Lights On, Rats Out

by Cree LeFavour

  So what good is the diagnosis to me? Most usefully I can reflect on the cluster of behaviors, symptoms, and emotions and try to head them off by pulling them apart to expose the underbelly of the problems various behaviors resolve for me—burning, vomiting, isolating myself. The worst I can do is label myself “abnormal,” “sick,” or “mentally ill.” I’ve long since concluded that humans are fundamentally weird creatures. I burn myself with cigarettes and that, along with a raft of other traits, qualifies me as borderline—not the other way around. It’s not because I’m borderline that I burn; the burning makes me borderline. This is a sneaky, essential distinction I’ll be working through for quite some time to come.

  Not surprisingly, under this large, shoddy circus tent of a diagnosis come behaviors that may have succeeded in eroding the analytic space. Part of this might be read from the affective intensity, the emotional tenor, of the exchanges between me and Dr. Kohl during sessions. I toyed with his emotions and tested his allegiance in the most sadistic way as I burned myself and looked forward to showing him the damage I’d done. We fought and argued and grew too close, occasionally pushing the proper limits of the relationship because he wasn’t going anywhere and neither was I.

  The certainty that Dr. Kohl wasn’t going to just catch and release me, given all the vomiting, burning, and suicidal threats, might have undermined the central work of creating an intimate space based on a shared intellectual engagement. The lofty air of pure talk was, after all, part of what I initially fell in love with and is in large part the plane psychotherapeutic treatment is intended to exist on. But to treat me with a more traditional emotional coolness when I was at an age that wasn’t quite full adulthood, when I arrived with a fragile belief in human connections and a well-evolved set of internal conflicts, might have driven me away. I’m sure Dr. Kohl fostered the emotional bonds I formed as well as he knew the risks that came with them.

  CHAPTER 39

  Guilt→Sex→Excitement

  Dr. Kohl’s posthospital limits and demands defined by our contract carry a rigid formality that is meant to reenact the parenting I never had. The agreements I’ve made with him are meant to hold me accountable to someone other than myself for the first time. And yet they have had the effect of also making me more dependent on him. I fight with him over the rules, angry and alienated from him one minute, sucked back in by his gravitational pull the next. I feel that he’s laying these scourges in my way for the sake of provoking a fight. I hate him for it.

  “I’m really tired of this therapy shit,” I tell him in an expletive-ridden outburst at the end of December. “I can’t believe I have to check about cutting my hair. It’s mine. Fuck this. I’m leaving. Such a fucking game. OA is such a game. I play your fucking game. I go there just like you’re telling me to. HOW DO I KNOW I’M NOT BECOMING SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO BECOME?”

  “You fear control by a masterful source,” he answers. It’s the 11s again and the connection between him and some external power turning me into something I’m not. For all I know this is the same power that’s made me a chameleon all my life—as if there’s a broader sense of falsehood in the universe that continually manipulates me to serve its purposes—the purpose of the people I encounter, the purpose of keeping me isolated and in doubt. When he prods me to socialize I resist and complain.

  “I’m totally isolated and have no friends, no one to hang out with.”

  “It’s hard to have friends when you have to control everything,” he says. True enough. Although it’s worse than that—what I need from friends is gratification, maybe even homage. My capacity for real friendship is stunted. As insecure and inferior as I often feel, the independence I rely on arises out of a sense of omnipotence. This is the charming “fuck everyone and everything” part of me.

  Maybe that’s why I fight so hard to be alone with Dr. Kohl as the sole object of my attention. If the demands he makes are intended to loosen my narrow focus on him by moving me into a wider, more social world I’m determined it’s not going to work. After all, I have him and that’s really all that matters, even if posthospital he’s less the confessor than the strict parent.

