Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

I hated to admit it, but he was right. Neither of us knew what we were getting into; we only knew what the other was getting into. I handed over the painkillers and doubled down.

“And when she is good, she is very very good,” John Doe grinned. “But if these are shit, I’ll make her life horrid.”

As Mo drove us home after the meeting, I wondered if I was making a mistake, if this plan was not unlike working with Dr. Ogden. I had started seeing him last year when there was nowhere to turn except my mind. My bad skating streak hadn’t stopped, and one day, when my mother came to pick me up at the rink, she had on the You Are Your Own Self Help Book audiobook, written and orated by Dr. Douglas Ogden.

“Remember: this is the life because it is your life,” intoned a man’s voice as I opened the car door. “Mantras are only as good as how often you repeat them. Repeat after me: This is the life because it is my life. This is the life because it is my life. Why wait to take control? You’re never going to be younger than this second.” The voice inched through the words with soft, creepy gentleness.

“I’ve got a guy in mind for you,” my mother said.

“No pairs,” I answered. “I’m falling enough for two people lately anyway.”

But of course she meant Ogden, and of course I was ready to try anything to get me landing off my backside. She told me he had helped one patient shrink a tumor the size of a grapefruit by imagining grapes.

“But there was still a tumor the size of a grape after?” I asked.

“It’s a miracle anyway,” she said. So she made an appointment at his practice in Weston, Massachusetts, and as we drove there to the sound of mantras, I was hopeful.

Dr. Ogden wasn’t the type of therapist to set up Parcheesi. He didn’t believe in ice breakers and he didn’t believe in chance. He closed the door to his office and pointed to a blue upholstered chair. It looked firmer than it was and I sank down in such a way that I had to look up at him.

“What are you afraid of?” he began. It was strange to see the face of the voice on the cassette tape. He was a big bald man with a flat, square head, and his shoulders looked like giant meat loins encased in a lilac dress shirt.

“Don’t you even want to know my name?” I asked.

“That’s fear talking,” he said. “Digression is a typical fear response.”

“I’m not digressing.”

He stood up and began pacing behind his desk. He’d looked taller when I could only see his top half. “It is very important that you not make excuses. Excuses are roadblocks to success. You must understand that for me to help you help yourself, you must take the responsibility of facing yourself without impediments.” He explained his role like this: you walk through life without seeing your own face or neck. It’s not like a dream, where you see yourself as the lead in some strange movie. I knew my hands and legs but my eyes were another story without a mirror. That was why I needed him, this mirror man. “And if you believe, you will achieve.”

“That’s a tongue twister.”

“Face yourself.” All five fingertips of each hand pushed against each other, almost in a prayer.

“Alright, I’m afraid I’ll never have the triple Salchow,” I said. “I’ve been trying to land it for two years. I’ve tried Pilates and weight training and watching videos of my technique and watching videos of other people’s technique and ballet and cardio and anaerobic intervals and even harness training, where you get strapped into a pulley to practice jump rotation. None of it has worked.”

“Go on.”

“I need it and I don’t have it yet. I don’t know if I can do it.”

“You don’t have it,” he said and paused for affect. “Until you do.”

“So what do I do until?” “You must train your mind to be over matter. If you believe, you will achieve!”

From then on, we spent a lot of time with our eyes closed. It was easier to see desirable outcomes when what was actual couldn’t be seen. There were windmills to imagine and jumps I hadn’t yet landed. I became afraid to watch myself in reality because I was afraid that’s who I’d become.

The method was simple enough: videotape the skate, watch yourself like a re-run, figure out the flaw you didn’t want to do again. Lauren used it with every one of her students, but I worried that the images of my mistakes might eclipse the ideal ones Dr. Ogden had instructed me to imagine for the success of my future. The better thing, he said, was to see my face on someone else’s body, so I transplanted my head to the top of Ryan’s neck. If I fell in my mind onto Ryan’s bottom, Ogden held a framed photograph of his Rottweiler puppy Slasher in front of me.

“You’ve got to be the pack leader,” he said. “If a dog smells fear, he will defecate all over the house. You are the master.”

“Am I the dog in this metaphor?” I asked. “Or is that someone else?”

“Don’t ask,” he said. “Tell.” I didn’t know how to talk to myself. If it was me telling myself what to do, who was myself? Who was this person who wouldn’t think what I wanted to think? Where did she come from and who was the me that was me?

“A monster,” Dr. Ogden said. “A big hairy monster.”

For the exercise, he told me to picture the worst thing I could, so I imagined an older, less aerodynamic version of me. If I could corner it with a pair of scissors and cut it to pieces, I would conquer doubt and fear. Some nights I knotted a ring to a string and swung it in front of my bedroom mirror—“Believe you will believe!”—and in this way I could see that I had mastered myself.

“Let me guess: schizoid,” Ryan said when I told him about seeing Dr. Ogden. “No wait, bipolar.”

“Worse,” I said. “Realist.”

“Do doctors still prescribe Quaaludes for that?”

“Self-induced hallucinations,” I told him.

But the mind was a medicine with contraindications. There were days my brain looked like a disaster movie, ruinous shoulder placements or lax abs flopping the entirety of myself down into bloody plunks. There were days I felt like I was just playing house. I wanted to wield fantasies, and there I was letting them mess onto the ice.

The day I became a regular person, I couldn’t keep my head attached to my body. It was one step ahead of the rest of me through every movement, and as the saying goes, it was one step forward, two steps back. “You’re letting yourself go,” Lauren told me because the clear cut I should have made through the ice was a sloppy skid that widened as it ran. “You’re letting your head get ahead of the rest of your body, and everything is following it in the wrong direction.” She reenacted my mistake to illustrate the importance of keeping the head under control. Her point was that the body was a follower. Look down, and you can guess where you’ll land won’t be your feet. I didn’t want to watch her, because of the imprint it might make on my mind’s eye, so I looked at my feet.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“If you say it, mean it.” To Lauren, meaning was not doing it again. But I wasn’t not trying.

According to Dr. Ogden, what I needed was not to think of what not to do; the mind didn’t work like a litote. I didn’t know how to avoid the thoughts I wasn’t supposed to think, though. “Has it ever occurred to you that a thought occurs to you, not from you?” I’d asked him the day before, but his answer was still windmills. He told me, “Use your head to get ahead.”

On the ice, I gave windmills a chance, but they turned purple. Fruit Loops skated past. Double Axel. Triple Salchow. Another double Axel. I would never be as young as her. I would never be as young as I was now. It was a sport for little girls. At least I was still a minor. So I skated a circle, and the wind I created loosened a strand of hair. I saw a streak of black cracking my vision. A symptom of hunger or hair? I didn’t know which, but I would not be stopped. The seconds shed. I skated faster. Speed equals distance divided by time. You must be tired. I was tired. I leapt.