My Age of Anxiety

A true story

There were signs early on, but I was too young to know what they meant. In primary school I heard the phrase, “Step on a crack and break your mother’s back,” and started avoiding cracks. But I didn’t like how obsessive that felt, so I started stepping on cracks to prove I wasn’t obsessive. Then I felt guilty about breaking my mother’s back, so I returned to avoiding cracks. This continued into my first year of college, although I’d long forgotten why and was as buoyant as a rubber duck.

My ego took a hit, however, when Jonnie, a bruised reed of a beauty, refused to date me because I was “shallow.” “Oh, you’re fun to hang out with,” she said, “but you’re all laughs. You need to suffer a little, or you’ll never be deep.” She was hot for Darren, our theatre department’s broody Mr. Darcy, who told me at a cast party one night, “I really don’t care whether I live or die.” I thought, Catch 22: being depressed would get me Jonnie, but then I wouldn’t care.

After a relentless string of post-college failures, I started listening to blues music and drinking whiskey while typing angry stream-of-consciousness poetry. And I thought bitterly, At least Jonnie would go out with me now. The storm that had been brewing ever since I’d avoided that first crack was about to break, but I didn’t see it coming.

I went back to college as a graduate theatre major, and was cast in a strange little one-act play by some broody existentialistic Darren-type. I didn’t like the play, so I stupidly gave minimal time to memorizing my lines. The result? On opening night, as I plowed into the first of several long abstract monologues, my mind went scrubbed-hard-drive blank. When my brain finally rebooted, I saw an audience of 250 nervously coughing at me.

I couldn’t remember who my character was or even what the play was. It was the classic actor’s nightmare. But instead of improvising something, anything, I stood there meditating on the absurdity of pretending to be someone I wasn’t for people who’d paid money to sit in the dark and watch me do it.*

I finally regained some tattered strand of memory, barked out a vague approximation of the monologue, and wandered offstage. I made my way through the rest of the show with the words “What do I say next?” running around screaming inside my brain.

Afterward, at the cast party, I guzzled a gallon of vodka, trying to drown out the voice in my head, while distractedly dialoguing with a Jonnie-like beauty named Dinah.

Then I stumbled home to my little cave of an apartment and disappeared down the sleep-drain. But at 3 o’clock in the morning, I sat up, instantly sober, my mouth full of cotton wool, and whispered,

“What if I go insane?”

To read the next My Age of Anxiety post, click here.

*I borrowed this experience and cursed an anxious teenage girl with it in my fantasy novel The Wishing Map.