“Why do you say ‘apparently’?” I asked.
“Because I’m staring at a fully decorated tree in the middle of my living room with no recollection of how it got there.”
“You decorated while under the influence?” I asked. “Impressive. Did you also convert from Judaism to Christianity?” Jessica was Jewish.
“As drunk as I was, anything’s possible.”
I propped my feet on the edge of the desk and leaned back in my chair. Happily, it was one of those spinning chairs you’d find in an office.
“And what’s the latest from Texas?” Jessica asked.
“I’m reading about Mount Kilimanjaro, actually. A friend of my dad’s suggested it for my Year of Fear, and I thought it could be a good idea until I learned about the many ways one can meet his or her untimely death while mountain climbing.”
“Kilimanjaro? That’s a great idea,” Jessica said, with much more enthusiasm than I’d expected. She’d completely ignored the part about the potential for dying. “It’s supposed to be a life-changing experience. Did you know you can see the curve of the earth up there? I’ve heard the sunrise is like nothing you’ve ever seen!”
“Seriously?” I’d been absently twisting my chair back and forth, but this made me stop and sit up. “I’ve never pictured you as the roughing-it kind.”
“I know, but lately I just feel so stuck in my life in New York that I want to do something that’s completely the opposite experience of living here. I’d do it myself, actually, if it weren’t so expensive.”
Uh-oh. Already I was more than halfway through my savings. Money was becoming an increasingly important factor in what I chose to do. “How much does it cost?”
“Thousands.”
My heart sank. “Is that with or without airfare and hiking equipment?”
“Without.”
“Well, there goes that idea.” I pushed off the desk with one foot to make the chair spin around a few times. “No way I’ll be able to afford that and have enough money to finish the project.” As I twirled I saw something large blur by. I put my feet on the floor. “Oh! Hi, Dad. Jess, let me call you back.”
He was wearing his long monogrammed flannel robe and slippers. My dad would never walk around the house in boxer shorts or with pajama pants and an undershirt. Everything in his manner—from the way he ate, spoke, and dressed—carried a certain dignity. In fact, I couldn’t recall him ever wearing a shirt without a collar, or blue jeans. When he was in his robe and slippers, it was the only time he appeared vulnerable to me.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just thought I’d ask if you wanted to go shopping for your mother’s and sister’s Christmas presents together tonight.” He paused awkwardly, then added: “Maybe we could even grab a bite to eat while we’re out, just you and me?” A peace offering after last night.
I smiled. “That sounds great.”
Four days later, on Christmas morning, Jordan and I were sitting on the living room floor, a battlefield strewn with torn and brutalized wrapping paper. She had just opened my present, a necklace with a silver square pendant. Carved into the pendant was an outline of someone swimming through the ocean, head turned in profile, as if taking a breath.
When she flipped it over, her expression turned quizzical. On the back I had engraved a quote. It wasn’t an Eleanor line, or even a Dr. Bob original. I’d come across it once while researching fear and had always liked it: Fear is just excitement without the breath.
It was an abstract concept for someone her age to grasp—the idea of breath as an antidote to fear. Even I’d been surprised to learn that fear and excitement are biologically nearly identical (think pounding heartbeat, sweating, muscle tension) but that fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing into it fully.
“Holding your breath when you’re scared is a way of closing yourself off from fear, trying to reject it,” Dr. Bob told me once. “But as we know, ignoring fear never works. Instead, inhale and invite fear in eagerly. When you breathe deeply, your anxiety levels lower and feelings of excitement take over.”
“I’ll explain it later,” I said with a wink, and this seemed to satisfy Jordan.
“Thank you!” She ducked her head in that sweetly awkward way characteristic of fourteen-year-old girls.
I went back to plowing through my stocking. My hands touched something flat and crisp, and I pulled out a blank white envelope. Inside was a check made out to me from my dad. I stared at it saucer-eyed for a few moments. My dad was watching from his wingback chair across the room, but when I looked over, he immediately busied himself with his own stocking.
“Your mother and I thought that if you’re going to keep on with this . . . thang you’re doin’, you might need some help paying for that mountain of yours,” he said, affecting a tone of grudging acceptance. “And we have enough airline miles that you could fly back and forth to Africa for free. We lose the miles if we don’t use them so it’s only practical . . .”
We all knew full well that there was nothing practical about what I’d been doing for the past half year. And I knew they didn’t understand it. And yet, the most practical man I knew was flying me to another continent so I could attempt to climb a mountain, just to see if I could do it. In this instant, I loved my parents so dearly that I was almost in physical pain.
Before I could respond, my mother said, “Can I just say one thing and I swear I won’t say another word about it?” She’d been arranging everyone’s presents so they’d be opened in an order of escalating delight. But now she came over and put her hand on my arm.
“Just promise me you’ll watch out for terrorists,” she said. “They’d love to kidnap you and hold you for ransom.”
Back in New York, Matt and I decided to spend New Year’s with his parents at their beach house. It was there that, at exactly 12:45 A.M., I discovered my bottle of sleeping pills was missing from my tote bag.
