~ September 12, 2003 - 5:07 a.m. ~
Paralyzingly Shy
::Sigh::I can't sleep. My fever's come back, and despite the news that I now have a ride to the Tolkien Gathering (thank you Ivy and Jamie) I'm just feeling really incredibly down right now.
Maybe it's that my fever's come back and my head is so stuffy that I can't breathe. Maybe it's that I didn't memorize enough of the Tain for tomorrow, and my head is so wonky right now that there is no more hope of accomplishing more tonight. Maybe it's all the fucking negativity I've been surrounded by lately. A friend has been staying here the past couple of nights because her boyfriend, who is probably leaving her, has asked her to leave their apartment until he decides whether or not to dump her. pAndi and Tim have been at squares lately, and I feel like Gina-piggy-in-the-middle (to rip off Father Ted). Tim has been sick and rather blue about the fact that, despite his immense talent for virtually everything, no one but the people at Student Services of his alma mater will hire him. And I haven't been able to work on my writing projects lately because I've been sick and worried about everyone else.
I'm also so afraid of just retreating into my own little world. It's gotten to the point where I don't know what I'll do if I don't just somehow make it as a writer, because the notion of just going to a job interview scares me. Dealing with new people scares me. I mean, I do it because I have to, otherwise I'd never get any groceries or even be able to go out on the street, but so often I find myself in a cold sweat when forced to speak with the girl in the checkout line or something. I'm petrified of becoming agoraphobic, and I know I'm at risk for it.
Oh god, this is turning into one of those late night confession things. If you don't want to read for the rest of your life, abort mission now.
So, most of you know I have panic disorder. I was unofficially diagnosed at the age of 15, officially diagnosed about six months ago. It's a genetic thing, part of a trio of disorders which also includes post traumatic stress syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder. If you have one, it is almost impossible not to have another. For example, PTS often morphs into PD, if the tendencies for OCD are there. In my case, my father, who is mildly OCD, nearly drowned as a child, which resulted in PTS and eventually PD. I was born predisposed to PD, with an absurdly mild case of OCD. Actually, I've never been diagnosed as OCD, but the genetic likelihood of me not having it is like one in a million, so the most likely scenario is that I have a latent form of it, which often happens. Women in their early twenties to early thirties who were extreme PD sufferers in their teens often become severely agoraphobic.
Well, enough with the clinical stuff. Anyway, panic attacks in people without PTS are triggered by things that evoke the memory of something that terrified you as a child, usually. That's the way it is in my case. It can be a word, or a phrase, or a picture, or just a memory that I can't get out of my head. The first time it happened, it was because someone giving a class presentation said the word "chaos." It's weird; I must have heard that word a zillion times before and since, but it got me going, and before I knew it, I was hyperventilating and trying to scream and not to cry all at once, and I thought I was going to die. To make matters worse, right when I got so woozy that I was near passing out, the fire alarm rang, and two friends carried me down the stairs. Once we got outside, I think I fainted or something, because the next thing I knew I was being taken to the clinic and being revived and everything.
This is crazy, but I was with The Beast then, and after about half an hour later, he came in to see me. We had been together a month, but this was the first time he kissed me. Every time after that, whenever I had an attack, he'd come running to my side. He made me feel so safe, and eventually I grew to depend on him to get me through the damn things. If I had gone to therapy then, that probably wouldn't have happened. People who are treated with therapy are cautioned not to rely on one specific other person to see them through the attacks. The ensuing dependency can completely fuck you up if that person isn't there when you have an attack.
So, the Beast was great at those times. I think he never enjoyed being with me more than when I was twisted on a clinic bed, pale, in a cold sweat, and utterly helpless. I would grasp at his hand with my little nerveless fingers and beg him not to leave my side. And the nurse and his teachers would let him stay because they didn't want me to have another attack. We were just the picture of romantic harmony, I suppose. He would be all attentive and sweet, and people who dropped in would say how lucky I was to have someone so devoted to me.
Outside the clinic, however, things were far less serene. *He* would remind me how lucky I was to have him hang around me when I was being such a wet blanket, and sometimes he would try and goad me by saying all my known triggers, to see if I would start hyperventilating again. He told me how miserable and demanding I was, how terrible my poetry was, how fake and false the characters in my plays sounded and how improbable my plots were, how terrible I was a geometry (we were in the same class), what a huge prude I was, and how I was always bringing him down. He told me countless times that I didn't deserve him, and I believed him. Why shouldn't I? Only two guys before him had deigned to give me the time of day, and one decided he was gay anyway. No one wanted me but him, it seemed. Of course, he kept me away from my friends as much as he could, so I really didn't have anyone's opinion but his own to listen to. He convinced me to lie to my parents, to drive him everywhere, to sneak out and be with him. He told me that if I really loved him, I would do anything he asked. So I did.
