh-graders with a Slam Book at a weekend house party, jumping up and down, lo
ading ourselves up on junk food and soda, and blowing everything out of proportion until we finally make ourselves throw up.
And he’s right—I am a histrionic bitch. But I can’t admit the truth to myself or anyone else. Instead, I tear the letters up and toss them down the trash chute. Damned if I’ll let him toy with me like that ever again.
And yet, almost a decade later, in a breakup letter from Dean—a man Todd Naismith has never even met—that relies on Todd Naismith’s third-hand opinion of me as a crazy, histrionic, menace-to-society bitch is black-and-white proof that toy with me like that (from several hundred miles away and sight-unseen, no less) is exactly what I’ve let him do.
It reminds me yet again of why I’ve always worked so hard to hide the truth about myself and my family from everyone—because mental illness can brand you for life, and creep back up on you in the worst possible ways, even years later. But running and hiding from the truth is also what got me into this mess to begin with.
To hell with people who don’t understand, I think. To hell with anyone who won’t accept me for who and what I am. It’s high time to turn this ship around and leave those who don’t understand back on the shore for good.
I’d abandoned my half-hearted attempts at Buddhism around the same time that Dr. X told me to cut off all contact with Todd Naismith. I’ve dabbled here and there in the years since, but the knowledge that the man who introduced me to Buddhism and Eastern philosophy in general is still disparaging me from hundreds of miles away stirs something in me. I am finally ready to stop being a victim. I am finally ready to take responsibility for my own actions and to take the steps I need to learn to manage my illness. I am finally ready to do the hard work necessary to find my own inner peace.
Todd and Dean were right about me all along, you see. I did have something wrong with me that I wasn’t willing to acknowledge. Maybe their assessments were cruel, vicious, and exaggerated, but at the heart of them, there was some truth. My illness was expressing itself in the unhealthy ways I carried out my relationships—not to mention in whom I chose to have my relationships with. I knew all along I had something bad going on in my brain—the black hole, the blinding feelings of confusion, the short temper, the memory lapses. Perhaps if Dean and Todd had been more informed about mental illness they would have helped me seek the aid and treatment I needed instead of condemning me. But since young men are not always known for their compassion and insight, they behaved instead as some young men behave. That’s life, and I don’t necessarily hold it against them. And as hurtful and unhelpful as their treatment of me was, in the end my illness was not their fault or their problem; I was not their responsibility. The responsibility fell only to me.
Most experts on borderline personality disorder believe that like substance abusers, people with BPD need to hit a “bottom” before they can ever truly begin to heal. I’ve hit my bottom, all right. In the past month, I’ve lost my job, my live-in life partner, my home, and my dignity. I’m broke and only a hair’s breadth away from being destitute. An old friend, someone I once trusted, has said some deeply hurtful things, and to top it all off, I’ve so badly harassed and threatened someone I love that if he really wanted to, he could get me charged with a felony. I’ve got nowhere to go but up.
It is time to take my first serious steps toward enlightenment—real, concrete steps, not bullshit platitudes shared over modern jazz and cheap pizza in a dorm room. And with enlightenment will come my first steps on my long journey out of the gaping black hole of my illness and into the bright light of health.
I start by meditating for an hour every day before I go to work. Real meditating too—not teetering on a secondhand futon while stoned, as Todd used to do. I learn how to do it properly, and I do it every single day with discipline. I go every Sunday to a local Buddhist temple that offers hour-long, structured Zen Shin meditation sessions, and I learn how to control my breathing by counting from one to ten, how to do walking meditation by focusing on every minute sensation my stocking feet make in contact with the temple floor, how to prostrate and bow in sets of twenty to relieve tension in my back after an hour of sitting without breaking my mind’s cleansing concentration. I chant in English, Japanese, and Sanskrit. I learn how to accept whatever thoughts come and go in the busy, cluttered, and filthy train station my mind has become after years of sex addiction, booze, drugs, dysfunctional relationships, and self-pity. I take up yoga. I learn to breathe deeply and stand on my head. I learn to surrender the self and dwell in the moment and only the moment, to let everything before and after the moment slip into nothingness. I pay out of pocket for therapy sessions with a licensed clinical social worker who believes in the power of spiritually integrated talk therapy instead of psychotropic drugs for counseling, seeing him once a week for six months, even though the cost is a financial hardship.
