Wait For It
Sofia Driscoll

Curled in the rocking chair. Staring into space, again. If Mihal were awake, she’d look at me and exclaim, “You’re a Shape!”. My arms and legs are tangled into one of those sticky bead mazes left for kids to play with in doctor’s office waiting rooms. I’m starting to forget that I’m made of something besides moments like these. Pitch-black mornings, afraid that I’ll get sick because I’m wearing the wrong shoes. Don’t argue with me on the logic right now. The shoes feel like fire on my feet. 

Lately, I’ve been spending early mornings at the Starbucks next to my favorite public park and garden. In the winter, the city turns the park into an elaborate path of holiday lights, shaped like a rainbow, the moon, candy canes, all sorts of flowers, and various animals. There’s even a dragon that breathes smoke on you from his perch on what’s usually a bed of flowers. Knowing I’m near the garden calms me. Something about the good memories there – the hope, the light. 

This morning is no different. I rise slowly from the chair and walk through the front door, towards the car. Apparently you can walk on fire if you let yourself sit in the fear for 20 minutes first. 

I choose “Wait For It” from the Hamilton soundtrack and queue it four more times before starting the twelve-to-thirteen minute drive. Mihal has been introducing me to Hamilton – out of order – and this was last night’s pick. I might have cried. 

If there’s a reason I’m still alive 

. . . 

I’m willing to wait for it. 

My ear stops at the word willing. This word has heft in the world of therapy. When I arrive at the treatment center each morning, a counselor asks me to rate my willingness on a scale between one and ten. Willingness, they say, is whether I’ll (1.) discern what the right choice is for a given moment, and (2.) actually make that choice even if it’s hard. 

To be honest, I don’t think I’m all that willing right now. But the song helps me pretend until I can recover something real. 

When I get to Starbucks, I just sit for a while. I sit still, fear, and lament how much time I spend these days sitting still and fearing. How much time I spend checking whether I’m nauseous, or how nauseous I am. Then I take out my journal and pen. 

The writing is a constant – form each letter, hold an imperfect idea, make sure the pen doesn’t smear too badly. Put ink to the thoughts in my head until they shift from wanting to run into traffic to planning how I’m going to ask for help when I don’t know what else I could need, and then to

a knowing that my family has faith in me when I don’t have faith in myself. I call to mind the line of strong, Cuban women I know are supporting me from Elsewhere. Mom was invoking them in litany last night, though I don't know that yet. 

I take a sip of tea. There’s a day to begin. 

In the following few weeks, Mary the nurse practitioner asks me to be willing to see that what I’m dealing with is beyond the scope of her clinic. She refers me to a residential treatment center for eating disorders, and at first I refuse: adding a few more months to an already-growing resume gap seems ill-advised. And if it's emetophobia and not body image driving my fear of food, how can this be an eating disorder? I’ll be the only person there dealing with what I’m dealing with, not only afraid but alone. But I have asked for help, haven't I? So I sign myself up and wait for it. 

My first three days at the treatment center, I don’t stop crying. I’m only an hour away from home, but an hour away is a lot when the rest of the patients are so welcoming it’s weird, you’re not allowed to have your phone except for an hour and a half in the evening, and you’re facing your biggest fears without the girl who’s held you through every panic attack so far. 

And yet. The thing about crisis is that it doesn’t let you not know what matters. Albeit numbly, I’m able to see that I have to start eating again if I’m going to live again, and if I won’t do it here and now, I won’t do it at all. Soon, I’m grateful instead of intimidated by the welcoming crew of fellow patients I’ve joined. My therapist explains to me that I have something called ARFID, which can happen when someone is afraid to eat because they’re afraid of something bad happening when they do; like an allergic reaction, choking, or vomiting. Slowly, I’m learning what it means to have an eating disorder, and what it means to recover from one. Slowly, I'm learning to have a body. 

Something they tell you often in eating disorder treatment is that the thoughts are the last thing to go. You have to keep eating on a schedule for a while, even though your brain still says it’s dangerous and doesn’t make any sense. But over time, your thoughts will catch up with your actions and it won’t feel so dangerous anymore. Apparently, your emotions don’t always guide you to what the right choice is: I decide to carry that with me for whenever my life starts again. From Wait for It, forte and with conviction: 

I am the one thing in life I can control! 

I question it, of course. I’ve learned by this point that emetophobia is about needing control, and my debilitating fear of an unexpected and involuntary bodily function is a proxy for my fear of losing control of myself. But I concede that Aaron Burr is probably talking about controlling his choices, and that there’s something to it. Even in fear, I can choose to eat. 

They said that after treatment, things were supposed to be better. Or maybe I said that to make myself go and keep on going. But my first attempt at employment on the flip side does not go well. It’s a job at a nonprofit, doing administrative tasks and answering the phones. The admin tasks go great – but three days into the phones and I’m already crumbling. I quit after day four, and want to curl into the corner of my parents’ couch until every hair on my head is replaced by a new one. Maybe then I’ll no longer be an object for shame. 

After I sent in my notice, my first thought was of physical violence. This wasn’t because anyone I worked with seemed like the sort – far from it, they were nothing but kind. But I could see why anyone would be angry at a new employee for leaving after less than a week, and maybe they have bad impulse control? On the other hand, maybe I have an anxiety disorder. 

