Girl Most Likely To

by Poonam Sharma

  “You mean we didn’t…”

  “No, Vina. I’ve known Nick for a long time. He’s not that kind of guy. You were completely out of it, and that’s not something that he would find attractive. For god’s sake, he’s not some horny frat boy.”

  “Prakash, I guess…I guess it looks like I made an honest mistake.”

  “No, Vina. It looks like you made a snap judgment about a nice guy, and exercised no judgment when it came to your bosses.”

  “But I…I didn’t know…and I didn’t remember…I had no idea,” I stuttered.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about Nick,” Prakash said. “And about a lot of other things, too.”

  “Well, I’d like to apologize to him.”

  Prakash shook his head. “I think it’s too late for that, Vina. You should probably move on. Try to work some of this stuff out on your own.”

  25

  My strategy to cope with the crap that life dumps on me goes something like this:

  (1) Make an unrecognizable and quite unladylike sound. Somewhere between a burp, a shriek and a whimper.

  (2) Go home and change into more comfortable and less flattering clothes. Avoid all mirrors. Lock doors, close windows and draw shades.

  (3) Curl up into an emotional and physical fetal position on my couch, insulated by heaps of blankets and pillows, and surrounded by a protective moat of takeout menus and remote controls.

  (4) Blame myself for not having seen it coming (whatever it was), blame trans fat and the NRA for making the world such a complicated place to live in and long for a simpler time when most people were decent, so women didn’t always have to know better.

  (5) Commence calling cheap knockoffs of The Psychic Hotline (although I would never admit this to any of my friends), while consoling myself that at least it’s cheaper than calling the family-condoned Sadhus (Read: real psychics masquerading as holy men and providing birth-chart and palm readings) back in India.

  This time my disillusionment took me far beyond the kind of solace that any tele-psychic or Tivo might provide. Short of actually divorcing the world, I found myself filing for a trial separation in the form of a plane ticket to Fiji. My parents weren’t happy about it, and my friends were more than concerned, but I knew it was something I had to do. And nobody was going to stop me.

  After a rather swift trial, Alan and Steve wound up in some white-collar prison, serving five to ten years for trading on insider information. Wade’s sullied reputation was eventually re-shined and infused with a large cash settlement for wrongful termination. Sarah quit and was immediately hired by another company, and Denny decided to apply to graduate school. Peter was the only team member who was promoted, largely because they needed someone diplomatic and trustworthy enough to repair the client relationships that had been ripped to shreds by the scandal.

  For my part, I hadn’t been to the office in two weeks, since that day when I made my way home from the SEC investigators’ offices. Thankfully, I could rest assured that my professional reputation was refortified, since phone taps on Alan’s and Steve’s personal lines had reportedly cleared me of any wrongdoing. Within ten days of my deposition, I was informed that I was no longer a suspect as far as the SEC was concerned, and that I would never formally be charged. Rather than celebrating, I found myself unable to pull my attention away from the question of how I had wound up in that situation in the first place. I huddled in my apartment with my thoughts and my regrets, and just when I would begin to feel like the dust around my professional earthquake was beginning to settle, my guilt over having trusted Jon for so long would resurface. Honestly, there were times when I couldn’t see a way out.

  Meanwhile, Human Resources had me listed as taking advantage of a “temporary leave of absence,” while they tried to decide what the heck to do with me. I took a far more circuitous route back to stability than did any of my coworkers, but in truth it was because I had far more to learn. Far worse than Jon or work or any one thing in particular, it was the no longer avoidable pattern emerging in my life that I had to sit still and make sense of. I was trying to understand how and why I had let things get to that point. I was trying to find the common thread between my obliviousness to Jon’s true character, my bosses’ true motives and my inability to voice and to question. At the root of it was: How did all of those themes intersect, and why had I failed to protect and to stand up for myself? The weight of that question was more than frightening; it was paralyzing.

  Countless voice mails from friends, family and reporters went unanswered until Cristina and Pam eventually forced their way into my apartment. Cristy threatened to shave off my eyebrows unless I would consent to a shower. Pamela cleaned my apartment even though she had never in her life had to clean her own. Then they both dragged me to a therapist for the first of three visits they had taken the liberty of scheduling and paying for in advance. I was almost jolted out of my emotional state by the disappointment in Cristy’s eyes when I failed to laugh at the joke she made about my being a mustache trim and a bottle of aftershave away from being a man. But I was simply too disengaged to pay any attention to the rational knowledge that I ought to care.

  During our first meeting we just stared at each other. Suzanne was the type of therapist, I came to realize, who waited for the patient to begin the conversation. She was a young-looking forty-five, wearing a deep-pumpkin-colored shirt, brown leather vest and matching pants, and a smile that made me ask if I might be wearing a straitjacket that I simply couldn’t see. So I averted my gaze, instead examining my fingers as if discovering them anew, which probably made me look like I was crazy. Or like I thought I had done something wrong. That made me feel defensive. So I spent the better part of my time giving her dirty, suspicious looks. And after our first hour of silence was over, Cristina took me home.

