Doorknobs and Scantrons
by ELISABETH DONNELLY
After I graduated college, I got anxious. Freed from the pressures of tests and books, of making sure my grades were good enough to keep my scholarship, I drifted into a life of waking up at 11 a.m., sleeping for twelve hours with frightening regularity, and an aimless temp job.
I wasn't aware of it while it was happening. My brain started to skid, my thoughts played on a repetitive loop. Suddenly, every little incident in life mattered, and it was way too important: if a stranger shoved me on the subway, I overreacted, swearing out loud. The sight of a train crowded with Red Sox fans, with very little room for my own body, would send me into fits. If a mouse scurried through my room, I ended up crying so hard that I hyperventilated into a bag.
I was functioning enough – while also standing on the precipice of an eating disorder at the time, the type of disordered eating where nobody knew that Powerbars made up a large part of my diet – but I was barely holding on. If the first few years out of college are a test of your fortitude, well, I was failing. I had not even showed up to the class. Salvation came in the form of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. After a barrage of standardized tests without the stress – Did I tap my foot 32 times before I go to bed? Do I sleep a lot? Was I scared of lightning? Answer A, B, C, or D – I found out that I was crazy enough to get in the program, and to get free cognitive therapy for Anxiety and Related Disorders.
Eight sessions later, I was "cured," and making decisions about life. Jobs to apply for, hearty square meals to eat. Things were improving, slowly. But I had to go back. Since the Center was a research institute, once I finished my round of therapy, I was required to go back for follow-up sessions. This meant more imitations of standardized tests, complete with a thick stack of Scantron sheets that I had to fill out.
I like to try new and exciting ethnic foods. I don't like myself very much. I'm scared of flying. Sometimes I lick doorknobs.
After answering four straight pages of do I have X psychological disorder? I got loopy. Picture it: a piece of paper with fifty declarative statements ranging from Small dogs scare me to Sometimes I hear voices. I had to answer a,b,c,d, or e, on a Scantron sheet, filling it in with a pencil, corresponding my letters to never, seldom, neutral - in the middle, sometimes, always. By the time I get to declarative statement #175, my brain was falling out of my head. Slowly. I dealt with this monotony by scribbling the odd statement down on a piece of scrap paper. Taken together, it was turning into some great crazy-girl slam poetry. Like if Sylvia Plath was good friends with Saul Williams.
My follow-up session happened to be on the first real spring day in Boston, where the city shook off the shackles of winter and became a hellhole of blossoming flowers and pollen choking the air. In celebration, my nose was running non-stop. I walked into the CVS in a haze and grabbed the first box of pills that promised sweet allergy relief.
Two hours later, I was lying on a sofa in the basement of my college library, dead asleep with that week's New Yorker on my face. Everyone else in there was younger. In college. Not temping and technically unemployed. An errant cell phone rang, waking me up. Luckily, I was in time to head down to my follow-up appointment at the college clinic.
At the clinic, the research assistant took me into a boardroom with comfy chairs. Her first mistake. She started talking at me, expecting a reply of never, sorta, kinda. Are you still afraid of mice? Do you think that you're going to die? Does that noise the radiator make annoy you?
If I replied sometimes or always, I was expected to elaborate. When did the mice scare you, last month? I grumbled yes and no as much as I could, trying to game the system so it'd end soon. I nodded off between questions, apologizing for "just being REALLY tired." Eventually it came crawling to an end, and I gave her my Scantron sheets and was free to go.
After the appointment, I fought the sludge in my veins and made my way home. I reached in my purse to check up on the allergy medicine I bought earlier. It was knock-you-out Benadryl. Of course. I blushed and kept going, thinking about my future nap.
The next day, I got a phone call from the research assistant. This wasn't typical. "Elisabeth, hi. I have your papers and they're all great. Thanks for coming in yesterday. But there was one thing in your papers that I found very disturbing, and combined with your behavior...”
Oh. "What?"
"You wrote I like to try new and exciting ethnic foods. I don't like myself very much. I'm scared of flying. Sometimes I lick doorknobs –"
I interrupted her. "Those are from the Scantron sheet. I was struck by the way all these sentences sounded. I was writing them all together like poetry."
"Really?"
"Really. And I was on a lot of Benadryl yesterday."
She let me go, telling me that I should give her a call if any problems popped up, and don't hesitate. She cared about me. It was comforting, in a way. Even though I knew I would try my hardest to never see her again.
The anxious years of my life feel like lost years, where I was floating around in the morass of my mind, to the detriment of ever really living. It would have been nice to say goodbye to them by wowing the research assistant with my clear-headed sanity and calm. But the truth, the day-to-day experience of dealing with anxiety ended up being a whole lot knottier. It always is.
Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her tumblr here and her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about John Cheever.
"Down Like Me" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)
"Lies" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)
"May Seem Macabre" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)
Sol LeWitt, Map of Amsterdam without the Amstel River, 1976