“But I know I packed them!” I told Matt. “I remember putting them in the bag.” I turned the tote upside down in the middle of the carpet. Quarters and lip balm careened across the floor, but otherwise: nothing. Matt paused his flossing to watch me rifle through my suitcase, approaching something close to hysteria.
“Maybe this is a good thing,” he offered. “It worries me that you take those pills every night, honey.”
I didn’t respond. I was too busy strategizing how to get my hands on some sleep meds. Could I make a run to a local pharmacy or drugstore? No, they wouldn’t be open on New Year’s Eve.
I lay awake for hours, roiling under the covers. Poor Matt suffered in silence next to me although I was sure he wanted to shake me. The plan had been to stay the whole weekend, but I was already plotting which bus I’d take back to the city—and to my prescription sleeping pills—the next afternoon. No way I was enduring another night of this. Then at 4:00 A.M.—as I was contemplating a highly inappropriate raid of his parents’ medicine cabinet for a bottle of Nyquil—I sat bolt upright. I knew where they were! I grabbed the keys off the counter, flew out the front door, and had the car trunk flung open in a matter of seconds. Sure enough, the bottle had tumbled out of my purse during the drive. When I made my victorious return to the guest room, Matt had turned on a lamp and was sitting up in bed. I danced the perimeter of the room, shaking the pills around like a maraca. He rubbed his eyes wearily.
“This has become a serious problem, Noelle. You’re a drug addict.”
I took a sip of water, tipped my head back, and gratefully swallowed a few tablets. “Well, that’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”
“Extreme? When we were in Aruba, you kept your sleeping pills in the hotel safe with your passport and pearl necklace!”
“You told me to put my valuables in it!”
Matt rolled his eyes and fluffed his pillow a few times before lying down facing away from me. I climbed into bed beside
him.
“It’s not like I’m getting high,” I told his back. No response. “I’m just trying to get to sleep—a basic human function necessary for survival.”
“You’re taking the easy way out,” he said without rolling over. “You need to try harder.”
“I need to try harder to lose consciousness?”
“You know what I mean.”
“But I have to go to sleep. It just takes me longer than everyone else to get there. Imagine if you had a three-hour commute to work, then someone came up with a way to transport you there almost immediately?”
“I’d take the safer option.”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone says. But I don’t see anyone driving a horse and buggy.”
“Aren’t you worried about what those pills could be doing to your internal organs?” he asked quietly.
In lieu of a response, I turned out the light. The answer was yes, of course, and I’d tried to cut back before. But you’d be amazed and appalled at how easily you’d sell out your liver after a few sleepless nights. I was about to tell him this when I heard his breath deepen. He was fast asleep.
It started at Yale. I learned a lot in college, but the lesson that had stuck with me the longest was how not to be tired. My classmates had graduated from tweedy private schools full of teachers like Eleanor’s Madame Souvestre. They arrived at college primed for the rigors of an Ivy League education. They knew how to skim a three-hundred-word book in an hour and retain the information. They cranked out twenty-page research papers in an afternoon and still had time for a game of Ultimate Frisbee before dinner. I, on the other hand, had gone to a high school where only 13 percent of graduates continued their education. The average SAT score had been 876 out of 1600. I’d been as ready for college as Cap’n Crunch was ready to commandeer an actual battleship.
Freshman year, I managed. But the following year my workload increased after I changed my major and had to take extra classes. I was studying until three A.M. just to break even. Over time, I simply trained my body not to recognize tiredness. This was great for studying, but less great when I needed to go to sleep. Sleeping pills were out of the question since I could only afford four or five hours of sleep a night instead of the requisite eight. Besides, the department of undergraduate health wouldn’t prescribe sleeping pills to students. I always found this amusing since they handed out free condoms at every turn. If you wanted to sleep with someone, they’d supply the provisions, but if you simply wanted to get to sleep, you were on your own.
When my roommate suggested a relaxing glass of red wine before bedtime, I secured a bottle of merlot from the local liquor store that didn’t check IDs. Later that night I poured the wine into a plastic tumbler I’d stolen from the dining hall. I took a few sips and made a face. Vile. I hated wine. I walked over to our fireplace mantel where we displayed our liquor, the bottles lined up like trophies. I pulled down a handle of Jack Daniel’s and poured myself a shot. Better to get it over with as soon as possible, I reasoned as I tossed it back. Within minutes I felt the booze slip seductively into my veins, my heart rate slowed, and I lapsed into a dreamless sleep. Soon I was having a shot of Jack every night before bed. When one shot stopped getting the job done, I added a second shot. By senior year, my nightcap had progressed to two shots of Everclear, a grain alcohol. At 190 proof, it was more than twice the strength of a shot of whiskey. Yes, it was so strong that it sometimes left me with a sore throat the next day, but having two shots of Everclear before bed made me feel less like a character in a Eugene O’Neill play than drinking four shots of whiskey.
After graduating from college, I moved to New York, where there were plenty of doctors willing to prescribe sleeping pills. I stopped drinking before bed and had many appointments at a center for sleep disorders. They ruled out restless legs and sleep apnea. Physically, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to sleep. My body eventually built up a tolerance to the pills, just as it had to the nightcaps. Even after taking a sleeping pill, I’d wake up as many as ten times a night. So I added half of a pill. When my body stopped responding to that, I added another half and another . . .
