Turtles All the Way Down(38)

Me: Huh?

Him: When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who’s doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating.

Me: Well, what do you have an interest in?

Him: You.

Me: I don’t know how to respond to that.

Him: You don’t need to. Have a good day, Aza.

Me: You too, Davis.

—

I had an appointment with Dr. Karen Singh the next day after school. I sat on the love seat across from her and looked up at that picture of a man holding a net. I stared at the picture while we talked because the relentlessness of Dr. Singh’s eye contact was a little much for me.

“How have you been?”

“Not great.”

“What’s going on?” she asked. In my peripheral vision, I could see her legs crossed, black short-heeled shoes, her foot tapping in the air.

“There’s this boy,” I said.

“And?”

“I don’t know. He’s cute and smart and I like him, but I’m not getting any better, and I just feel like if this can’t make me happy, then what can?”

“I don’t know. What can?”

I groaned. “That’s such a psychiatrist move.”

“Point taken. A change in personal circumstances, even a positive one, can trigger anxiety. So it wouldn’t be uncommon to feel anxious as you develop a new relationship. Where are you with the intrusive thoughts?”

“Well, yesterday I was making out with him and had to stop everything because I couldn’t stop thinking about how gross it was, so not great.”

“About how gross what was?”

“Just how his tongue has its own particular microbiome and once he sticks his tongue in my mouth his bacteria become part of my microbiome for literally the rest of my life. Like, his tongue will sort of always be in my mouth until I’m dead, and then his tongue microbes will eat my corpse.”

“And that made you want to stop kissing him.”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“That’s not uncommon. So part of you wanted to be kissing him and another part of you felt the intense worry that comes with being intimate with someone.”

“Right, but I wasn’t worried about intimacy. I was worried about microbial exchange.”

“Well, your worry expressed itself as being about microbial exchange.”

I just groaned at the therapy bullshit. She asked me if I’d taken my Ativan. I told her I hadn’t brought it to Davis’s house. And then she asked me if I was taking the Lexapro every day, and I was, like, not every day. The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.

When the conversation paused for a moment, I asked, “Why’d you put up that picture? Of that guy with the netting?”

“What aren’t you saying? What are you scared to say, Aza?”

I thought about the real question, the one that remained constantly in the background of my consciousness like a ringing in the ears. I was embarrassed of it, but also I felt like saying it might be dangerous somehow. Like how you don’t ever say Voldemort’s name. “I think I might be a fiction,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Like, you say it’s stressful to have a change in circumstances, right?”

She nodded.

“But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?”

“I don’t follow how that would make you fictional.”

“I mean, I don’t control my thoughts, so they’re not really mine. I don’t decide if I’m sweating or get cancer or C. diff or whatever, so my body isn’t really mine. I don’t decide any of that—outside forces do. I’m a story they’re telling. I am circumstances.”

She nodded. “Can you apprehend these outside forces?”

“No, I’m not hallucinating,” I said. “It’s . . . like, I’m just not sure that I am, strictly speaking, real.”

Dr. Singh placed her feet on the floor and leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “That’s very interesting,” she said. “Very interesting.” I felt briefly proud to be, for a moment anyway, not not uncommon. “It must be very scary, to feel that your self might not be yours. Almost a kind of . . . imprisonment?”

I nodded.

“There’s a moment,” she said, “near the end of Ulysses when the character Molly Bloom appears to speak directly to the author. She says, ‘O Jamesy let me up out of this.’ You’re imprisoned within a self that doesn’t feel wholly yours, like Molly Bloom. But also, to you that self often feels deeply contaminated.”

I nodded.

“But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”