This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,71
He pauses. “Jocelyn?”
The ache in his voice pulls me out of my spiral. I hate that I made him sound like that. I hate that when I look him in the eyes I can see the hurt in them.
“Jocelyn, you know that if you want to pull out of the contract, I won’t hold it against you, right?”
WILL
In the beginning of her freshman year, my sister started to act even moodier than usual. The only thing that would make her smile at any family gatherings was when one of our younger aunties cooed over her, “Look, Grace, when did you become so fit! Sha, are you a model now with that waist?” Invariably this would spark controversy with my nne nne’s generation, who grumbled that she was too skinny and should gain weight, and Grace’s resting frown would come back. She was always a picky eater, but that year she started to prepare her own food, mostly raw vegetables and soups. It wasn’t until she fainted one day after tennis practice that her coach took my mother aside and told her that she’d caught Grace purging in the locker room the week before.
“I do not understand it,” my nne nne vented to my dad on the way home from the hospital. She had flown in from Chicago as soon as she’d heard that my sister was sick. “Why does the girl think she needs to lose more weight? She is stick thin as it is.” She was truly flummoxed, completely unable to comprehend how her perfect grandchild had suddenly become the problematic one. “Such a waste. There are people going hungry in parts of the world, and yet children in America are vomiting recreationally.”
“They don’t do it for fun, Mmá,” my mother said sharply. “It’s a disease.”
Dr. Rifkin had introduced me a long time ago to the concept of cognitive distortions—those moments when your brain is an asshole and misinterprets your world. It was kind of the same thing with Grace—she had something called body image distortion, so that whenever she saw her body reflected it was like she was looking into a funhouse mirror.
I’ve been able to recite the cognitive distortions I’m prone to since fourth grade. That doesn’t mean that I have total control yet over how I personalize (in short, my tendency to feel responsible for bad things that happen to other people), how quickly I jump to conclusions, and my apocalyptic-level ability to catastrophize.
It’s always easier to see fault lines—both your own and others’—than to fix them.
So when I realize that I’ve been listening to Jocelyn and silently ticking off the ways that her brain is tricking her (polarized thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive), I know that just pointing them out isn’t going to be helpful. Even after pretty much half my life in therapy, I still bristle when my dad gently points out a distortion or suggests that I write in the workbook Dr. Rifkin gave me for the days in between sessions.
What I can do, though, is relieve one of her stressors. She’s only doing that stupid business program for her father, and maybe because she doesn’t want to let me down.
I think I’m doing the right thing by giving her an out, I really do. But I really, really should have given more thought to how her asshole brain was going to interpret what I said.
JOCELYN
If I felt like lead before, now I feel like ash. All it would take is a puff of wind, and I’d blow away.
“You want me to break the contract?” I whisper. I hate the way my voice breaks. I hate how pathetic I am, that we’re less than a week into this stupid plan and Will already wants to bail.
“No!” Will practically explodes in horror, and for the briefest moment it’s as if he’s reached out a hand to physically steady me, even though we haven’t touched. I know in my gut, in the release of tension in my chest, that he means it, and I wish I could bottle the intensity of his emotion and squirrel it away somewhere.
It’s funny how your brain works, isn’t it? How it can warp reality like Silly Putty, pulling your emotions this way and that, so that you can think that something is absolutely true one minute, only to have doubts about it the next.
I just want to know what to think. How to be. I don’t want my life to be a shapeless, endlessly changing plaything at my brain’s