My next thought was that it would be fine if it came down to physical violence because such an experience would teach me a lesson about not making hasty commitments, what happens when you can’t predict the future, or something like that. I would learn that my work ethic needs work, and this would turn into one of those nice, neat narratives where I got what I deserved. 

But when I actually show up to work on my first and last Friday at that job, what I receive is overwhelming compassion. Heaps of mercy I can barely process, and that I can’t say for sure I or the situation deserve. My manager meets with me in the morning to get a sense of what’s going wrong, to see if he can support me through it instead of letting me go. Then he sends me to HR to see if there’s another open position in the agency that meets my strengths and needs. There isn’t, but they all encourage me to keep an eye out. 

As I walk out of that building the final time, it occurs to me that maybe the lesson I need to learn is less about deservingness and work ethic and more about humanity. Or taking up space. 

Somehow, it’s just one night after the start of my renewed unemployment that Mihal brings up marriage. It isn’t the first time we’ve talked about it by a long shot, but it is the first time we talk about rings. I’d invited her out to read with me (and invited myself out of my shame cocoon) at the Nocturnal Starbucks, which gets its name because it doesn’t close until 10:30pm. Instead, we make a spreadsheet of wedding tasks and kiss in the car like teenagers. Buoyed and secure in this one place, my pace slows and the path towards compassion is clearer: 

I’m not falling behind or running late. 

. . . 

I’m not standing still, I am lying in wait. 

When I see someone visibly struggling – perhaps they forgot to brush their teeth, are red-faced from crying in a public bathroom, or they’re short with someone over something small – I like to remember that everybody was in first grade. I imagine their name, or a placeholder if I don’t

know it, written last name-first on a roster or testing sheet, or in Sharpie marker on the inside of a lunch box in the lost and found. 

As I strain to spend each jobless day not-frozen in self-hatred and wallowing, I start picturing my own name, typed last name-first on a Scantron label. As if I have the dignity of a child, too. 

And then I start reading. I mostly alternate between mass-market historical romance novels and scholarship about the impacts of smartphones, ipads, and other such portable screens on our attention, well-being, and children’s social and emotional development. Cohesive – I know. But I know this about myself – when I put my mind to work on words, these blessed bridges between possibility and action, I become capable. 

Through my reading I realize I want to go to graduate school and research that portable screen thing, once I can comprehend the logistics required. But I know that what I really mean is once I have enough confidence: it’s not like I’m spending any time researching assistantships, or how to cold-contact a professor whom I think could be a good mentor. So in the meantime, I experiment on myself. 

I arrange the parameters thusly: there’s a wooded path behind my apartment complex, and I’ll go for a walk there every day unless it’s raining. At first, I’ll wear my headphones around my neck and hold my phone in my hand just in case I change my mind, but the goal will be to walk 30 minutes without listening to music or checking my phone for anything except for the time. If a couple of scholars say that time without my phone will give me space to make sense of myself, why not try it out? 

By the end of the first week, I’m no longer bringing my headphones. I still bring my phone, but I put it in my backpack instead of holding it in my hand. A grace of unemployment is that checking the time can wait. Today, I choose to walk beyond the prescribed path, using the makeshift trail made by the feet before me to reach a pedestrian bridge. I’ve never walked this far before. 

The pedestrian bridge curves above a four-lane thoroughfare. Everything looks just a bit smaller from up there, but not so small that I don’t distinguish individuals. On the bridge in front of me, a set of parents runs after their son, who’s doing his darndest to make an escape on his toddler bike. Smiling at them, I look up and notice the bridge is protected by the kind of metal structure that leaves little rhombi indented on your thighs when it’s used to make a chair, and for some reason it’s colored sea-foam green. A world above and a world below. 

About halfway across, it occurs to me that the metal structure is there to make sure people don’t jump. A memory startles me then, of sitting in that Starbucks in March, writing my way through panic, and wanting nothing more than for the phobic cycle I was in to end: 

If there’s a reason I’m still alive 

. . . 

I’m willing to wait for it.

I’m surprised the remembering makes me feel light, until it hits me that it’s because I’m not there anymore. I am here, walking on this pedestrian bridge and thinking about how I still don’t know where my life will lead or who I will become, but now I’m actually willing to wait for it all to unfold. I don’t have to work so hard to convince myself. 

The gold-standard treatment for OCD – a line my emetophobia crosses into – is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). What this means is slow exposure to the stimuli that bring about fear, and intentional avoidance of anything you’d normally do to make yourself feel safe. 

Jubilee compels me to try it spontaneously, to test how far I’ve come. I tell myself “you’re going to vomit one day,” and I hold that thought in my head without forcing it away. My heart is beating faster and I’m a little shaky. But I’m also looking at the trees. I imagine this thought, the scary one, as just one thought in a web of so many other thoughts – about the bridge, the sweat on my shirt, Mihal and my future with her, how nice it is to feel phone-less – and then I focus on how an inner life is made up of so many webs of thoughts just like a lifetime is made up of webs of experiences and people and things. But I don’t have to spend all my time waiting for that.