Girl Most Likely To (17 page)

M
y strategy to cope with the crap that life dumps on me goes something like this:

• (1) Make an unrecognizable and quite unladylike sound. Somewhere between a burp, a shriek and a whimper.
  
• (2) Go home and change into more comfortable and less flattering clothes. Avoid all mirrors. Lock doors, close windows and draw shades.
  
• (3) Curl up into an emotional and physical fetal position on my couch, insulated by heaps of blankets and pillows, and surrounded by a protective moat of takeout menus and remote controls.
  
• (4) Blame myself for not having seen it coming (whatever it was), blame trans fat and the NRA for making the world such a complicated place to live in and long for a simpler time when most people were decent, so women didn’t always have to know better.
  
• (5) Commence calling cheap knockoffs of The Psychic Hotline (although I would never admit this to any of my friends), while consoling myself that at least it’s cheaper than calling the family-condoned Sadhus (Read: real psychics masquerading as holy men and providing birth-chart and palm readings) back in India.
  

This time my disillusionment took me far beyond the kind of solace that any tele-psychic or Tivo might provide. Short of actually divorcing the world, I found myself filing for a trial separation in the form of a plane ticket to Fiji. My parents weren’t happy about it, and my friends were more than concerned, but I knew it was something I had to do. And nobody was going to stop me.

After a rather swift trial, Alan and Steve wound up in some white-collar prison, serving five to ten years for trading on insider information. Wade’s sullied reputation was eventually re-shined and infused with a large cash settlement for wrongful termination. Sarah quit and was immediately hired by another company, and Denny decided to apply to graduate school. Peter was the only team member who was promoted, largely because they needed someone diplomatic and trustworthy enough to repair the client relationships that had been ripped to shreds by the scandal.

For my part, I hadn’t been to the office in two weeks, since that day when I made my way home from the SEC investigators’ offices. Thankfully, I could rest assured that my professional reputation was refortified, since phone taps on Alan’s and Steve’s personal lines had reportedly cleared me of any wrongdoing. Within ten days of my deposition, I was informed that I was no longer a suspect as far as the SEC was concerned, and that I would never formally be charged. Rather than celebrating, I found myself unable to pull my attention away from the question of how I had wound up in that situation in the first place. I huddled in my apartment with my thoughts and my regrets, and just when I would begin to feel like the dust around my professional earthquake was beginning to settle, my guilt over having trusted Jon for so long would resurface. Honestly, there were times when I couldn’t see a way out.

Meanwhile, Human Resources had me listed as taking advantage of a “temporary leave of absence,” while they tried to decide what the heck to do with me. I took a far more circuitous route back to stability than did any of my coworkers, but in truth it was because I had far more to learn. Far worse than Jon or work or any one thing in particular, it was the no longer avoidable pattern emerging in my life that I had to sit still and make sense of. I was trying to understand how and why I had let things get to that point. I was trying to find the common thread between my obliviousness to Jon’s true character, my bosses’ true motives and my inability to voice and to question. At the root of it was: How did all of those themes intersect, and why had I failed to protect and to stand up for myself? The weight of that question was more than frightening; it was paralyzing.

Countless voice mails from friends, family and reporters went unanswered until Cristina and Pam eventually forced their way into my apartment. Cristy threatened to shave off my eyebrows unless I would consent to a shower. Pamela cleaned my apartment even though she had never in her life had to clean her own. Then they both dragged me to a therapist for the first of three visits they had taken the liberty of scheduling and paying for in advance. I was almost jolted out of my emotional state by the disappointment in Cristy’s eyes when I failed to laugh at the joke she made about my being a mustache trim and a bottle of aftershave away from being a man. But I was simply too disengaged to pay any attention to the rational knowledge that I ought to care.

During our first meeting we just stared at each other. Suzanne was the type of therapist, I came to realize, who waited for the patient to begin the conversation. She was a young-looking forty-five, wearing a deep-pumpkin-colored shirt, brown leather vest and matching pants, and a smile that made me ask if I might be wearing a straitjacket that I simply couldn’t see. So I averted my gaze, instead examining my fingers as if discovering them anew, which probably made me look like I was crazy. Or like I thought I had done something wrong. That made me feel defensive. So I spent the better part of my time giving her dirty, suspicious looks. And after our first hour of silence was over, Cristina took me home.

During our second meeting, the following day, I asked Suzanne why she wasn’t saying anything. Her thoughts were not important, she explained; mine were. When I asked her if she thought I needed therapy, she said what was important was if I thought I did. When I told her that my friend had forced me to come, she told me nobody was forcing me to stay. But she said it in a way that implied only a weaker psychological being would choose to leave, rather than work through her issues. Despite my monumental resentment of her and of Cristina and of everyone else in the world, I decided to stay in the chair. Somehow the prospect of being judged inferior by this complete stranger was more than I could bear.

“I don’t mean to be rude, Suzanne, but you don’t know me or my problems,” I finally offered.

“Why don’t you tell me about them? I want to know about them,” she explained, and then added after the cynicism registered on my face, “I care.”

She
cared.
And the hostage negotiator was always on the bank robber’s side.

“You can’t believe that I care?”

Well, I
could
believe it. Theoretically, I
could believe
whatever I wanted to.

“It’s not that. It’s just…I mean, no offense, but you’re being
paid
to care.”

“You don’t think I would care if I weren’t being paid?”

“No, that’s not what I said. But you’re not my friend, by the nature of this relationship. You’re my doctor.”

