I had an idea: I should publish my memoir on my blog. So that is what I am doing. If you want to start at the beginning, start with The Prologue. If you want the actual book, it’s available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, Baker & Taylor and Borrow Box.
“You have a cold,” the doctor said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. But.”
The doctor flipped through my file. I waited for the death sentence. Cancer? A tumor? Something too exotic to diagnose?
“You seem to come here for a lot of minor complaints. Colds. Headaches. Food poisoning. A spider bite.”
It had been an impressive spider bite. A circle of skin on my left calf had turned pink and warm to the touch and swelled up to a diameter of at least two inches. My skin had never reacted so violently to a bug bite. I’d had to show the bite to a doctor just in case.
The doctor snapped my file shut. “I think you should see a therapist. Your student insurance covers ten visits.”
Therapy? Me? What if my friends found out?
Therapy was for bored housewives and people who could not get their shit together. I did not fall into either category. I was an Ivy League student, writing a senior thesis about the publication of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and headed to law school next year. I barely ever cried.
Clearly, though, I was doing something wrong if this doctor thought I needed to talk to a therapist. “Okay,” I said as he handed me a sheet of paper with information about the college’s mental health services. I felt like I should say something more to convince him that I was a normal, successful student who rose above her emotions, but the words got stuck in my throat.
Maybe I could use therapy to learn the right way to act so no one would ever again think my feelings were getting the better of me.
***
My new therapist ushered me into his office. He seemed old—in his early thirties, at the very least—and was wearing glasses, a white lab coat, and grey slacks. The blinds were drawn.
I sat down on a chair on the other side of the room and took note of the large box of tissues on a nearby table. Hopefully I would never need them.
“So why are you here?”
“One of the doctors suggested it. He said I’ve been coming to the student medical center too often.”
“Do you think you’ve been coming too often?”
“All my friends think I’m a hypochondriac, so maybe.”
“What do you hope to accomplish in therapy?”
“I want to stop acting like a hypochondriac.”
“Why?”
“Because hypochondriacs are weak and pathetic. People laugh at them.”
What I meant was that I thought hypochondriacs were weak and pathetic. I thought feelings were silly and degrading.
I have tried to understand where and how this aversion to feelings started.
Maybe I learned it from the movies. I watched a lot of Star Wars and Indiana Jones growing up. The heroes almost never took a moment to linger on unpleasant feelings. If someone important died, they got sad for 2.3 seconds before throwing back their shoulders and facing the next attack from Darth Vader or Nazis.
Maybe I gleaned it from books. I favored big fantasy adventures like The Lord of the Rings and just like the movies, those stories did not dwell on messy feelings like sorrow and loneliness. Even if a character cried, I only had to flip through a couple of pages to get back to the adventure. The message I internalized about life was that emotions deserved very little attention from a heroic character.
Then again, maybe my overdeveloped sense of independence contributed to the way I avoided crying. From an early age, I wanted to be able to do things all by myself. In preschool, I learned how to read. In kindergarten, my mom gave me Ramona and Her Father, a book with chapters and almost no pictures. We sat down on the couch and started to read the book together, but after a few paragraphs, I pulled the book away, insisting I was going to read it by myself. The girl who wanted to read by herself would have loathed asking her parents to help her navigate messy feelings. I had to handle my emotions alone.
Except I did not like the way I felt when I was sad, lonely, embarrassed, or rejected. I learned to shove those feelings away. It was better to listen to some cheerful music and do my homework than to let myself cry when I was dumped two days after my first kiss or when I found out my friends had dressed up in their fanciest clothes and had “prom” at a diner without me.
Whatever the reason, by the time I was in the office of my first therapist, I was determined to be strong and rise above any ugly feelings that might try to ruin my day. Even if that meant acting like everything was fine when my eldest cousin died.
***
After several sessions, the therapist observed that my medical complaints had started during the spring of my freshman year.
“I guess so.”
“Did anything happen before the spring that might have triggered your fear of dying?”
“Um,” I thought out loud. “I don’t think so.”
The therapist waited.
“My cousin Kim died.”
“Tell me about that.”
I took a deep breath. I had barely spoken of Kim’s death since it had happened. “It was January. I was a freshman. I saw Kim for the last time ever on Christmas Eve . . .”
On my dad’s side of the family, I was the fifth of sixteen grandchildren. Three of my cousins lived in Michigan, but the rest of us were born and raised in Los Angeles. Family gatherings, from barbeques to baptisms, were frequent and crowded with cousins. Christmas Eve was the most important. Since before I was born, everyone had always celebrated Christmas Eve at my Uncle Phil and Aunt Berta’s house. Aunt Berta made lasagna, there was this amazing pink Cool Whip “casserole,” and the house was crowded with about thirty cousins, aunts, uncles and family friends.
