When I voiced my paranoia, both to her and to my other friends, they told me I was nuts.
“I’m also so incredibly jealous of the fact that he and Emily keep having all this bonding time,” I wrote in my journal one day. “I have this stupid irrational fear that he’s going to realize she’s so much cooler than me and fall desperately in love with her.”
The next day:
jesus christ i’m fucking crazy.
i need to get out this moment of crazy right now before it engulfs me.
I’M SO WORRIED THAT HE WILL STOP LIKING ME AND WILL START LIKING EMILY INSTEAD
EEKAACKEEEEKAAAAAACK WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY would this bother me so much?
And the next:
i’m sure emily’s upstairs with the boys now.
it’s funny how the second i introduced her to them i felt like i’d made a mistake . . . i really didn’t want her to come up with us that night. i really did want to keep them separate from her.
(Note that a very good exercise is rereading your journal entries from your teen years and trying to stop yourself from jumping out a window.)
Maybe I subconsciously saw how they looked at each other or talked about each other. Maybe I saw him touch her arm or watch her walk away. Maybe I sensed I wasn’t actually happy doing drugs and playing video games with his friends, but stuffed down that dissatisfaction in favor of snagging a boyfriend. Maybe I suspected the panic I experienced each time I stood outside the door of his dorm room, trying to put on the mask that made me a person he liked, wouldn’t be sustainable in a long-term partnership. But it was easier to blame inevitable fate and misfortune than to admit this wasn’t what I wanted, and my fragmented synapses convinced me that I could sense bad things before they unfolded.
Bad things, it turned out, were everywhere. Not long after my friend swiped my paramour, another friend’s father had a heart attack. Had I sensed it? Not that I recalled, but on second thought, my stomach had felt a little funny that morning. A roommate’s relative was killed in her car by an oncoming driver. Had I known? Come to think of it, I had had a headache that week. I recalled an episode of the Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark?, in which a cursed camera could snap a photo of a subject and predict its gruesome destruction. Was I that camera? Probably not, but certainly I was something.
* * *
In its early stages, as depression starts to seep in, everything is tinged with gray. You are still you, and your friends are still your friends, and your life is still your life, but it feels muddy and overcast, like you’ve relocated to the Upside Down or Seattle. Food starts to taste like air. Laughter is canned. You wake up and walk around the world like you’re wearing weights on your arms and your chest and your back, and you start to wonder if things will always be this heavy. Still, you are fine, you say.
* * *
It turns out a great way to worsen a brain splinter is to study the skeptics. When I returned to school for the spring semester, I enrolled in a class on the history of modern philosophy. I showed up to only about 40 percent of the lectures, but on the occasional moments I peeled my eyes away from Solitaire, I took an interest in the works of skeptics like Spinoza, Descartes, and Hume. As a child, I had often lain awake at night pondering whether anything existed outside my own head (as normal children do), and so when I read about the cogito—cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am—my already warped little cerebral cortex latched on. Sure, if I imagined my friends betraying me, it might come true, but did it even matter if they weren’t real? Who gave a shit about grades if they were just a figment of my imagination? If my parents died suddenly, who’s to say they weren’t hallucinations to begin with?
I floated on this false theory, wondering if I was just existing in a real-life version of the Matrix, my body pumping blood into a machine in an unknown robot-run dimension. Time started speeding up, sending me hurtling through the weeks and months faster than it used to, as if I were living inside a movie montage instead of real life. I was having trouble hanging on to minutes, and I started to wonder if I was even who I thought I was, if I was indeed Rebecca Fishbein, age nineteen, sitting in a dorm room in Baltimore, Maryland. I was just under five feet, with curly hair—for the time being, at least—and blue eyes and slightly blurry eyesight I refused to correct with contacts. I had two parents and a sister and, most of the time, a midterm due. These were the facts. This was my blueprint. Wasn’t it?
