But still, something felt treacherous. Like I’d forgotten something. Like something had happened that was about to end me. I racked my brain for the source of this danger. Did I get too drunk toward the end of the night? Did I say something wrong? Did I tease my friends too much, push too hard? After half an hour of suffering through endless doubts, I leapt out of bed and checked my email, because it would be good to get some work done, even though it was Sunday. I killed a few hours this way, eyeing the clock carefully for the moment it hit ten a.m.—late enough to be socially acceptable, right? And then I texted my friends: “that was fun last night! did u get home safe? urrghh hangovers amirite? man i can’t really remember the end of the night! did i say anything stupid?”
As I waited for a response, my mind raced so fast it vibrated. I took a shower and tapped my fingernails and paced around, the pitch of the thrum getting higher and higher until an hour later somebody woke up and texted back, “omg. last night was pure magic! thank you for inviting me, i will never forget it! umm what do u mean stupid? like stupider than usual? kekeke jk ilu.” Only then did it feel as if I could exhale the tornado of bees that had been thrashing in my lungs. Only then could I exhale the thing I called the dread.
The dread arose when I was editing a tricky radio story, or I said something irritating at a party, or I admitted to a friend that I didn’t know where Persia was and she grimaced and said, “Iran,” like I was a tier-one dumbfuck. It seemed as if other people might be immune to moments like these; they somersaulted through their failures and ended up on their feet. But when I made a mistake, the dread crept into my field of vision and I couldn’t see anything except my mistake for an hour, maybe even a day. Still, usually, these moments could be cured with a gulp of whiskey and a good night’s sleep.
Then there was something larger—seemingly random hours or days or months when the dread swelled and became profound, like an enormous dark shadow lurking underneath me as I treaded water. I thrust my face underneath the surface to try to name the source of this dread but surfaced only with the usual guesses: I must be lazy or I’m making mistakes in my career or I’m spending too much money or I’m a bad friend. And then I worked as hard as I could in a dozen directions in order to satiate the beast.
If I was at a restaurant, I analyzed the health content of each item and agonized over a dollar price difference. If I ordered a burger, I couldn’t enjoy how good it tasted because I’d be worried about its fat content or greenhouse gas emissions or whether I was eating enough fiber. I made a star chart and hung it on my closet door, awarding myself stickers when I did more freelance work, created more art, got more stories on the show. Always, always: I tried to be good. But when the dread was at its most terrible, no matter what I did, I was never good enough.
The great black dread started to ruin everything. I didn’t know how else to feed it—what it wanted from me. I cried at random moments during the day, my hair fell out in clumps, and I wondered if I should distance myself from everyone I loved in order to protect them from me. Because the dread told me that I was on the precipice of fucking everything up. That one day, very soon, it would strike, and it would take, and it would kill.
Sometimes the dread actually did strike—and it struck often with men. I was confidently flirtatious with boys I dated. But as soon as we made things official, the dread would ring like tinnitus in my ears. In the first months of a new relationship, I had dismal visions: A boyfriend flashed me an impatient look and I fast-forwarded through to the end, to some tragic domestic scene five years later when our love was spent and all that was left was resentment. In order to quell these disturbing prophecies, I asked for affirmation over and over, fishing for compliments every time I looked in the mirror: Ugh, my skin is so bad right now. How can you love me? Oh, I’m so stupid. You should just dump me. You still like me, right?
I asked them for support, asked if I could come over even though I just saw them yesterday. Then I freaked out that I was turning into a needy leech and pushed them away. I disappeared for days, and when I returned, I was resentful of them for abandoning me.
Eventually, all men tired of these charades. They sighed and said, “I’ve already told you that I love you and that you’re beautiful a million times. Why do you need me to say it again?” I apologized. I said that maybe it had something to do with the way I was raised, and they looked deflated. One of them pointed to the banner of multicolored letters I strung in my room spelling out This Too Shall Pass. He demanded to know what happened to that strength, that optimism I’d led him to believe I possessed. Hadn’t I told him in the beginning that I’d overcome all of that? And once I sensed the men pulling away from me, I pulled away, too, so I could be the decider, the one with agency in the impending split. But then I was always a shameful, pleading mess when they told me they were leaving me for good.
One of these men was a guy who loved cyberpunk and postapocalyptic fiction. (It was San Francisco, after all, and my childhood sci-fi obsessions had transformed me into a dystopian dream girl.) We wrote each other stories and went shopping for survivalist supplies at REI and did an apocalypse photo shoot with combat boots and machetes among the rubble at Albany Bulb. I shaved half my head because he said it would be hot. Less than a year into our relationship, he took me to a gun range for the first time, and I was delighted to find I was a great shot: All of my bullets traveled right through the head of the paper man-shaped target. A week later, the guy dumped me. He said it was because I was too intimidating; he was afraid that one day, I’d wake up and shoot him in the head, too.
I was devastated. For three months, all I consumed were bottles of Jameson and a single box of cornflakes—a small handful a day, and even that made me nauseated. I lost so much weight that my ribs formed a stepladder, my vertebrae sharp shells pushing dangerously out from beneath my skin.
But I thought I fixed this problem, I muttered to myself all day long. I thought I became a nice girl. I picked and picked at my memories, trying to figure out how, despite my best efforts, the horrible, rotten core at the center of myself managed to get past my defenses and worm its way out. I questioned every word I uttered, every movement I made. How was I supposed to be?