chillest girl in the MRI machine

it’s a saturday night when i have my first MRI. the MRI looks at three things: my brain, neck, and upper spine. this means that i have to lay still in the tube, with the camera helmet enclosing my face, for about an hour. at our appointment a week prior, the neurologist explains the procedure to me, and asks if i think i will do okay being confined in the tube for so long. i laugh. silently but not invisibly, i have been resisting crying for the majority of our appointment. when i laugh, she seems sort of relieved by my lightness. she laughs, too. i tell her that there is literally zero chance of me doing okay with that. 

i do not consider myself particularly claustrophobic, nor do i consider myself particularly nervous around doctors, but i do consider myself liable to do poorly in the event that resigning control of my body is required. i am very aware of, and oftentimes embarrassed of, this liability. as a kid, those dental x-rays where you have to sit still with a block in your mouth sent panic pumping through my entire body. when i was in elementary school, i was in the emergency room with an extremely broken arm, and the doctors tried to roll me onto said broken arm for imaging. i screamed and thrashed and kicked like i was actively being murdered. amidst the thrashing, they caught one image and identified one break. it was not until i saw an orthopedic specialist days later that several other breaks in the same bone could be identified. when i was in middle school, the orthodontist was trying to install a pallet expander into my mouth, and i caused such a scene that they had to stop, reschedule the appointment, and try again another day. what i call “causing a scene” is probably more aptly named a panic attack, but the language of a panic disorder was not something i had access to back then, so we all called it dramatics. i will spare you further anecdotes about said dramatics. the point is that i did not take well to being touched, restrained, or physically manipulated in some way, even if ultimately for my own good. at the appointment with my neurologist, i do not go into these details.

the neurologist tells me that it is very common for people to do not-okay in the MRI enclosure. she calls in an Ativan prescription. i leave the office and buy a coffee. in the parking garage, my arm twitches and i spill said coffee all over my jacket. i take it off. i sit in my car. i cry my eyes out. my lungs feel diametrically opposed to intaking oxygen normally. this feeling eventually subsides. i drive home. i text my friends photos of my coffee-stained jacket and suggest that i am being hexed. that’s literally the only explanation, one says. another suggests we both try out religion. 

on saturday, i take the Ativan. my best friend drives me to the hospital and takes a photo of me crossing my arms outside of the neurology department. we agree that i look like a spy and we laugh. for an hour, she falls asleep in a chair in the waiting room and i lay still and devoid of thought in the tube. we listen to music on the way home. i order an ice cream sundae and watch Old Enough! on Netflix. i am glad that the day is over. i am proud of myself. i have smoothly survived a situation that would have sent previous versions of me into hysterics. i am the person fifteen-year-old-me dreamed about. she wanted to be the chillest girl in the world. 

– 

the results of my first MRI are uploaded to a patient portal, and they come through early in the morning a few days later, when i am with someone i do not know very well. i miss the calls from my neurologist. i read the automated transcription of the voicemail she left because i am too afraid to listen to it. the automated transcription is not very helpful. once i am alone a few hours later, i log into the patient portal. i am sitting in my parked car with day-old mascara smudged under my eyes. i call my mom and read the medical jargon out loud. neither of us know what it means. she sounds like she is nervous but i can tell she does not want me to think that she is. she tells me i should call the neurologists back. this is sound advice. she tells me it will be okay. 

i go inside. someone presses a parking ticket onto my windshield. i make the call. i pace around. my neurologist is very lovely. she explains the results to me. i ask her a hundred questions. i thank her a hundred times. we schedule more appointments, including another MRI. i screenshot photos of my brain and text them to my friends. i am obsessed with this one in particular where my eye is lit up like an orb. my friends curse me out. that’s fair, i respond, and it is. the photo is extremely disturbing.

later, i am in my friend’s room, watching Jersey Shore. i text my friends: crazy how the body is inescapable and i’m in bed watching Deena and Snooki make out. everyone is like well, at least that’s one of the best episodes. they add that by the way, i am handling things really well.