* * *
Anxiety takes the gray of depression, turns it red, and twists the edges, speeding up your heart rate and making your hands shake. Anxiety doesn’t just make you sad, it makes you scared, without permitting you to pinpoint a cause or possible solution. Anxiety warps your brain, inserting dark corridors into your future and packing them with threats. When you are anxious, you are always unsettled, no matter how much reading of online forums or deep breathing or crying into the phone you do. If you’re not sure what specifically is spiking your adrenaline, then it could be anything, which means danger lurks from all possible angles.
* * *
Just a few weeks before the Sun-In-cident, my oldest friend’s father died of complications from cancer. I happened to be back in New York for the weekend, where I was visiting a friend of a friend in Astoria, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking tequila mixed with vodka (tequila and vodka—try this at home, kids, and then vomit all over your home!). I woke up with a vicious hangover and a voice mail from my friend with the news. I helped her buy a dress, slept in my childhood bedroom, went to the funeral, and cried on the train back to school.
And so here I was, losing my mind and track of time and dreaming of my own father going into the ground in a box. Thanks to the philosophy class, I wasn’t sure if anything existed outside my shattered little head, but I did know that what I had, I could lose at any moment. The people I loved would one day be gone. The things I knew could change in an instant. They could be taken from me and never returned. And my hair could turn orange and never look normal again.
* * *
The problem with ceding your grasp on reality is that you don’t know it’s happening, because to you, everything feels quite real. You think your hair is falling out when it’s not, because your brain is broken and won’t tell you the truth anymore. You think your parents will die in a car crash on their way to pick you up from school, because that’s what your brain is threatening will happen. You think time will start moving so fast you won’t be able to see it, because your brain has sped up the clock. You think there’s no point in staying alive, because who can live without a functioning brain?
* * *
Unlike people, scorched hair can usually be resurrected, and when I got home after the semester ended, I got a very expensive haircut. The stylist held my overdried curls in his fist and made a face. “It’s horrible,” he said before chopping off the deadest of the dead ends, then dunking my head in what felt like a vat of hair mask. Relief at last. The cut helped kill the frizz (the orange tinge stuck around for months), but it didn’t quite put my brain back together, so I started seeing a therapist. We’d meet once a week at her Upper West Side office, where I’d spend forty-five minutes listing all my physical ailments. “I think you think too much,” she said, after six weeks and $300.
I’d like to say that the therapy fixed me like the cut fixed my hair, but it turns out depression can’t be snipped away as swiftly as dead ends. My therapist told me to email her, but I never did. Instead, I went to Rome for my fall semester and let thin men holding hand-rolled cigarettes psychoanalyze me. (“Bella, don’t be sad, drink more wine!”) After four months in which I exclusively consumed al dente spaghetti, my brain felt back to normal, maybe because I was distracted abroad, or because it was good for me to be taken out of my environment, or because the passage of time had given my skewed inner chemicals a minute to settle, or because gelato has some kind of supernatural healing power. Either way, by the time I got back to school that January, I felt like my old self again.
But that “old self” still had some sadness lingering beneath the skin, like a pimple trying to push itself out of a clogged pore. The myth of depression is that it’s something that gets better, when really it’s just something that lives inside you all the time, sometimes dormant, sometimes not. My Sun-In breakdown might have been the most extreme manifestation thus far of whatever weird shit was swirling inside me, but the weirdness had poked its head out from time to time in my past and would certainly pay me sporadic visits in the future. It’s hard to stop feeling sad when you hate yourself, and it’s hard to stop hating yourself when you’re always feeling sad.
When I was twenty-five, I would suffer a spate of sadness so extreme I feared I’d get drunk and try to jump in front of a subway, so I went back to therapy. Finding that marginally helpful, I stuck with my therapist for a little over two years, until my health insurance changed and I didn’t have the money or the willpower to continue. Then I slid into a fun period in which I frequently cried at bars, which was great for my friends and for all the strangers who wanted a nightcap but got my hysterics instead. Then, too, I wondered, late at night as I waited (and waited, and waited) for the train, if one day I’d be just the right amount of sad and just the right amount of drunk and take the leap. I considered this without any intention of following through, but when you’ve got the darkness in you, you can’t help but flirt with the idea of doing something that might expel it into the world.
