Three Was A Magic Number

Your Lord And Savior. The Anorexic High School Years.

I had my first panic attack when I was 15 years old. I was sitting in Mrs. Gugger’s 2nd period Spanish class and it come on without warning. My heart began palpitating, tunnel vision set in, and I started to feel nauseous. I excused myself from the room without asking and walked slowly down the hall to the bathroom, where I stood around trying to find my breath for a few minutes. When I thought I was feeling better I walked back to the class room. Within minutes, the feeling crept in again, and I once again bolted out of my chair and raced out of the room. I again walked slowly down the hall — this time towards the nurse’s office — and said I was not feeling well, could I please go home for the day. I was back in bed by the time I should have been starting Geometry.

Over the next two years I started seeing a shrink to quell the attacks, and I learned about how stress can manifest itself in different forms, and this is how the stress in my life was affecting me. My parents were separated and still living under the same roof, there was pressure to perform well in school, there was pressure socially to conform to whatever all the other kids in school were doing, and on top of that there was stress over the fact that I could not control my stress. I also began to develop what I now regard as some unusual OCD behaviors during that time period. Since the most commonly experienced physical discomfort I felt during my panic attacks was nausea, I would do everything in my power to take myself out of any situation that might lead me to become nauseous. Like eating. I cut my diet down to anything that could not possibly rot or be prepared incorrectly. I formed routines. I needed to wake up at 6:39am every morning and lay in bed listening to Howard Stern until exaxtctly 6:45am, at which point I would get in the shower, where I would remain for exactly 11 minutes… It went on like that throughout the day. Knocking on wood was a huge part of my life. If the thought of a potential panic attack entered my mind I would knock on wood three times. Then I realized that maybe other ailments could be stamped out by knocking on wood three times, too. So for everything that could possibly go wrong that I could think of — from kidney stones to the flu to cancer or food poisoning — I would have to knock on wood three times. Sometimes I would sit in bed at night and knock on wood 50 or 60 times, and if I lost count I had to start over. It was totally fucked up.

The day after my first panic attack, I survived unscathed. So the first routine I implemented was to listen to the same CDs as I fell asleep to the night before. There was no rationale to that decision, I just thought that since I had made it through the day without an incident I should repeat what I’d done the night before and it would help soothe my thoughts. As it turned out, I would listen to the same CDs every night from that night during my sophomore year all the way through the last day of High School. I had an AIWA 3-CD stereo in my room, and the same three CDs remained in there in the same order for over two years. When I would crawl into bed at night, my routine was that I would hit the “seek” button on my remote control until I saw track number three for the third time. Since the CD player would “seek” between discs, there were three songs I could hear on a given night:

Blur – Coffee & TV – 13 (Not my favorite Blur record at the time, but it was in the CD player so oh well.)
Ben Folds Five – Mess – The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner (Sometimes melodies from these songs still snake their way into my brain)
Ben Lee – I Am A Sunflower – Breathing Tornados (My friend Dan took me to see him at Pontiac Grille in Philly one night and I liked it. Whatever, that was the same night I saw Silverchair at the Trocadero. Does that make up for it?)

I stopped seeing a shrink a few months before graduation, and once I left home for college my panic attacks subsided. I no longer filled the margins of my notebooks with little uplifting notes to myself and ideas for song lyrics, I stopped carrying around pockets full of pills I could rely on in a time of need, I could finally be myself around my friends instead of hiding my anxiety, and most of my obsessive behavioral tendencies subsided. In fact, I still remember the night I stopped knocking on wood. I had just started my sophomore year and my roommate must have heard the soft tapping of my fist against the headboard from across the room. He asked what I was doing, I replied “Nothing,” and that was it. I just stopped right then and there. The last habit I had to break was my nonsensical “Only eat what can’t kill you” diet. That lasted until I met Nicci, because I wanted to impress her. You can’t just eat bagels and drink soda all the time and expect a girl to date you exclusively. When you’re just hooking up or fucking around those things can be concealed, but not when you’re dating.

During my run this morning I was listening to Howard Stern and he referenced his shrink, and all these memories suddenly came back to me. I thought it would make for a good post. A lot of what i used to do when I was younger is funny to me now. Especially the idea of such insane routines, like how I incorporated music into my daily regimen. Maybe it’s not funny to you. Maybe I’m “oversharing.” Oh well. If you people don’t care I’ll just laugh about it with Adam, whose OCD was so bad he did one of those insane boot-camp psychological programs where they make you lick your shoes to prove germs won’t kill you. At least one person out there understands my former plight.