  During our second meeting, the following day, I asked Suzanne why she wasn’t saying anything. Her thoughts were not important, she explained; mine were. When I asked her if she thought I needed therapy, she said what was important was if I thought I did. When I told her that my friend had forced me to come, she told me nobody was forcing me to stay. But she said it in a way that implied only a weaker psychological being would choose to leave, rather than work through her issues. Despite my monumental resentment of her and of Cristina and of everyone else in the world, I decided to stay in the chair. Somehow the prospect of being judged inferior by this complete stranger was more than I could bear.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Suzanne, but you don’t know me or my problems,” I finally offered.

  “Why don’t you tell me about them? I want to know about them,” she explained, and then added after the cynicism registered on my face, “I care.”

  She cared. And the hostage negotiator was always on the bank robber’s side.

  “You can’t believe that I care?”

  Well, I could believe it. Theoretically, I could believe whatever I wanted to.

  “It’s not that. It’s just…I mean, no offense, but you’re being paid to care.”

  “You don’t think I would care if I weren’t being paid?”

  “No, that’s not what I said. But you’re not my friend, by the nature of this relationship. You’re my doctor.”

  “Your problems are valid, Vina. Why is it that you feel the need to place me into only one category?”

  “I don’t know…I mean, I don’t.” I suddenly felt as if I were trying to explain the importance of financial planning to a teenage pop star with her first record deal.

  “You seem frustrated.”

  “Look, I’m not a mental case. There’s just too much going on for me to explain to someone I don’t know.”

  “Do you think it might help to try?”

  “No.”

  “Can you explain why not?”

  “No, I can’t. That’s just it. I cannot explain anything. There’s so much going on in my mind right now. How can you understand my situation? I don’t even understand my s
ituation. Everything in my professional life and romantic life fell apart and I didn’t even see it coming. So how the hell am I supposed to explain what happened to a stranger?” I blurted out, before bursting into sobs.

  “Well, if you can’t tell me what happened, can you tell me what you want?” she asked, carefully handing me a box of Kleenex.

  “I want my life back.”

  “You want to be happy again.”

  “Mmmm-huhhh.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I want my life back. I’m sick of being so angry with myself and with everything around me.”

  Similar to the morning when I woke up on my floor between Christopher and his cat, I went home that night thinking something had to change. Shuttling between my cave and this woman’s office wasn’t going to help me; I had to find a way to help myself. The only problem was I didn’t know how.

  Our third meeting lasted all of five minutes. I walked into Suzanne’s office, sat down, and she informed me that she would be recommending that I start taking medication. Zoloft, it was called. She felt that it would stabilize me so that I could “focus on dissecting my feelings and laying them out in a way that we could more comfortably address.”

  I remember watching her mouth form the words. I remember asking myself how could she think that diminishing my control over my mind would ever help me feel like I wasn’t going to lose it. She knew nothing about how bad my judgment had been, and already had the audacity to want to steal from me what little of it I had left. I wanted to explain all of this to her, but that was the moment, sitting on the rubbery chair in her office that made unpleasant sounds whenever I sat, rose or shifted my weight, when I acknowledged that I was the only person who could think my way back to trusting myself and the world. My own thoughts were all I had. It wasn’t a dismissal of the psychiatric process. It was a reaction to the idea of getting stock tips from someone who kept all of their money in real estate.

  “I am the only person who has to live inside my own head,” I explained to a surprised and concerned Cristina through the phone the next morning, while searching the Internet for the cheapest airfares to Fiji. “So how can anybody ever understand this for me?”

  “I can accept that, Vina. But why do you have to run away?”

  “This is not about running away.”

  “A meditation retreat? In Fiji? For two weeks? Listen to yourself, Vina.”

  I was listening to myself, I thought; and perhaps for the very first time. Still, I understood why it must have sounded ridiculous. To be honest, even I wasn’t completely sure where all of this would take me. But I had some time off work, and some money saved up, and I had spent the previous sleepless night staring at my ceiling, racking my brain for some idea of the next step I should take. Suddenly, around five a.m., the answer came to me: Vipassana. It was a type of meditation I had heard of years earlier, which promised nonreligious guidance on the path to self-knowledge and healing. A quick Web search had revealed the rest. Special meditation centers the world over were fully funded by donations, and claimed to provide free intensive meditation guidance to those who were seeking it. While most classes were fully booked months in advance, I decided it must be some sort of sign that the only available slot within the next three months was for a retreat beginning just a few days later, and on the other side of the world.

  Naturally, I was nervous, although I was far more frightened of the idea of losing my resolve. And I would rather have eaten my own foot at that point than spend one more minute with the status quo. I needed a change. And I needed Cristy’s support.

  “Cristy, you’re starting to sound like my parents.”