this praise becomes familiar. one of my friends calls me the most laid back person she knows. i can hardly believe such a compliment. when i tell my sister about this, she is equally surprised, and we agree that at least as far as my immediate family goes, i am unanimously considered the most neurotic. humbling. still, my friend’s compliment holds a phenomenal weight somewhere inside me where i am still fifteen. that part of me can think of nothing grosser than my own reactivity. with adult eyes, now, the pattern is indiscreet: when the external circumstances of my life felt exhaustive, difficult, and out of control, i took to constructing a fiercely indifferent personality for myself. rather than react directly to what happened to me, i focused on becoming unrelentingly fearless, confident, and unbothered. the coping mechanism itself is not all that different from younger iterations of myself who did not want doctors anywhere near me, who would rather just live with a broken bone than have to endure the burden of someone examining me. at twelve and at fifteen i just wanted to have a say in what was going on.

in some ways, the reminder that my family still sees me as the source of drama is a comfort. yay, the teenager who was double-fisting eating disorders and daring her boyfriends to drive over one hundred on the highway does not get to permanently tamp down my emotional availability! in other ways, the whole thing is confusing. it is odd to worry about whether or not i have lost access to my childhood neuroses because it feels sort of unbecoming, as a twenty-two year old, to idealize the behavior of a neurotic child. in practicality, i would not have made it to this point in life indulging every anxiety. i have spent years working on understanding, managing, and living with anxiety. i have done so with a doctor who is not all that convinced that i am a dramatic person. i think more than anything else, he thinks i am normal.

before my second MRI and spinal tap, i have to visit the medical center again for more bloodwork. i make small talk with the woman who draws my blood. i am accustomed to lying to strangers who ask about my life plans, but i tell her the truth. she wishes me luck. i do not spill my coffee in the parking garage. everyone acts normal. i feel like i should be more emotional about this whole thing. i worry that i am outrunning my own reactions, and that there will be a devastating collision ahead of me whenever i stop and catch my breath. i try to make myself cry on the drive home. i listen to Holocene and Pawn Shop Blues on loop. the old tricks don’t work. the parts of me that want to cry are counteracted by parts of me that feel twelve years old again every time a tear forms.

why endure the humiliation? the latter parts ask.

it’s inevitable, the former parts insist.

the latter parts are like, whatever.

i assure myself that i still have an Ativan left, in the event that such a collision presents itself and i find myself choking on air. i wish i could shake myself by the shoulders and yell in my own face: everything means something! my roommates and i hang out around our apartment wearing massive bedazzled sunglasses. on sundays, we usually see each other for the first time around one in the afternoon, when we are all eating breakfast. 

–

the scheduled time of my second MRI is 8:50 am on a friday. the time i wake up is 8:35 am. my ability to sleep through alarms is a concerning development, but i am not really all that panicked. i brush my teeth and walk two blocks to my car. when i get to the hospital, the radiologist and i make small talk. we both grew up doing all-star cheerleading. i tell her that i would never want my future children to do it. she agrees. we both intrinsically understand why, which is kind of sad, but it’s kind of fun that we have something in common. she inserts the IV into my arm. i look away.

i do not take Ativan before this MRI, because i only have to be in the tube for thirty minutes this time, and because i want to save my Ativan for the panic attack i am anticipating but also avoiding, but mostly because i woke up fifteen minutes before an appointment that takes fifteen minutes to drive to, so a lot of things fell through the cracks. i look in the mirror while i am taking off my jewelry. mascara is smeared under my eyes again. i snap my nose ring in half trying to take it out. i send a photo of the broken jewelry to a friend. maybe you really are being hexed, they say. i throw it out. i worry that i have become immune to embarrassment. late last night, i stared in the mirror in my bedroom and decided i was extremely beautiful. in this hospital lighting, i fear that my face actually needs a complete surgical overhaul. the radiologists compliment my nail polish. they give me a warm blanket. i get into the tube.