For example, a few months ago I went to the beach and a friend offered me a bottle of something to spray in my hair. “It’s Sun-In,” she said.
I did consider it—for a second.
Honesty Is the Best Policy, but Lying Will Give You the Life You Want
The other day, I was at my parents’ house “working” on this very “book” when I decided to take a look at some of our home movies. A few years ago, my folks burned tapes of me and my sister to DVD, and they’re fun to revisit, unless they were taken when I was in middle school, and then I have to text my therapist. On this particular video-watching occasion, I sped through clips of me as a baby—featuring about a week’s worth of footage of me taking cotton balls out of a bag and throwing them on the floor—and landed on one from August 1992, filmed at the Dutchess County Fair near my grandparents’ house in Upstate New York.
In the video, I’m about a month away from turning three, and I am fascinated by the fair’s petting zoo. I did not grow up around animals. I never had any pets, and the only real contact I had with wildlife were glimpses of rats going home to the sandbox. On tape, I seem a little scared of the farm animals, but then a couple of fair workers show me a goat and let me pet it. I am overjoyed. I am elated. I am the happiest I’ve ever been. “At home, I have a zebra!” I tell the workers. I am, of course, lying.
They say active imaginations are a sign of intelligence. If that’s true, I was the smartest fucking child in the world. I loved to make things up. I pretended the heroine from Beauty and the Beast was my big sister, spinning the tale so convincingly a friend’s parent asked my mother about her “older daughter, Belle.” I told a schoolmate I had two dogs, a cat, and a rabbit, even though the only life-form my mother let into our home was a jar of pond scum I cared for as part of my second grade science class (and even then she worried it might scuff up her floors).
I spent an entire summer at day camp claiming I had already turned seven when really I was only six. I told my friends I was a professional actress and was going to Florida to star in a production of Romeo and Juliet. I bent a paper clip, put it in my mouth, and told everyone it was a retainer. I started a detective agency, which consisted of my “solving” the crimes taking place in my classroom. My teachers couldn’t understand why everyone’s lunch boxes kept going missing. It was because I was stealing them. I solved the mystery!
I told all these lies because I was young and theoretically didn’t know better, even though I absolutely did. I worried all the time that people would catch me making falsehoods, that they would hate me and stop being my friend. I worried they would tell my parents and make them stop loving me. I worried lying would ruin my life. But I couldn’t stop doing it.
Lest you think compulsive lying was just a cute childhood habit, it did not break with age. If anything, as I got older I got better at lying, and my lies became both more believable and more significant. Every instance that dumped new people at my feet—summer camp, high school, even college—was an opportunity to spin a new lie, to make myself into a new human. I lied about dumb things, like cousins I didn’t have and neighbors I’d never met. I lied about parties I’d never been to and cool friends that didn’t exist.
And I lied about boys—people I said I’d kissed but hadn’t, things I said I’d done but was afraid to do for real. Teen boys, it turns out, don’t care much for unrepentant sarcasm and baby fat, and in high school I couldn’t pay a dude to touch me (not to mention I was usually fixating on boys who weren’t interested in me, not that that changed in adulthood). I have fond memories of a particular school event at which I thought a boy in my class was trying to dance with me, but really he was trying to distract me so his friend could mack on the girl to whom I’d been clinging. High school was always that beautiful. But when I made up stories about my sexual prowess, it didn’t matter that I spent most Friday nights babysitting and/or creating complicated family structures on The Sims. While my friends were getting drunk and making out with boys at parties, I was, too. But these were parties they weren’t invited to and boys they didn’t know, since I fabricated them. I refused to get left behind, even if I was catching up only in my head.
* * *
Psychiatrists say compulsive lying stems from a slew of psychological problems, including borderline, antisocial, and narcissistic personality disorders. The interesting thing about compulsive liars is that though medical journals refer to them as “pathological,” they tend not to lie for their own benefit. They’re not trying to cheat their way into a job promotion or wave off a parking ticket or trick someone into hopping into bed with them. Rather, this kind of habitual lying works as a shield for people who believe they are not enough as they are. Instead of presenting the world with a person they hate, they present the person they want to be.
* * *
Liars are having a moment. This year, we have been inundated with stories about scammers and grifters who spun lies so convincingly they got smart people to throw fortunes at them for elaborate, impossible schemes. The story of Billy McFarland’s fraudulent Fyre Festival—in which he managed to swindle $26 million out of investors, not to mention unpaid labor from workers on Great Exuma island in the Bahamas—was so wild it warranted competing documentaries from Hulu and Netflix.
Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has been the subject of a book, a podcast, an HBO documentary, and an upcoming film starring Jennifer Lawrence after reportedly convincing investors to give her hundreds of millions of dollars by falsely telling them she’d spearheaded technology that would revolutionize healthcare. Anna Delvey, the so-called Soho Grifter, who allegedly posed as an heiress to get hotels, restaurants, and socialites to unwittingly fund her lavish lifestyle, is getting a Shonda Rhimes–helmed television series. People are fascinated by these liars. They want to know how the McFarlands and Holmeses and Delveys of the world manage to keep up with their grifts, and why they’re so determined to spin these webs of lies that are sure to tangle and choke them.
I don’t know these people, and though I pride myself on the extensive number of Psychology Today articles I have read in hopes of diagnosing myself with primary psychopathy, I am not a professional armchair therapist. I would also like to think that sporadically inventing high school parties and fictional sex partners is less problematic than claiming you’d come up with a way to have blood pinpricks reveal cancer diagnoses. But a thing about compulsive lying that I have learned after years of living within its grip is that if you do it enough, you start to believe some of your own stories.
When y
ou create your own canon, it can attach itself to your life like a ghost appendage, and things that don’t exist feel like they do. You start forgetting what happened and what didn’t. Did you kiss that boy, or did you tell yourself you did? Are you sure you don’t have a dog and a cousin named Sam? Was it you who lost your virginity on this date to this person, or was it the alt-you, the cooler, braver version who lives in a dimension powered by your mendacious wish fulfillment?
* * *
My lying slowed down when I graduated from college and moved back to New York. In the Adult World, there were no rules and no deadlines and no honor-roll roommates judging me for getting fucked up on a weeknight, and so life outside my head started to feel interesting enough to stand on its own. The new me smoked weed on the street, and went to DIY shows in Williamsburg, and knew people with tattoos in bands, and stayed out until four a.m. with her store manager while he rolled her cigarettes. The new me tripped on MDMA at house parties, and once let a strange man bite her on the face at a bar. The new me was wild and scary and brave, and she was beginning to feel okay about existing in the world as she was, even if the current me cringes to remember some of her exploits.
But slowing down is not stopping completely. I am not good at kicking bad habits. I sucked my thumb until I was in the second grade, and I have the buckteeth to prove it. Even in Adult World, lies managed to dribble out of my mouth when I didn’t want them to, particularly if booze was involved. I’d entertain new friends at bars with stories about dates I hadn’t had and lovers I hadn’t taken, then wake up ashamed, wondering whether they’d remember.
If it feels a tad Jayson Blair–esque that someone with a career based in telling the truth ran so fast and loose with it in her personal life, note that none of this lying extended to my reporting. (Or to this book, just FYI, and unfortunately for all my overburdened friends I have at least a decade’s worth of Gchats to prove it.) If anything, one of the reasons I picked this industry was because the veracity it required offered some relief from my own struggle with it. Writing the truth for work opened up a pure space in my world, one where I could rest from trying to keep up with my lies.
Good Things Happen to People You Hate Page 4