“Kim was sick. But not sick like she was going to die. More like sick because she had had the flu for a week.”
I was hanging out with my cousins Emily and Julie on a couch near the Christmas tree. As kids, we had played tag in the backyard with our brothers. When we felt too old for tag, we played poker with pennies and nickels. Now that we were in college, we just liked to sit and gossip. Emily, Julie, and I had gone to the same all-girls Catholic high school and our classmates were always up to something amusing.
Kim came into the living room. She was thirty-one, and I was not quite nineteen. Despite all the family gatherings, I did not know her very well. I had been the sort of kid who wanted to hang out with other kids. I was not interested in grownup lives, and with our age difference, Kim always seemed like an adult to me. I assumed I would get to know her better when I was older myself and we had boring grownup stuff, like mortgages and grocery lists, in common.
Kim was helping her mom get dinner ready. We chatted while she snapped open a tablecloth and smoothed it over a folding table.
“How are the college girls doing? Anyone have a boyfriend?”
“We bantered, and Kim coughed into her arm.
I winced sympathetically. “I heard you had the flu.”
“Had?” Kim laughed. “Try the present tense. This has been the longest flu of my life.”
“Christmas Eve with the flu must be fun.”
“Oh, it’s fantastic.” Kim smiled. “But it’s worth it. This is the first year that Timmy kind of understands what is going on.”
At two and a half, Kim’s son was the baby of the family.
“Then what happened?” My therapist dragged me back to the present day.
“That was the last time I ever talked to her. A couple of days later, she was hospitalized. I wanted to visit but my parents vetoed that idea. But the doctors discharged her and said she was doing better. I came back to Dartmouth for the winter quarter. I forgot about Kim being sick…”
I started to cry and reached for the tissues. I had rarely cried in front of anyone. Hell, I had barely ever cried in solitude.
My parents had called my dorm room on a Sunday morning, waking me up. Kim was gone, they said, she had died the day before, in her sleep. I remember crumpling forward into an origami position of shock—elbows on knees, head in hands, legs numb.
“But the doctors said she was fine. They discharged her from the hospital.”
“I know.” In the background, I thought I could hear my dad crying. He had been only thirteen years old when Kim was born and made him an uncle.
I sobbed so hard, my chest hurt. My roommate got out of bed and hugged me from behind.
“Can I come home for the funeral?”
“Of course. Dad already called the airline. There’s a flight that leaves Boston this afternoon. Can you get packed in time to catch the eleven o’clock mini coach?”
I disentangled myself from my roommate’s hug and forced myself to stop crying as I talked travel logistics with my parents. Then I got in the shower and sobbed alone. I was in brand-new emotional territory. My great-grandmother had died when I was seven; my childhood dog had been put to sleep shortly before my senior year of high school; and that was it. I was not prepared to deal with death, not when I was in New Hampshire, far from my home in Los Angeles, in front of friends I had known for less than four months. Especially not with my lifelong aversion to crappy feelings.
I did not cry for Kim again—not even during the funeral. But now, in my therapist’s office, I found I was crying and in need of the box of tissues. For a moment, my chest felt lighter, as if a darkness were leaving my body, but then my brain got involved and resisted the rush of emotions.
I sniffled and pulled myself back together.
“Sorry about that.”
The therapist shrugged. “That’s fine.”
I was horrified with myself. If I had to be a person who did therapy, at least I could be the sort of person who smiled and acted fine during said therapy.
By our next appointment, I had everything figured out and explained it all to my therapist. “I’ve been acting like a hypochondriac because Kim died suddenly and unexpectedly.”
“Oh?”
“She had been taking diet pills that damaged her heart. Fen-phen.” Kim died in January 1997. Less than a year later, the Food and Drug Administration pulled fen-phen off the market. “But at the time she died, we had no idea why she had been sick, so I became anxious that I too might collapse and die without warning. That’s why I’ve been running to the student center for every medical symptom.”
The therapist nodded and tapped his pen against a clipboard. I remember how smug I felt, coming to that conclusion about my anxiety. My conclusion, however, was just a rushed and amateurish attempt at concocting a psychological explanation to put a bandage on the emotional equivalent of a severed limb.
“The next time I get stressed about a medical symptom, I just need to remind myself that I’m being a hypochondriac. Then I can talk myself off the ledge.”
The therapist tapped his pen even faster against the clipboard.
“So I don’t need any more therapy. I’ve resolved my issues. I’m cured.”
With a completely neutral tone of voice, the therapist said, “You think you have resolved all your issues?”
“Yes. Now that I know what is happening, I can control it.”
If I had known the problems my hypochondria would create after I had my first child, I might have been willing to invest a little more time in therapy. Then again, I would never have believed how badly my efforts to conceal my hypochondria would backfire.
Continue reading Chapter Two right here. Or just get the entire book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, Baker & Taylor and Borrow Box.