Seven years later, I was up to five pills a night and even Jessica was concerned. “Do all of those pills turn you into a princess or something?” she once asked. “Because otherwise I can’t find a logical justification to swallow that much crap. Even a blow job makes more sense.”
“It’s not like I’m in danger of overdosing,” I said defensively. “It takes over forty pills to OD.”
When people found out I worked in gossip journalism, they’d sometimes joke, “How do you sleep at night?” “Pills,” I’d deadpan. But that was only part of it. Doctors could legally prescribe only thirty sleeping pills a month (because, apparently, they’re addictive!), and I’d blow through that prescription in about a week. So I started stepping out on my doctor. At one point I was working two different brands of sleep aids, three different pharmacies, and four different doctors just to get a night’s rest. Doctor shopping is illegal, of course, and it was also expensive. It hadn’t been as bad when I’d had cushy corporate health insurance benefits, but once I was laid off I’d gotten a cheap plan with a freelancers’ union whose coverage policy loosely translated to “Yeah, right!”
The following weekend, Matt spent the night at my apartment. When I came out of the bathroom after washing my face, he was peering at my sleeping pill bottle with suspicion.
“This is a different bottle from last week, isn’t it?” he said accusingly.
My guilty expression was all the answer he needed. “I knew it! The pharmacy logo was different. How many of these are you taking a night?”
I couldn’t lie to him, so instead I admitted, “Enough that if I keep this up, I won’t have enough money to fund the rest of my Year of Fear.”
“It’s that expensive?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Also, I can’t take sleeping pills on Kilimanjaro.”
As soon as we’d finished opening presents on Christmas Day, I’d gone straight to the Internet to read up on the logistics of climbing Kilimanjaro. I’d come across the info about sleeping pills while reading testimonials of hikers who’d conquered the mountain. I’d been heartbroken to learn that taking sleeping pills would be downright dangerous. They suppress your breathing and it’s already so suppressed from the lack of oxygen that you could die in your sleep.
It was an impossible situation. I couldn’t imagine being that far away from home, in that strenuous an environment, without my pills. What if I didn’t get any sleep the entire time? I would never make it to the top, let alone back down again. Yet I couldn’t imagine telling my parents I wasn’t going. What would I say? That I’d chosen sleeping pills over their generous gift? I couldn’t do that, especially not after I’d had that talk with my mom about how she needed to have more faith in me and my sister. If I told her about the pills, she’d have reason to worry about me for the rest of her life.
“You should make facing your addiction part of the project,” Matt suggested. “Wean yourself off before you leave for Africa. Is there anything scarier than going off sleeping pills?”
“If there is, I don’t want to know about it,” I said grimly.
A few days later in Dr. Bob’s office, he reminded me, “Research has shown that cognitive therapy is more effective in treating insomnia than sleeping pills.”
“I always thought you just said that because you can’t prescribe!” Dr. Bob was a PhD, not an MD. “Like the guy with the tiny penis who says, ‘Size doesn’t matter!’ ”
He gave me a warning look.
“Sorry.”
“Most insomnia is due to excessive mental activity—namely worrying,” he said. “Tell me, what do you think about now when you’re trying to fall asleep?”
“Lots of stuff. What if I can’t make rent? What am I going to do for a li
ving when this year is over? Is Matt ‘The One’? Is that Ben Affleck’s real hair?” I paused, realizing Dr. Bob might not know who Ben Affleck was, but he was already jumping in.
“First understand that we’re hardwired to toss and turn all night,” he explained. “Anxiety helped our ancestors survive in a primitive environment. In circumstances where animal attacks could happen at any moment, where strangers could kill you, where your survival could depend on whether your tribe liked having you around, those who weren’t anxious enough didn’t survive.”
“But why am I worrying now? We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.”
“Precisely. Modern civilization is eliminating most of these threats far too rapidly for our evolutionary biology to catch up,” he said. “In fact, rates of anxiety have increased dramatically during the last fifty years. The average child today exhibits the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.”
“And these are the people who are going to be running the country in forty years?” I said. “That’s reassuring.”
But he had a faraway look in his eye. “Now most of our worry is unproductive worry. We worry about past mistakes, obsess about what other people think of us, create terrifying future scenarios out of nothing. Our mind chatters away even when we wish to sleep or relax or simply do nothing.”
I was reminded of an Eleanor quote I’d come across a few weeks before but hadn’t understood: “Most of us, I suppose, are ridden by at least some imaginary fears. But I think it is as important to deal with these as it is with the fears based on a reasonable foundation. They often do us more harm.” Now it made sense to me.
Dr. Bob snapped out of his reverie. “The good news is, by working to overcome your anxiety, you’ve taken the first step toward overcoming insomnia,” he said. “Now it’s time to go all in.”
“All in?” I asked nervously.
“You have to make a choice,” he said. “Are you going to continue on this path or change direction? What happens when you start taking three pills a night? Four?”
My Year with Eleanor Page 14