This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,72
mercy. Is that too much to ask? For things to hold their shape for a little while?
“I’m so tired.” Saying it feels both like I’m finally releasing a breath and like I’m admitting defeat. It’s the worst kind of confession: Weak. Pathetic. Selfish. I think about all the work my parents have put into giving Alan and me a fighting chance. I think of my amah, seventy years old and still waking up at six in the morning to prepare my lunches and start with veggie prep. And I’m the tired one?
“I get it,” Will says softly. “I am definitely one hundred percent absolutely on board with the contract.…” He takes a deep breath, shakes his head.
I brace myself for the “but.” When it comes, though, it’s not what I expect.
“But I know that it’s a lot of pressure. It’s okay to be stressed. It’s okay to have doubts about the right things to say in the application.”
It’s a good thing I’m sitting down, because the realization that this is the first time anyone has given me permission to be stressed? It’s a knee-wobbling revelation. My parents always look at my freak-outs with impatient exasperation and basically tell me to get over it. Priya always just tries to talk me down, tell me how everything’s going to be okay, which just winds me up because I think of more evidence to argue that it’s not. No one’s ever just agreed with me that things suck. It’s refreshing.
“I wish I could just take a nap and have everything be all better when I wake up,” I say finally.
“You and me both,” Will says. As we’ve talked he’s inched in closer to me, and I swear I can feel his body heat and smell the scent of his shampoo, something sweetly sharp that makes my brain whisper, Closer, closer.
My mom and brother will walk in at any second so I resist the urge to lean into him, bury my face in his shirt so I can be surrounded by his smell and shut out the jumbled mess of my thoughts.
Instead I just whisper, “Thanks,” and wrap my hands in my lap.
“Always,” Will says. He’s quiet for a minute, unsmiling, and I feel a growing anxiety as I watch him start to say something, then stop.
“Have you ever…” Will purses his lips and shakes his head. “Okay, there’s no way to have this conversation without sounding like a jerk, except to come clean to you.” He visibly steels himself.
“What are you talking about?”
“So you know those doctor’s appointments that I told you I had to go to?”
“Yeah.” A couple of times over the summer Will had told me that he was going to have to be late for work.
He grimaces and picks at the cuticles on his left hand. “Well, they weren’t dermatology treatments like I said. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“O-kay?” It’s weird. Instead of being apprehensive, I’m just confused and a little curious. It’s just another sign of how much I trust him, despite my brain’s best efforts.
Will takes in a deep breath before blurting out, “I’m… They were therapy appointments. I’ve been seeing a psychologist since I was eight. Anxiety.”
I can’t help it, but my knee-jerk reaction to the word “therapy” is to recoil and to wonder what Will’s been hiding from me. I blink and realize that I need to choose my words carefully.
Because I am hopelessly pathetic, those words do not materialize.
WILL
Among my closest friends, it’s well known that I’m kind of neurotic. It’s a running joke, even, but I’ve never actually told any of them that I see a doctor, or that I have a diagnosis. Or two of them, really: generalized anxiety disorder, with a side of social anxiety disorder.
It’s not that I’m hiding my mental illness, exactly—it’s out there in the open. I couldn’t conceal the lengths I’ll go to avoid certain situations, even if I tried.
Besides, like Dr. Rifkin says, anxiety is a spectrum. Every single person who has ever existed has felt nervous over something at some point in their life. Which means, when I’m doing my exercises and using my coping skills, I can pass for normal well enough, even though my sister would lecture me and say, “There’s no such thing as normal.” She would tell me, “Everyone has their own shit to deal with.” I guess she should know.
Still, I’ve never labeled my shit to my friends, because giving it a name pathologizes it, turns me from someone who