  She wasn’t about to give in. “Well, good. I’m worried about you. And speaking of them…have you told them about this yet?”

  A few hours later, I did. And in their defense, few parents (Indian or otherwise) would have been comfortable with a move like this, even if their only daughter hadn’t been in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

  “I need to be alone, Mom and Dad,” I told them through the phone while hauling out my suitcase from the depths of my closet. Attempting to explain why they shouldn’t expect me to call when I was away was tricky.

  “I need to be away from anything and anyone that makes me question the validity of what I’m going through. You still don’t accept the reality of my claustrophobia, much less my relationships. And you don’t realize that you should respect me more for trying to find help. But it’s not my place to change the way you look at things, especially before I learn to change myself. Honestly, I’ve got to start trusting myself, and taking better care of myself. I’m tired. And maybe what you do is the best you can do, considering how you were raised. But it doesn’t help me right now. I need to figure some things out for myself, without the stress of having to justify anything to anyone. So, please understand.”

  I tried my best as to why it had to be in Fiji. I tried my best as to why this seemed like my last chance to get a grip before I gave in and decided to blot out every thought entirely. My parents tried their conflicted best to understand, and they insisted on seeing me off at the airport.

  Nani held my face between her hands before the security checkpoint at JFK.

  “I’m not crazy, Nani. I am trying to figure things out.”

  “Beti, sometimes you try too hard to be a good girl. I couldn’t be more proud of you. You are finally doing something for yourself. Remember, beti. Jo undher se athha hai. What comes from inside is what matters. And if it tells you to go to India or Fiji or Timbuktu, then for God’s sake, go. Yes, you are a strong girl, but if that shaanti inside is disturbed, nothing else will ever be good in your life. And I can see that your shaanti, your peace, has been disturbed.”

  My parents mustered smiles from a few steps behind her. I smiled back and then leaned in to whisper in her ear, “Will Mom and Dad be okay?”

  She bent down, lifted my backpack and held it out to me. “You let me deal with them.”

  As it turned out, they had already managed to start dealing with themselves. I found the following note tucked inside my backpack somewhere high above the clouds a few hours later.

  Beti,

  It is not so easy for us to understand why you had to go to the other side of the world, when you have a family here that loves you and only wants to help. We believe that a person should be with their family at times like this. Maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to some parts of your life. Though it was not with the intention of making you feel ignored. Just remember one thing: there is a school for almost every skill in life, but there is no school where you can learn how to be a parent. It is the most important job we have, but it is also the only one thing which nobody can ever teach you. Take your time, and do whatever you need to do. We believe that peace of mind is a choice, but perhaps it is not always so. Be safe. Find your own shaanti, beti. We are here for you whenever you need us.

  Love,

  Mom and Dad

  26

  “Observe your sensations. Do not react to them.”

  The meditation leader’s voice came from every direction as I struggled to sit perfectly still. My right leg had fallen asleep, my back was beginning to ache and the wool blanket in which I was wrapped mercilessly tickled my left cheek. And keeping my eyes shut for any length of time was driving me insane.

  Serious meditation is about as exciting as an audit, and about as easy as trying to convince your hair not to grow. But in the best of cases, it can be emotional detox. It requires patience, seclusion and a complete disinterest in returning to your actual life; and at times it felt like forcing nails down the chalkboards inside my mind. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I desperately feared returning to New York without anything to show for it, I probably would have crawled out of a window by the end of the first night. Sitting still had never been my forte.

  “Whenever you find your mind wandering into the troubles of the external world, simply bring it back to observations. B
e aware of the emotion just as you are aware of the physical sensation. It might be tickling or prickling or hot or cold or itching. It might be anger or regret. Do not be frustrated with your mind. Simply observe your mind’s behavior and laughingly bring it back to the observation of the physical sensations of this moment. Focus on the breath.”

  I was sitting myself into a coma in the meditation room of a secluded retreat in Fiji, along with forty-nine other seekers-of-mental-stability, all of whom were clearly better at this than I was. I knew this because, even though I wasn’t supposed to, I kept opening my eyes to check if everyone else’s were closed. They always were. The only person who was having a worse go of it than me had been sobbing for the past twenty minutes. The meditation must have begun to take its effect, since my auditory perception had been sharpened enough for me to deduce, without so much as looking in that direction, that she was seated two rows before me and to my left. Day One was brutal.

  Group-directed Vipassana meditation was a centuries-old peace-seeking technique requiring a strict vow of abstinence, silence and vegetarianism, along with the renunciation of reading, writing, television or any other external stimulants for the duration of an eleven-day introductory retreat. The sexes were separated, and encouraged to focus inward. Even eye contact was discouraged. So by the end of Day One all I really knew for sure was that of the two sets of feet sharing my bedroom, neither had apparently ever met with a pedicure.

  Day Two wasn’t quite as bad as the first. Still, I wondered how I managed to land in what felt like an adult version of television’s Brat Camp. The daily schedule was as follows: