At least the spoon thing was going well. I counted off the days as if I were a recovering alcoholic. Fifteen days without spoons . . . Four months without spoons . . . Five months without using spoons, and ten days since I accidentally touched a spoon when carelessly grabbing a fork from the dishwasher.
If the spoon thing was a cry for help, it was a weak, internal cry. I knew it probably signified something sad and desperate about my personality. The spoon thing, the assignment of the slightest, dumbest handicap to myself, was a reminder that I was both in control and out of control, that I could force myself to behave a certain way for months on end, for no reason, that I was that easy for my own self to manipulate.
This is so stupid, I would think, and the thought would immediately be followed by But, alas, this is who I’ve chosen to be.
I was trying to gain dominance over myself as a way to prove that there was a difference between my intentions and my actions, as a way to prove I was not really who it was starting to seem like I was.
The spoon thing, of course, wasn’t who I was. It was like a fake lip ring or an ill-advised pair of suspenders, an accessory to compensate for my actual personality, a disguise to conceal the flaws I didn’t know how to address. It was a distraction from my real personality defects, something I could identify as the source of my “weirdness” and my problems, but that was actually a symptom of the larger problems I did not want to deal with.
Also, it made it really hard to eat school hot lunch, because the cafeteria only offered sporks, which I had decided counted as a spoon three days into my spoon thing.
I made friends with three Mexican girls. One of them, Angelica, was assigned to be my partner in English class, and she told me she would find me at lunch so we could finish our history assignment. She found me on my bench and ate with me. Then she asked me to follow her to the locker room, where her two best friends were hanging out.
I talked with Angelica most days in class, and sometimes I abandoned my bench to hang out with them in the locker room. I was hoping to become close enough to them that I would have people to hang out with during summer break, which was fast approaching. They mostly spoke Spanish, unless they had something to say directly to me, which meant I didn’t have to listen to their conversations unless someone said my name first, which I thought was neat. They were big on cute little nicknames, and they called me Chelso.
“Chelso, there’s your boyfriend,” Angelica said, pointing to Jake, the boy I had agreed to date months earlier and hadn’t talked to since. They all laughed and said something in Spanish and then lightly pushed me on the arm, the way close-knit teenage girls did in tampon commercials. I avoided eye contact with Jake and saw from the corner of my eye that he was avoiding eye contact with me.
“Did that Jake guy ask you out?” my mom said.
“No,” I said. “How did you know that?”
“He’s in my third period.”
Maybe he was in her third period, but there was no way he’d volunteered that information to my mom. I looked at her suspiciously.
“Did Angelica tell you?” I said.
“Jake is really sweet. I like his sideburns.”
“Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, will you go to prom with me?” Daniel said to me on our midmorning break.
“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t meant to respond so quickly, or in the affirmative. But what else do you say to the cute, popular idiot who is perpetually making you feel like you’re not in on some hilarious joke that is most likely being made at your expense, when he asks you to be his prom date?
You say no, my inner monologue reminded me, because he sucks and you hate him and probably no one has ever put him in his place.
My quick “yeah” was confirmation that there was some part of me that wanted Daniel to accept me and make me cool and popular, like him. That I wanted him to sweep me away on prom night and convince me, over the course of the evening, that he was misunderstood, that his good looks caused a lot of personality problems for him and that he was trying to identify and overcome those problems, and that he wanted me to be part of that journey with him.
Daniel sauntered away from me toward his laughing male posse, confirming my suspicion that I was the butt of a poorly conceived, mean-spirited joke, or that this was a medium-pathetic way for Daniel to gauge his own popularity.
“I’ll try to remember to go,” I yelled, exposing my desperate need to appear indifferent.
I stood in the courtyard with a blank expression, trying to figure out if I appeared unaffected or deeply affected, then wondered if it made any difference to anyone which one I appeared to be, and then considered which feeling I was actually feeling, then considered what I appeared to be feeling now, to people who saw me standing in the middle of the courtyard by myself for over a minute, then looked around to see who might be wondering about my feelings about standing in the courtyard, then checked back in with myself to see what my feelings were.
Still not sure, I thought.
The second bell rang while I stood there, indicating that I was late to class.
Let’s kick this spoon thing up a notch, my inner monologue said.
I had gone without spoons for eight months, and I barely gave it a thought anymore. It didn’t feel like a restriction anymore. I needed to make it laborious again.
Knives could be an interesting utensil to live without. How would I cut things? Or spread them? Going without both knives and spoons could pose some interesting challenges. I could overcome those challenges by refusing to see them as challenges and instead calling them “accomplishments.”
Maybe these “accomplishments” could shed some light on what kind of person I wanted to be, because I obviously couldn’t figure that out on my own.
Maybe I could stop using kitchen utensils of any kind and prepare and eat all my food with my fingers.
Maybe eating with my fingers would be less gimmicky and more authentic. A punk-rock eff-you to institutionalized utensil implementation.
No, I thought confidently, maybe a little sternly. This is where I draw the line.