  Back then he was coaxing a needy toddler to trust him; now he’s trying to manage a rebellious teenager by setting rules and limits. We fight over whether or not I’ll agree to go back on an antidepressant. I question why I would I go back to it when it seemed to have no positive effect on me and carried now, no less than before, the great inchoate danger of compromising my “real” self—that ever-present danger of “becoming something I don’t want to become.” We do math together because I’d always believed I couldn’t be good at it. I also had the Graduate Record Examinations (GREs) to master if I was going to apply to graduate school. All of these small attentions are his way of holding me accountable, taking care of me, and helping me normalize my relationships.

  Despite the structure and thrice-weekly appointments (I went from four to three in January 1992) I don’t trust what’s happening to me. The nightmares, mixing sleep with waking, are crazy-making and come in concert with the blinking 11s; I’m not done questioning my sanity. I can’t seem to make sense of the inside and outside—how false the world feels and how scared I feel.

  “Maybe the only true authentic you is crazy and you only pretend to be sane,” he says, half teasing.

  “Yes …” I answer tentatively. It’s as if he’s instigating, forcing me to confront my fear because he trusts I am sane.

  “If anybody knows you’re crazy …” he says with a smile.

  “You do.” I finish for him. “Only you’d say I’m not …”

  At the bottom of the page for the day he writes, “The sanity uncertainty and confusion come from internalizing two disturbed parents. Mother is ill, beyond the alcohol. She feels better with Dr. Kohl or sick friend because it is clear to her who is sick or well.” Not able to trust myself to judge, I use Dr. Kohl to hold me intact when nothing else in the world remains steady.

  “I got very close to burning myself,” I tell him in mid-January. “IT’S SUCH A GAME.”

  “I made you a deal in here or you’re out,” he reminds me.

  “Fine—you won’t go along or be nice to me, so we can have this little game. I perceive myself as not having a relationship with someone.” In other words, I’m trying to convince him that it feels as if my connection to him has been reduced to a game of chicken, a practical engagement in which he props me up and makes the rules while I flounder. I’m doing what I can to resist the progress he’s trying to make by throwing myself at him as explicitly as possible. Our energies have been siphoned off into a defense against the goals of therapy through intense transference. I’m resisting change by clinging to him.

  “You can’t have me, so you will have no one,” he suggests. I’m not answering this pointed, loaded statement so I head for the arsenal.

  “I can’t make that leap from burning is a big deal to it’s acceptable.”

  “As if the ends justify the means.”

  “Yes,” is all I say. I’m not entirely sure what he means. I honestly don’t think the burning is a big deal—still. I guess he means that feeling better by cauterizing my desire for him can’t be justified.

  “No one was there as a child to talk over stimulating yourself or the guilt and shame you felt.” As usual he’s leaping to root causes, but I’m right with him.

  “I actually thought of that. Felt totally forbidden,” I confess.

  He then writes, “GUILT→SEX→EXCITEMENT.”

  As Freud noted, the analyst must “keep firm hold of the transference-love, but treat it as something unreal, as a situation which has to be gone through in the treatment and traced back to its unconscious origins.” Dr. Kohl is attempting to get at the root of the dynamic between us and around burning by tracing the transference to its origins. He must bring “all that is most deeply hidden in the patient’s erotic life into her consciousness and therefore under her control.” Whether or n
ot Freud overemphasized sexual drives isn’t in contention—it’s fair to say he did, not to mention how he framed female sexual desire. But in this context his point stands; Freud got a lot of things right.

  In April Dr. Kohl writes out a few goals for treatment to himself:

  1 Help her, free her to expand relationships, loving, nurturing, “out there.”

  2 Deal with transference to prevent unbearable dependency.

  3 Expand her “appetites” by supporting broader experiences.

  4 Help her learn to fight for and express her needs.

  I’m putting up a fairly heroic resistance to his efforts. I cut my finger “by accident.” I’ve talked my way out of going to OA. I’m sick of people.

  I call him to tell him “I’m toying with cigarettes. Close …” Then at the next session I say, “Saturday and yesterday I held cigarette close to finger, never directly … looks different now.” In other words, I sort of, very mildly, burned my finger.

  “It tests, pushes, by escalating something … After I got off the phone it did seem crazy to do it. I didn’t even want to. When it seems not good it seems stupid, not horrible. I’ve never been concerned it was wrong. Only hurts me.”