I tried to be everything he wanted me to be, doing everything he asked me to do. He would always ask me what I would do if he left me, and I would beg him not to say such things, protesting that I couldn�t live without him. I changed my writing style to suit him, listened to the music he liked, dressed the way he asked me. When we met, my hair came to my bellybutton. Throughout our two year relationship, my hair got shorter and shorter at his request, until it was finally only a few inches. It frizzed horribly, and I had to use lots of gel to keep it in line, and it didn't matter anyway, because he hated it. He said it was too short now and ugly, and agreed with me that I looked like a boy. He would wait until the gel was dry, and then jump on me and bend the stiff bits of my hair until the gel lost its hold and my hair was a frizzy mess of white flakes where the gel came off.
I remember I used to write him countless poems, and late at night I would read them to him over the phone. He would tell me which ones were worth revising and which ones he disliked so much he couldn't stand them. I've kept all my poems over the years, and when I go back through my notebooks, I see all these notes saying "Never read to the Beast again" and "Beast liked, rework" and similar shit. Toward the end, I had completely lost my voice, and it took me almost a year before I could write again. When I finally did, it was like learning to do it from scratch.
Despite my efforts to please him, Beast announced about a month before my birthday that he wanted to take a break from me, saying I was too much for him to handle. I spent the next few weeks trying to stay away from him and please him at the same time, but he'd just end up blowing up at me. The week before my 17th birthday, we were back together, but everything was very tense. I was bending over backwards to make him happy, and he would tell me to just shut him and stop bothering him. The day before my party, he broke up with me, though he showed up the next night anyway. He said he didn't have my present on him, but to meet him at school on Monday so we could talk.
That Monday, he gave me my gift, a silver Aquarius necklace, and told me he'd gone to my party so I wouldn't feel embarrassed in front of my friends. He said he didn't want to see me anymore, but maybe one day we could be together again.
I was crushed. I went around for about two weeks in a daze, completely depressed. I had two panic attacks then, but he didn't rush to my side, and I was left grasping Meggers' hand, fighting for breath without him. It was like I had to learn to breathe normally all over again, as though I hadn't overcome countless attacks before. Finally one night, I showed up at Barnes and Nobel when I knew he was working there. I shuffled around the racks until I found another friend who worked there, and asked her to cover for the Beast and send him outside to talk to me. I waited in the parking lot for half and hour before he came out to me. I poured my heart out to him, telling him how much I missed him, how I was nothing without him, how I could never live without him. Between my tears, I begged him to come back to me, and after forty-five minutes of prostrating myself before him, he admitted that he missed me, and we could be together again. That night when he got off work, we talked on the phone for hours, and I apologized about a million times for all my faults and shortcomings. I promised him things would be different this time, and I wouldn't let him down ever again.
The next night, he called me and asked me to come pick him up. Unquestioningly I did, and we drove to the beach and parked for four or five hours. I was out way after my curfew, but at the time it was worth it. He told me how much he loved me, and how he couldn't live without me, and how he had been a total asshole to me. I told him not to be silly; I was the awful one. He promised then that he would never leave me, and he even said he wanted to marry me, and I was so glad to have him back, I thought I'd die of joy. We made out for hours, and I caught hell from my parents when I got home, but I didn't care.
I didn't see him at all in school the next day, but that night while I was on IM, he messaged me. And broke up with me. Furious, I call him up, telling him what a coward he was to break up with me via a machine. That was about the last bit of backbone I had that night, because everything else out of my mouth was a pathetic slew of "I-love-you-don't-leave-me's". I was crying my eyes out as he told me that he hated the sniveling, groveling thing I'd become. He told me I was weak, and he could never be with someone as pathetic as me.
"Why do you love me?" he finally asked.
"Because when I'm with you, I feel happy and complete," I said. "You make me feel-"
"That's enough," he sneered. "See? You don't love me at all. You just love the way I make you feel. I'm not even a person to you."
"No, no!" I protested. "I do love you. I love the way you're always kind, and thoughtful, and-"
"What about when I'm being a dick? Do you love me then?"
"I love you in spite of that."
"If you really loved me, you'd love me always. You wouldn't love me in spite of my faults. You'd love me because of them."
I was speechless. Months later, I would read almost those identical words in "Atlas Shrugged" and I would wonder ever after if that was were he got them from. When I read that chapter, I understood why Cheryl was overcome by an anger and helplessness that cost her her life.
We broke up for good that night. By the next day, he had told almost everyone that he was through with me. I spent the next two weeks moping, having panic attacks, and randomly bursting into tears. I could almost never make a drive alone anywhere without pulling over to cry. Friends kept telling me how they had never liked him, and always thought I could do better, but I didn�t believe them. I was convinced that no one would ever want me again. I was totally despondent until one morning when my parents and I had it out.
I refused to get out of bed for school, and both Mom and Dad had to come in and scream at me until I got out. I was running really late when I just sat down in the foyer and started crying that they hated me, and that I thought they were cruel for making me go back to school. This was when my parents laid into me for the giant pity party I was having. They told me how special I was, and how the Beast was clearly a jackass, and how I was being really selfish for acting like the world was over where there were people in the world dying of hunger and AIDS, and wars, and poverty, and how I would realize soon what a moron I was being.