“Your problems are valid, Vina. Why is it that you feel the need to place me into only one category?”

“I don’t know…I mean, I don’t.” I suddenly felt as if I were trying to explain the importance of financial planning to a teenage pop star with her first record deal.

“You seem frustrated.”

“Look, I’m not a mental case. There’s just too much going on for me to explain to someone I don’t know.”

“Do you think it might help to try?”

“No.”

“Can you explain why not?”

“No, I can’t. That’s just it. I cannot explain anything. There’s so much going on in my mind right now. How can you understand my situation? I don’t even understand my situation. Everything in my professional life and romantic life fell apart and I didn’t even see it coming. So how the hell am I supposed to explain what happened to a stranger?” I blurted out, before bursting into sobs.

“Well, if you can’t tell me what happened, can you tell me what you want?” she asked, carefully handing me a box of Kleenex.

“I want my life back.”

“You want to be happy again.”

“Mmmm-huhhh.”

“What does that mean?”

“I want my life back. I’m sick of being so angry with myself and with everything around me.”

Similar to the morning when I woke up on my floor between Christopher and his cat, I went home that night thinking something had to change. Shuttling between my cave and this woman’s office wasn’t going to help me; I had to find a way to help myself. The only problem was I didn’t know how.

Our third meeting lasted all of five minutes. I walked into Suzanne’s office, sat down, and she informed me that she would be recommending that I start taking medication. Zoloft, it was called. She felt that it would stabilize me so that I could “focus on dissecting my feelings and laying them out in a way that we could more comfortably address.”

I remember watching her mouth form the words. I remember asking myself how could she think that diminishing my control over my mind would ever help me feel like I wasn’t going to lose it. She knew nothing about how bad my judgment had been, and already had the audacity to want to steal from me what little of it I had left. I wanted to explain all of this to her, but that was the moment, sitting on the rubbery chair in her office that made unpleasant sounds whenever I sat, rose or shifted my weight, when I acknowledged that I was the only person who could think my way back to trusting myself and the world. My own thoughts were all I had. It wasn’t a dismissal of the psychiatric process. It was a reaction to the idea of getting stock tips from someone who kept all of their money in real estate.

“I am the only person who has to live inside my own head,” I explained to a surprised and concerned Cristina through the phone the next morning, while searching the Internet for the cheapest airfares to Fiji. “So how can anybody ever understand this
for
me?”

“I can accept that, Vina. But why do you have to run away?”

“This is not about running away.”

“A meditation retreat? In Fiji? For two weeks? Listen to yourself, Vina.”

I was listening to myself, I thought; and perhaps for the very first time. Still, I understood why it must have sounded ridiculous. To be honest, even I wasn’t completely sure where all of this would take me. But I had some time off work, and some money saved up, and I had spent the previous sleepless night staring at my ceiling, racking my brain for some idea of the next step I should take. Suddenly, around five a.m., the answer came to me: Vipassana. It was a type of meditation I had heard of years earlier, which promised nonreligious guidance on the path to self-knowledge and healing. A quick Web search had revealed the rest. Special meditation centers the world over were fully funded by donations, and claimed to provide free intensive meditation guidance to those who were seeking it. While most classes were fully booked months in advance, I decided it must be some sort of sign that the only available slot within the next three months was for a retreat beginning just a few days later, and on the other side of the world.

Naturally, I was nervous, although I was far more frightened of the idea of losing my resolve. And I would rather have eaten my own foot at that point than spend one more minute with the status quo. I needed a change. And I needed Cristy’s support.

“Cristy, you’re starting to sound like my parents.”

She wasn’t about to give in. “Well, good. I’m worried about you. And speaking of them…have you told them about this yet?”

A few hours later, I did. And in their defense, few parents (Indian or otherwise) would have been comfortable with a move like this, even if their only daughter hadn’t been in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

“I need to be alone, Mom and Dad,” I told them through the phone while hauling out my suitcase from the depths of my closet. Attempting to explain why they shouldn’t expect me to call when I was away was tricky.

“I need to be away from anything and anyone that makes me question the validity of what I’m going through. You still don’t accept the reality of my claustrophobia, much less my relationships. And you don’t realize that you should respect me more for trying to find help. But it’s not my place to change the way you look at things, especially before I learn to change myself. Honestly, I’ve got to start trusting myself, and taking better care of myself. I’m tired. And maybe what you do is the best you can do, considering how you were raised. But it doesn’t help me right now. I need to figure some things out for myself, without the stress of having to justify anything to anyone. So, please understand.”

I tried my best as to why it had to be in Fiji. I tried my best as to why this seemed like my last chance to get a grip before I gave in and decided to blot out every thought entirely. My parents tried their conflicted best to understand, and they insisted on seeing me off at the airport.

Nani held my face between her hands before the security checkpoint at JFK.

“I’m not crazy, Nani. I am trying to figure things out.”

“
Beti,
sometimes you try too hard to be a good girl. I couldn’t be more proud of you. You are finally doing something for yourself. Remember,
beti. Jo undher se athha hai.
What comes from inside is what matters. And if it tells you to go to India or Fiji or Timbuktu, then for God’s sake, go. Yes, you are a strong girl, but if that
shaanti
inside is disturbed, nothing else will ever be good in your life. And I can see that your
shaanti,
your peace, has been disturbed.”

My parents mustered smiles from a few steps behind her. I smiled back and then leaned in to whisper in her ear, “Will Mom and Dad be okay?”