  “Been abused.” This seems like a non sequitur.

  “No big deal I’m burning myself.”

  “What?” Then he realizes I don’t mean it in the present continuous tense with the latest minor burn I’ve just confessed to, one of many I haven’t told him about. I simply mean it as a thing I do in general.

  “I dreamed Nicole was burning her arm. I was freaked, horrified.”

  “You’ve been through it all,” he says, not that helpfully but with sympathy.

  “Yes … burning seems meaningful in relation to trying to survive. Not a big price to pay in order to survive.” I’m determined to defend the practice—as I say, it doesn’t hurt anyone but me.

  In his notes for the session he observes, “Eased up on the OA limit and she’s pushed this [burning] boundary.” Then he lists my “4 choices,” none of which he ultimately forces me to make:

  1 Drop out of therapy.

  2 New therapist.

  3 Back to OA (I let her out of this), math, roommates, no burning.

  4 Hospital.

  There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do with how I’m feeling, other than to keep coming back. So I unload my misery at his feet. He’s not afraid of it and he never tells me to put it away even when I give up.

  “Being alive is a put-on and a fake.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Musical Chairs

  Eventually Dr. Kohl’s patience wears out as I delay finding roommates and a house to share with them. He sets deadlines to bring in the classifieds and prods me to approach the people I’m acquainted with through my former job. Finally, under his threat of not seeing me anymore, I throw myself in with a former coworker and her friends, who are planning on getting a house together. One is my friend Jess. I love and trust her but spend no time with her. Our friendship is truncated by her girlfriend, Olga, who, unlike Jess, brings with her jealousy, neediness, and other obligations of friendship I’m generally allergic to. The other three, one man and two women, are distant acquaintances. It’s done. I’m moving.

  I leave my apartment on 4/1/1992, quickly undermining the purportedly positive effect of my roommates by staying in my room, door closed, music up loud, writing. More useless words, practicing the only form of deliberate concentration I know. I write more poetry and then write what I can about Dr. Kohl, but I lack perspective; it’s litter. As I’m so practiced at doing, I hold on to a presentable veneer for display when passing through the kitchen or catching one of my roommates on the stairs. The only good part of being there is seeing more of Jess by frequently sharing a smoke with her on the front steps. It’s easy to get smaller and more invisible by the day in the big Victorian I share with so many bodies. I have plenty of practice hiding.

  I wish and don’t wish to hear someone else in the house. Book in hand, cigarette burning, I write and pass days secreted. Voices in the kitchen, feet on the stairs, I have no idea how to break the familiar pattern of feeling dispossessed.

  Not long after moving, when I’m alone in the house, I lie in a hot bath drawn in the shared bathroom, door locked. Turning the lights out, I’m a body suspended in warm liquid, the slosh of water and its scent in the dark more a temperature than a thing to take in with the nose. I float bodiless. I imagine my familiar outline, nothing to show above the waterline but two buoyant breasts and a patch of black pubic hair. And my head, of course. I try to relax, but all I can think is how natural it would be to put my mouth beneath the surface and forget to breathe for a while. Soon I could forget even the dark and the warmth I sought in this element. Too bad I know it will take more than a fantasy to finish me off. The body is unwilling. I suspect it takes a churning ocean far from shore to drown at will—and then it’s not will that does it but hypothermia or a riptide or so much salt water in your mouth you can’t breathe after a while because every time you cough to force it out of your lungs you gulp down more of the liquid that will eventually suffocate you. As Anne Sexton writes, “Real drowning is for someone else. It’s too big to put in your mouth on purpose.” So I give the fantasy away and climb out of the tub, squandering the hot water. The drain makes a sucking sound for me, its one and only tired metaphor.