By the end of the year, students started ditching their classes to hang out in my mom’s science room/garden. There would be no more class work, she decided, only gardening and socializing. She left the door to the classroom and the door to the garden open. Bright summer light streamed in from both sides of the room and students drifted in and out of the classroom. Teachers of neighboring classrooms began to complain about the noise, but my mom didn’t change her policies.
A student stepped on one of the class computers while dancing on top of a desk and my mom hid the broken computer under some boxes of barely used microscopes so that the school administration wouldn’t find it until the year was over and she was no longer responsible for the science equipment.
“Just try to be cool,” she pleaded with her students. “The year is almost over.”
Daniel and the other jocks asked my mom what she was doing for the summer, and invited her to ride Sea-Doos with them on the lake. My mom happily agreed and told them to call her, but she didn’t
give them our phone number.
I wondered if Daniel was trying to get my mom’s number as a means to reach me, or if he was attempting to get me to fall in love with him as a means to reach my mom, or if he was constructing a false reality purely to confuse and manipulate me, or if my mom had convinced him to flirt with her so that I would assume he was trying to get to me so that I might feel desirable, or if he wasn’t doing anything except being talkative and outgoing, and that his attractiveness was making me project flirtation onto everything he did.
I didn’t go to prom with Daniel. It was a joke, obviously. I had never had any misconception that it was anything other than a big, hilarious joke that I was definitely in on the entire time.
That summer, someone handed me a bowl of ice cream with a spoon sticki
ng out of it, like a dare. The spoon seemed forbidden and exotic to me, and I felt an urge to rebel. Rebel against myself, I guess, or rebel against the things I had convinced myself were important but were actually pointless, or rebel against the fork industry, which I had inadvertently aligned myself with and was now regretting.
But I had been clean and spoonless for ten months, and I was proud of that. It was stupid, I knew that, but it meant something to me. It meant I was capable. I had decided to do something and, despite the many bumps and twists in logic I had to employ along the way, I had done it. I had succeeded at something. Giving it up because I was embarrassed to admit who I was would be a step backward.
I slowly brought a spoonful of ice cream up to my mouth and licked it, not touching the spoon with my tongue.
6
voluntary responses to
involuntary sensations
The hill man first came to me while I was in my bed one night, a detail-less 2-D hallucination. The hill man walked up the hill until he reached a medium-size rock about three-quarters of the way up. The hill man stumbled over the rock, fell down to the bottom of the hill, picked himself up, and started walking up the hill again, where he again stumbled on the same rock, fell down the hill in the same way, and again started walking up the hill. It was like a very boring 8-bit video game, and it lulled me to sleep within an hour.
I thought of the hill man for most of the next day, while making self-portraits in acrylic on tiny canvas boards in my room. The hill man’s journey up the hill had no beginning and no end. By the end of the day I had thought of him (with varying degrees of focus) for almost ten full hours, and he still had not made it up the hill without stumbling over the rock.
Same thing the next day.
Same thing the day after that.
As far as unwanted repetitive thoughts went, this wasn’t so bad, contentwise. For as long as I could remember, after thoughts like I’m feeling great, or I’m having fun, my mind compulsively listed all the things I regretted most in my life: Ruined my mom’s childhood doll on purpose. Faked tears when my great-grandma died. When someone of authority talked to me, I would often think, Don’t kiss her, don’t kiss her, don’t kiss her, until the authority figure stopped talking to me. But the hill man was far and away the most persistent unwanted thought I had ever had.
One night in bed, after a couple of solid weeks with the hill man, I concentrated intently on his journey. I believed that if he made his way over the rock and to the top of the hill, I could finally stop thinking about him. But my brain was stuck in a loop. Over and over and over, the hill man stumbled over the rock. I laughed a little in my bed in the dark, thinking that I was just pretending I could not control my imagination. Then I redoubled my efforts and tried again. I zoomed in to focus on just the man, the way his legs moved, carefully guiding his foot over and to the other side of the rock. But it wouldn’t work. He always tripped. I had no control.
I felt at odds with my mind, as if it were a separate entity from myself. It was like I had been tricked my whole life into thinking I had the ability to think whatever I wanted, and was suddenly given concrete proof that I did not have that control. I could not imagine the man going up the hill without stumbling, nor could I will him and his pointless journey out of my mind.
The hill man remained with me in some form for almost all waking hours. Sometimes I would lazily let the images play in my mind, not trying to control the hill man at all. Other times I would concentrate deeply, trying to help him overcome the imaginary rock that now seemed like one of my biggest problems in life.
The neck thing was the same but different. It began several weeks after the hill man. I flexed the left side of my neck, causing my head to turn to the left slightly. I didn’t know why I was doing this. There was no reason for it. It didn’t feel particularly good.
