Нед Виззини: It's Kind of a Funny Story

If the shrink is classy, she’ll (mostly she’ll, occasionally a he’ll) have a bunch of DSMs, because they come in different editions—III, IV, and V are the most common. I don’t think you can find a DSM II. It came out in 1963 or something. It takes like ten years to put one out, and they’re working on VI.

Jeez, I could be a shrink.

Now, in addition to the DSMs, there are an assortment of specific books on psychiatric disorders, things like The Freedom from Depression Workbook; Anxiety & Panic Attacks: Their Cause and Cure; and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Always hardcover. No paperbacks in a shrink’s office. Usually there’s at least one book on childhood sexual abuse, like The Wounded Heart, and one shrink I went to caught me looking at that and said, “That book is about childhood sexual abuse.”

And I was like, “Uh-huh?”

And she said, “It’s for people who were abused.”

And I nodded.

“Were you?”

She had a little-old-lady face, this one, with a shock of white hair, and I never saw her again. What kind of question was that? Of course I wasn’t abused. If I were, things would be so simple. I’d have a reason for being in shrinks’ offices. I’d have a justification and something that I could work on. The world wasn’t going to give me something that tidy.

“I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine—I’m here.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’ve been coming here for a while.”

Dr. Minerva always has such amazing outfits. It’s not that she’s particularly sexy or beautiful; she just carves herself out well. Today she has a red sweater and red lipstick that is exactly the same red. It’s as if she went to the paint store to match them up.

“I want to not have to come here.”

“Well, you’re in a process. How’re you doing?”

This is her prompt question. The shrinks always have one prompt question. I’ve had ones that said “What’s up?” “How are we?” and even “What’s happening in the world of Craig?” They never change. It’s like their jingle.

“I didn’t wake up well today.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“I slept okay.”

She looks completely stone, staring ahead. I don’t know how they do this: the psych-poker face. Psychologists should play poker. Maybe they do. Maybe they’re the ones who win all the money on TV. Then they have the gall to charge my mom $120/hour. They’re very greedy.

“What happened when you woke up?”

“I was having a dream. I don’t know what it was, but when I woke up, I had this awful realization that I was awake. It hit me like a brick in the groin.”

“Like a brick in the groin, I see.”

“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”

“And what is that nightmare, Craig?”

“Life.”

“Life is a nightmare.”

“Yes.”

We stop. Cosmic moment, I guess. Ooooh, is life really a nightmare? We need to spend like ten seconds contemplating that.

“What did you do when you realized you were awake?”

“I lay in bed.” There were more things to tell her, things I held back: like the fact that I was hungry in bed this morning. I hadn’t eaten the night before. I went to bed exhausted from homework and knew as I hit the pillow that I would pay for it in the morning, that I would wake up really hungry, that I would cross the line where my stomach gets so needy that I can’t eat anything. I woke up and my stomach was screaming, hollowing itself out under my little chest. I didn’t want to do anything about it. I didn’t want to eat. The idea of eating made me hurt more. I couldn’t think of anything—not one single solitary food item—that I would be able to handle, except coffee yogurt, and I was sick of coffee yogurt.

I rolled over on my stomach and balled my fists and held them against my gut like I was praying. The fists pushed my stomach against itself and fooled it into thinking it was full. I held this position, warm, my brain rotating, the seconds whirring by. Only the pure urge, the one thing that never let me down, got me out of bed fifty minutes later.

“I got up when I had to piss.”

“I see.”

“That was great.”

“You like peeing. You’ve mentioned this before.”

“Yeah. It’s simple.”

“You like simple.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Some people thrive on complexity, Craig.”

“Well, not me. As I was walking over here, I was thinking . . . I have this fantasy of being a bike messenger.”

“Ah.”

“It would be so simple, and direct, and I would get paid for it. It would be an Anchor.”

“What about school, Craig? You have school for an Anchor.”

“School is too all over the place. It spirals out into a million different things.”

“Your Tentacles.”

I have to hand it to her; Dr. Minerva picked up on my lingo pretty quickly. Tentacles is my term—the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary War, which necessi-tated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting in the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and e-mail for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing—homeless-ness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

The opposite of the Tentacles are the Anchors. The Anchors are things that occupy my mind and make me feel good temporarily. Riding my bike is an Anchor. Doing flash cards is an Anchor. Watching people play video games at Aaron’s is an Anchor. The answers are simple and sequential. There aren’t any decisions. There aren’t any Tentacles. There’s just a stack of tasks that you tackle. You don’t have to deal with other people.

“There are a lot of Tentacles,” I admit. “But I should be able to handle them. The problem is that I’m so lazy.”

“How are you lazy, Craig?”

“I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I’m afraid I’ll stutter.”

“Do you have a problem with stuttering?”

“When I’m depressed, it won’t come out right. I’ll trail off in midsentence.”

“I see.” She writes something down on her legal pad. Craig, this will go on your permanent record.

“I don’t—” I shake my head. “The bike thing.”

“What? What were you going to say?” This is another trick of shrinks. They never let you stop in midthought. If you open your mouth, they want to know exactly what you had the intention of saying. The party line is that some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle, but I think they do it to make us feel important. One thing’s for sure: no one else in life says to me, “Wait, Craig, what were you going to say?”