But it’s money well spent. I’ve finally learned to let go.
After several months of dedicated self-study, I feel the fog of my lifelong mental illness begin to lift. I have developed a level of self-awareness I’ve never known before. I find myself apologizing to store clerks when I snap at them. When I feel a rage attack coming on, I sit down, count to ten, and take long, slow, deep breaths until the urge to tear everyone within arm’s reach to shreds passes. I start to feel compassion for strangers on the street. I sleep better than I have in years, and even find I can wake up for meditation every day at 5:30 a.m. on the dot without the need for an alarm clock. I have a focus and presence of mind I’ve never thought possible. The top of my head opens wide and lets in the sky, which gets brighter each day. A life of meditation and mindfulness has literally changed my brain chemistry, in a way no amount of medication can.[5] I’ve discovered that Buddhist meditation is as effective, if not more so, as Western-style cognitive and pharmacological therapy in changing the behavior and brain chemistry of practitioners, up to and including increased sense of well-being, increased cognitive performance, greater longevity, higher levels of empathy, and increased levels of insight.[6]
I learn to make better relationship choices too. I end friendships with longtime theater friends who have raging drug and alcohol addictions; I stop associating with people and places who reinforce any of my former destructive patterns of behavior, like going out on the town looking for one-night stands, and spending money like water on shopping trips and expensive lattes; and I ditch those who trash-talk others behind their back too much. I stop going to bars and clubs altogether in favor of the occasional cup of tea at Kopi, my favorite coffeehouse. I meet my closest, most loyal friends for lunch or to watch movies, never for drinks. I cut up all my credit cards and learn to live below my means. And in perhaps the ultimate act of self-awareness, I decide that from this point forward, my days as a needy, self-destructive sex addict are over. I will never sleep with a man again until I am married and he is my husband.
Some of my friends find that last life-altering decision a bit too austere and old-fashioned, but I’ve never once regretted it. Shortly after I make that decision, after all, I meet the man who will later become my husband.
A few weeks before I am to be married, I call Dean and tell him he can come take away all his abandoned furniture and belongings from the apartment, where his name is still on the lease; if he doesn’t, I plan to toss it all in the Dumpster behind the building. I won’t be needing anything of Dean’s in my new life—his junk is nothing but pieces of worn baggage from a me that no longer exists.
Dean comes over with a van to pick up his things one night. He stares at my new engagement ring with palpable envy, and flirts with me just as he did when we were first dating. I can tell he regrets how things ended between us.
When we’re in the basement storage unit, rummaging around to separate his belongings from mine, we come across a battered leather briefcase. “Here, I think this is yours,” I say, and hand it to him.
“No, that’s not mine,” he says. “It was Raj’s. I don’t know how it got mixed up in my thin
gs, but—” He stops, takes a moment to collect himself. “Throw that piece of shit in the garbage. I never, ever want to see anything of his ever again.”
“I’ll let you throw it out then,” I say, and smile. “I think you’ll enjoy doing it a lot more than I would.”
Dean appreciates that. There is peace between us from then on.
Several people have asked me over the years what’s it’s like to be enlightened. To be honest, I don’t know. I’m not even sure that I am. Like learning to live and thrive with a mental illness, enlightenment is a never-ending work-in-progress, after all. The minute we stop working at it is the minute we cease to exist. But whenever anyone asks, I tell them only one thing.
“I’m awake. I was asleep for a long, long time, but I’m awake now, and that’s all that matters.”
It’s been over ten years since my life-changing, bottom-hitting relationship catastrophe with Dean led me unwittingly away from an unstable, self-destructive life and into a healthy one. I now know what it’s like to have a relationship that lasts, as my husband and I will be celebrating our eleventh wedding anniversary this year. I have plenty of money in the bank, a solid retirement plan, and I no longer worry about where my next paycheck is coming from or how I’ll make the rent. I own my own home, am debt-free, and I am successfully self-employed with a freelance writing business. I have a wide circle of friends, many of whom look up to me and regularly come to me for advice on how to address their day-to-day problems as well as how to respond to friends and family members who are struggling with mental illness. I work as a novelist and journalist, and many of my articles for newspapers and magazines focus on wellness—mental wellness, specifically. What I write resonates with my readers because unlike some other reporters covering that beat, I’ve actually lived through the very types of situations and tribulations I now report on.