  Turning the light on, I stare in the mirror at the reflection of my naked body, the legs I loathe; the arms, wide jaw, broad shoulders; and the breasts, really my best feature. Firm. Proportional nipple. Not too big but definitely big enough. I can’t look long—my face is blotchy and hideous; my cheeks and eyes, off-kilter, are horrible. Tongue stained a foul brown from too much nicotine and caffeine. Fine blue veins passing across my forehead feed me, making my pulse go whether I like it or not. I look to the noisy drain and cheap, molded white plastic tub, entertaining the idea of making a terrible mess of it with one of the razors I hoard. Forever quiet, no march of hours, no voice, mind departed. Did I say fuck you? Struggling to listen for myself, I wrap my wet body in a towel and tell the thought to go away and play.

  Without burning and vomiting—my recourse when I need to let go of myself—I don’t quite know what to do. The less of me there is, the lighter, the more I feel the power of denying desire. Then there are the 11s and their favorite toy, the cigarette, goading me to take to burning as the psychic eraser I long for. I’m left to loathe my body, the material self I can see clearly enough to hate. There’s no dimness dark enough to hide.

  The options before me: 1. I can go back to the hospital and rot or find a pipe and a bedsheet. 2. I can trust Dr. Kohl not just when I’m with him but beyond 112 Church Street, play by his rules, and come up with a reliable version of myself even if it’s one certain to be fake. 3. I can “leave,” which is to say die now.

  The strongest grapnel holds; Dr. Kohl keeps me in place.

  Once the move is over I focus on finding a job, if only to get a tiny piece of normal back. I’ve been cashing disability checks of $196.71 every month since 11/11/91. I don’t recall asking for them and I don’t deserve them, so by the time the daffodils, tulips, and lilacs have bloomed and withered, by the time Lake Champlain is busy with what looks too much like toy sailboats, I’m back waitressing at Sneakers, the popular breakfast joint that fills to overflowing with college kids every weekend.

  Why go back there, given how much I hate the job? Because I know how to do it, it’s easy money, and it’s comfortable. I don’t have to learn anything new or prove myself. Starting over isn’t in me. They like me there. I always showed up, worked hard, and made the customers happy. Why not hire me back?

  The mirrored backdrop of Bacardi, Myers’s Rum, Gilbey’s Gin, Tanqueray, and the rest obscures the reflection of my face, all smudged black eyeliner, dirty hair, and chapped lips. Such as it is, it’s all a performance for the people waiting in the long rowdy line. I don’t exist for them yet, the loud music drowning me out. In mi
nutes I’ll unlock the front door and click on the cursive neon “SNEAKERS” sign.

  On this Saturday morning, like every other weekend day at 8 A.M., they rush as if I’ve started a round of musical chairs. Once they’ve claimed a spot they want me—all of them at once and not soon, not in a minute, but now. I deliver myself with a smile as if this is the best part of my day, as if there’s nowhere I’d rather be than bringing them everything they desire while chatting them up as if we’re old pals. I give it all to them as though I mean it, even when I feel pieces of me coming off and drifting to the floor with the jagged tops of the dups I rip away to stick on the nail for the cooks. Danny. Chris. Carbon copy. “Order up!”

  By the end of the day parts of the customers are stuck to me, clinging with maple syrup and raspberry jam until I can shower. They always forget to pay for that, the part they leave on me as I question the quality of their hunger: “Scrambled, fried or poached?” is just the chorus. “Coffee?” “Tea?” “Half-and-half or whole milk?” “Skim?” “Honey?” “Orange juice?” “Mimosa?” “Bloody?” “Salt?” “Omelet?” “Cheddar or Swiss?” “Wheat, white, rye, pumpernickel, or English muffin?” “Granola?” “Yogurt or milk?” “Fruit, no potatoes?” “Side sausage?” “Patty or link?” “Side bacon?” “Full or short-stack?” “Blueberry, banana, or plain?” “Waffle?” “Real maple?” Between sets of beverages, condiments, meat, eggs, and bread I take to the bathroom, lock the door, and turn out the light. The dark and I rest together. A full minute of muted disguise replenishes me before I emerge into the light to take their money away from them, greasy bills, sticky coins. I’m greedy for it all no matter how unclean.