In theory, I had total control over the movements of my body. The neck thing wasn’t a spasm. I performed the neck flex just as I would perform the series of movements necessary to scratch an itch. It wasn’t unconscious. It was deliberate. But, then again, not twitching my neck made me feel uncomfortable, just as leaving an itch unscratched would. I wanted to flex my neck. I couldn’t stop thinking about wanting to flex my neck. I simply had to flex my neck. So I did. Sometimes this would satisfy me (but was it really me who was being satisfied?) and sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes I had to flex my neck multiple times to feel satisfied. Sometimes dozens.
I didn’t know how visible my neck tic was, but I wanted to keep people from seeing it. I would pretend to itch my ear, cover my neck muscle with my hand, or put my hood up. Sometimes I would excuse myself to the bathroom and flex as hard as I could, trying to satisfy the urge.
I didn’t want to tell anybody. I had never heard anyone describe the persistent unwanted thoughts and uncontrollable body movements I was experiencing. It would sound freakish to explain that I could not stop imagining a man trying to climb a hill, even though I didn’t want to imagine it and the thought wasn’t interesting, and that the man couldn’t even climb the hill all the way, and that I was obsessed with getting myself to imagine him making it up the hill all the way, even though, as previously mentioned, I did not care. And the neck thing, which was possibly related, possibly worse, possibly even less logical: an insatiable need to jerk my head around unnaturally, especially in front of people I did not want to
notice me.
These could only be symptoms of something very bad, I thought. A personality disorder. The beginning of my psychotic breakdown.
Eventually I told my mom. I tried to approach the subject delicately, as I didn’t want her to think I was crazy.
“It’s silly but I can’t stop thinking about it,” I said, describing the man on the hill. “Sometimes I think about him for hours.”
“Have you tried doing anything to relax?” my mom asked. “Like massaging your temples or deep breathing?”
“I’ve tried, but I just think about him even while I’m doing that stuff. It’s like I don’t have control over my own mind. Also, I keep doing this thing with my neck. Like, flexing my neck muscles. I’m afraid people can see it and my neck is always sore.”
My mom picked me up from school one day and took me to the doctor, and the doctor referred me to a neurologist.
“I think about this man who walks up a hill and then falls down. He does it over and over, and he never makes it up the hill because there’s a rock that he trips over. Once I start thinking about him, I can do it for hours. I picture him going up the hill, tripping, falling, and then going back up the hill over and over.”
“Those sound like some pretty intrusive thoughts,” the neurologist said.
“And then, I don’t know if it’s related,” I said, “but I have to move my neck a certain way, sometimes over and over. It doesn’t feel right unless I do it the right way. Even if I do it the right way, sometimes I still have to do it a bunch of times.”
“What happens if you don’t do it?”
“If I don’t do it I can’t focus on anything else. I just keep thinking about how I want to flex my neck.”
“Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat?” the neurologist asked, looking at my mom. With the attention off me, I took a moment to scan the room. The office seemed plain and notably un-brain-doctory. I expected an X-ray of a brain or something on the wall, or plastic models of brains scattered across well-loved bookshelves. There was nothing on the walls but the neurologist’s diploma. There were no bookshelves or decorations or even a rug. Just a desk and three chairs.
“No, I haven’t,” my mom said.
“Oliver Sacks is the author,” he said. “It’s a must-read. There is a chapter about Tourette’s syndrome. The way Oliver Sacks writes is just remarkable. The whole book is astounding.”
I don’t want to read a book, I thought angrily while nodding politely. I want you to t
ell me what to do.
“Tourette’s syndrome?” my mom said. “Is that what you think Chelsea has?”
“It sounds like Tourettic tics,” he said. “With some obsessive-
compulsive tendencies that are causing the intrusive thoughts,” he said, writing something on a pad of paper, which he then handed to me. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, it read. Then he picked up his prescription pad and wrote me a prescription for a low-dosage antipsychotic.
Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder were definitely terms I wanted to keep hidden. I’d rather people think I was making erratic movements for no reason than for a reason that made me sound mentally ill. They were terms that were misunderstood or barely understood, both by me and by the culture at large, and I didn’t want to be associated with them. I also believed they weren’t the correct diagnosis. I hadn’t expressed clearly that I was in control of the neck movements. That it was the compulsion to do these things that was out of my control, not the actions themselves. If I focused hard and used all my willpower, I could prevent myself from performing the movements.
And the hill man. I still didn’t believe it was anything more than me being weird, my attention-seeking personality tricking myself into believing I couldn’t control the outcome of a thought.
I blamed myself for describing my symptoms unclearly.
At the same time, the terms also soothed me. I wanted them to be mine. If there were names for what I was experiencing, that meant my strange and embarrassing behaviors were at least common enough to have been identified, which meant there were other people who did the same kinds of things, which meant maybe this wasn’t my fault, that maybe fault existed somewhere outside the realm of my responsibility. Deep in my brain, some mysterious synapse was misfiring, the whole system inaccessible to my conscious desire not to do weird shit.
I had no idea what the drugs were supposed to do to me, so all summer I looked for changes of any kind. Did I feel calmer? Did I have less physical energy? Were my thoughts changing? Was I able to control my imagination more effectively? Could I remain still for any length of time at all?
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