Chapter 37
37
NOW
THE WEDDING WAS IN THREE hours. Doubtless they were all gathered around the massive mirror in my parents’ bedroom, the whole bridal party, drinking champagne and smearing lipstick onto each other’s faces. The boys were to get ready in Chelsea Morning, but really they were goofing off on the water trampoline. I could hear their happy hollering from the screened-in porch of Little Lies. They probably wouldn’t even change out of their swimsuits until the very last minute.
Helene stuck her head into my cabin to invite me to come get ready with the rest of the bridal party. I told her I wasn’t feeling well. That I should just get ready alone. That I didn’t want to risk getting her sick. She walked over and gave me a willowy hug. Then she looked me in the eyes and said, “Don’t worry about the wedding. You just focus on feeling better. Okay?”
Well. I definitely felt worse after that.
All addicts are liars.
My father told me that when I was fifteen. By then, I knew all about his past: the cocaine, the alcohol, the ultimatum from my mom. Everything.
I know what you’re thinking. If you’re an addict , you’re thinking, that means you’re a liar. How can I believe what you say?
It’s a valid question. And I’ve got the answer for you.
We addicts don’t just lie; we believe, too. If you aim to deceive others, the first person you convince is yourself.
—
AT THREE P.M., I SPOTTED another figure coming up the boardwalk. Manuel.
“Shit.” I scrambled into bed and pulled the comforter. Just in time—I heard footsteps turn onto the last hill before the front door. The door swung open. More footsteps. The door swung shut. I exaggerated my breath into the long, throaty exhales that sleeping people make. A pause. Then more footsteps, this time walking away.
—
FOR SO LONG, I THOUGHT my obsession with work cured me of my OCD. I thought that because the scariest thoughts—the ones that damned not my ambition but my moral character—were gone, I was saved. Research every copywriting technique known to man? Build templates over and over in your mind until they’re as close to perfect as possible? Refuse to take a single day off? Panic spiral on the weekend, when you have too many free hours? Absolutely. Hand it on over. Progress, as my old shrink called it.
It wasn’t so much a question of the thoughts coming back. I saw that now. They’d been quiet for a long time, the crazy thoughts, the ones most disconnected from reality: that I was a sociopath or a cheater or in love with one of my siblings, or any number of the terrible, outrageous things that I, at one point or another, genuinely believed to be true of myself. So quiet, in fact, that I believed them to be gone. Forced off the island. Drowned in the water of my mind.
I was wrong.
—
THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS you can use the word excess . You can attach it to a noun to indicate that the object in question exceeds the necessary amount. For example: Karma’s bakery shares their excess cupcakes with the homeless population of Chicago. (They do, in fact.) Or: The parents were glad to be rid of their excess child.
In copywriting, we speak of wringing excess words from the page . This idea refers to the overflow, the words that do nothing more than distract from your core message. Look—people don’t like to read. They might claim they do, but they’re lying. The human brain does whatever it can to cut the excess, to skip words or phrases unnecessary to grasping the overall message of the piece. Nobody looks at an instruction manual with the intent to read every single bloody goddamn microscopic word in its overstuffed pages. Absolutely not. You read enough to understand that screw A goes into hole B, then you throw six hours of some poor copywriter’s life straight into the recycling bin. Goodbye and good riddance.
Of course, excess need not modify a noun; it can also be a noun. One way to use it mirrors the word’s function as an adjective: an excess of something. An excess of cupcakes. An excess of children. Any more than four can be considered an excess of children.
And finally: excess itself. A standalone concept. No modifiers, no qualifiers. Living in excess. A display of excess. This usage can be applied to a wide range of scenarios; the only requirement is that the situation in question be so over the top it seems disconnected from reality.
This place, these summers, this family…it’s one enormous display of excess. Isn’t it? I mean, for God’s sake, who needs an entire island? Who needs ten boats? Who needs six children? Just stop at 2.5, like everyone else. Biology can only handle so many variations on the same pair of chromosomes. Eventually it runs out of useful combinations. That’s why the youngest kids turn out so messed up, why we drop out of college or get arrested for stealing cigarettes or suffer silently beneath the weight of debilitating mental illness. We’re made of leftovers.
—
IN A FAMILY OF EIGHT, if you want to be heard, you yell.
But there’s more than one way to yell, isn’t there? There are thousands of ways. Infinite. As many ways as there are children in a family. Addiction, isolation, starvation, workaholism, excess—
In some ways, these methods are even more effective than yelling.
In some ways, the loudest screams are silent.
From: Memory [email protected]
To : Conscious Mind [email protected]
Subject : Press Release on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Below is a brief press release detailing some Hard Truths? with regard to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Read & syndicate as necessary.
When you say you have OCD, most people think it means you wash your hands a lot and keep your room hyper tidy. They picture Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets , stepping over sidewalk cracks and eating breakfast at the same table in the same restaurant every single day. We’re the quirky misfits of psychological disorders. Harmless. Neurotic. Adorable, even.
That depiction? Bullshit.
OCD isn’t about washing your hands. It’s about living in constant fear of the outside world or, in many cases, of yourself. It’s a mind that attaches itself to whatever obsession it can find. One stuck in permanent fight-or-flight. One that can’t stop looking for tigers, even though it left the jungle millennia ago.
But when you get good at refocusing that obsession on something else—I mean, really good, incapable of thinking about anything but work or food or drugs or whatever it is that you choose—you look inside and find nothing. No fear. No sadness. No guilt or terror or memories threatening to eat you alive from the inside out. Nothing. Only stillness.
And sure, you might not have a social life. You might ignore your family’s calls. You might not see your best friend or the love of your life or maybe both of those things in one. But it’s worth it. If running away from your Worries means running away from everything , that includes your heart. That includes all those most unbearable of emotions, the kind that make you want to crawl into a hole. The kind that make you want to disappear.
So you do.
You disappear yourself.