My parents have never really used that kind of laid-bare tough-love tactic on me before or since, but it fucking worked. All of a sudden, I got really angry with the Beast. In a matter of minutes I was shocked that a) I was ever with him at all and b) that he had the audacity break up with me. It was a very healthy dose of rage, and it got me into the next week just fine. Eventually it wore off, but by then a support system of friends had buoyed me and my hopes, and I realized that my parents were right. I had been a huge moron. If I had really been the pathetic excuse of a human being the Beast so obviously wanted me to be, why were there all these people around me, telling me how great I was? No one was paying them. They were my friends, the same dear friends I'd had since middle school, who were still there for me, despite what some dumb guy did or said.
Eventually, I just ended up embarrassed that I had ever fallen for the Beast or his ration of shit. I was able to move on rather quickly, and about two months after I had gone back to being pretty normal, I met Tim.
Happy ending, obviously. So why do I feel so shit-o now?
It's like this. My PD is never going away. Perhaps it could if I took drugs, but the idea of being dependant on chemicals to keep me sane scares me. Like John Nash, I'd rather rely on the power of my mind.
Anyway, about six months ago, I could feel the attacks brewing again for the first time in almost four years. I was also feeling stressed and depressed, what with the senior year bullshit and Lear and my Indie Study and all, so I went for a depression screening at the college counseling center. Depression runs on my Dad's side of the family (only the women), so I thought I'd better get that checked out. Fortunately, it wasn't depression, just my good old PD coming back to bite me in the ass. And what made it so scary this time was that I knew that I had never learned to deal with the attacks without the Beast. So I did what I should have done when I was 15 and went into therapy to help control things.
I just had all these lingering commitment issues that had surfaced as a result of the PD. I was suddenly anxious about my relationship with Tim, and scared all of a sudden that he was going to leave me if I became a total basketcase. Which, of course, only fueled my fire, driving me further into the realm of bastketcasing. Which only made me loopier. At to this a healthy dose of last-semester-ever stress, and you can imagine the wreck I was. The fact that my dad suddenly began calling me weekly to ask if I had found a job for after graduation yet wasn't helping.
I was in therapy for two months before University insurance pulled the plug, right before finals, no less. In that time, I feel like I overcame a lot of my anxiety about Tim leaving me (none of which was remotely founded, by the way), but without ever really addressing the issue of the Beast and what he did to me, besides telling my therapist that he was the one who used to get me through attacks, and learning to deal with attacks without him. But because we never really talked about him, there ended up being so much that wasn't addressed, mainly, my shyness. See, I was never really able to make friends after the Beast, because my confidence was really shot. All my subsequent friends were made through Tim, or because of a dorm situation or something, because somewhere along the line, I lost my confidence in myself to attract others to me. Of the few friends I managed to make in college, only a very small few haven't left for grad school or real life or whatever. Most of my friends from high school are so far away, and we rarely talk. They've moved on, made friends, started new relationships and, you know, basic human interactions. I'm the one who's this human icicle, too scared to thaw and introduce myself to anyone. Even with the people I only know online, I freeze up in chat, or drive myself nuts trying desperately to be clever, only to end up sounding dumb. I'm convinced that when I'm just honest about who I am and what I'm into and what I want to do, people will find me boring or stupid or nerdy or pathetic. So I strive to be witty and funny and interesting, but I still always freeze again in the end. Or I end conversations before I want to, retreating into a book or a story I'm writing before I embarrass myself. I always take a book with me everywhere I go so that I have someplace to hide. It's easier than striking up a conversation.
I know I'm being stupid. I know I should just move on. I want to take myself by the shoulders and scream "OK, it's over! Get yourself a fucking life! Who cares that mousiness has now been abusively patterned into your subconscious? You used to be a zippy little fire-cracker! Reclaim your fucking life. No one cares what you say anyway, so just say everything you want to. Be your fucking self!"
I guess that's what this is about. I've been writing for two hours now, and this is absurdly long, and I don't expect anyone to read it all. But I don't think I can be honest about being shy unless everyone knows why I feel this way, if that makes sense.
Ha. My mother always used to say, there's no point in airing your dirty laundry. Some secrets should stay secret. And she's probably right. This whole thing has been so personal that I think it should probably stay personal. But I'm going to post it anyway because that's the only way I can think of right now to exorcise all the negativity I feel. Find the most negative aspect of my life right now, my paralyzing shyness, and just purge it from my whole fucking life.
If anyone who actually gets through this novel of an entry catches me being all shy and coy, and want you to kick me in the ass and tell me to get over it. And if I'm trying to be uber-clever, tell me to be myself. And if I'm boring you, tell me, and I'll shut up until I have something genuinely interesting to say, not just more witty crap.
I'm not going the way of countless of my fellow PD sisters. I am not going to shy myself into becoming a shut it. I'm going to fucking do things, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts. Because if I can't be the person that I was, the confident, friendly, outgoing person I was, then he won. And I'll die before I let that happen.