thirty minutes go by quickly. this is probably because i sleep through the entire MRI. i wake up when it is over and teenage pride beams through me. i am the easiest patient. i am cool, calm, and collected. i wear the grippy socks they gave me home. there were years i was so anxious i could not sleep. i stayed up for days straight. it made me lose my period and everything. i cannot believe i have mastered the art of self-sedation. i have not thought about what will happen when i receive the results. i feel like i was written by Ottessa Moshfegh. i feel like Fleabag. i maul the curb a little bit leaving the parking garage. i am the main character. everyone is trying to diagnose me. i am the Bob Dylan lyric: looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes.

at home, we have a Dance Moms style pyramid of the Love is Blind season 3 cast on the wall. it is made of stick figures on post-it notes. i wear my hospital grippy socks with the most obscene outfit imaginable. i clean the kitchen and ask everyone to rate my look. 

later, i read Rayne Fisher-Quann’s essay “In Conversation With Myself.” i am secretly hoping that she is living the exact same life as me and can tell me exactly how to feel. that is a delusional hope, and she is not living the exact same life as me, but i feel a little bit like she sees me when i read this part: i’m almost pre-maturely exhausted with external perceptions of my own pain before i’m even done being exhausted with the pain itself. i haven’t even started crying before i start thinking about whether i’m performing it. 

Rayne is one of my favorite writers, and in talking about herself, she is also talking about feeling trapped by the voyeurism inherent in womanhood. it infiltrates even the most intimate processing of pain. it urges us to reduce even the most unbearable experiences into aesthetic capsules. i think it infiltrates, too, the avoidance of that processing. dissociation has become almost feminized in its reduction to a mood, a trend, a nihilistic political statement. there are examples, if not playbooks, for women on how to isolate ourselves from our fears or how to lean just far enough into our anxieties that we plow through them entirely and end up on the other side, numb, skinny, drinking a Diet Coke. i have an ex who told me their first impression of me was that i had “no thoughts.” now, they assured me, they knew i was “actually crazy.” i can’t believe i ever thought that was funny.

i could cite all of Emmeline Clien’s “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating” here, but what sticks out to me the most in thinking about my own health are her words on the dissociative, “post-wounded” rejection of optimistic wellness for women: When we thought happiness was a possibility, we thought it might be nice if our bodies were in a healthy condition if we ever achieved it. if i have given up on the world and on the future, and have dissociated from it to such an extent that my body is nothing more to me than a tether to a reality that i didn’t ask to be a part of, then any ailments confirm that giving up is the right call. i can beat any bad things that happen to me to the punch by preemptively becoming hopeless. i have said things akin to this line of thinking many times: of course this is happening to me! but i do not want to be resigned to a “post-wounded” identity anymore. i am not immune and i am not disinterested. i want to believe happiness is a possibility.

i have struggled to determine how much of my apparent unaffectedness is a performance, and how much reflects a legitimate loss of connection to my own feelings. here is what i do know: though parts of my behavior and demeanor might indicate calm, i am forming an alliance with the middle schooler wailing at the orthodontist’s office. she is what Emmeline Clien would call actively un-chill, and i miss her. i miss freaking out. i want to be smacked in the face and talked onto the ledge. i want to reverse whatever numbness has adapted its way into my evolution. i can blame the coping mechanisms i developed as a teenager for repressing my ability to process heavy things, but when i really think about it, i know that the teenager was ultimately just trying to protect me, too. what do i learn from splintering myself into all these different parts and motives? calling some of them healthy and others problematic? it has taken different shapes, but i have always had the same guttural, animalistic, base instinct to protect myself. i want to give myself a hug that stretches across time.

at night, i do my makeup sitting on the floor of my room. i listen to Machines by Jensen McRae. i think about one line for a long time: now i know that i bleed months, but i was a machine once. i think of times when my caloric input and output were the structure of my entire day, other times when i woke up determined to zombie-walk through whatever would be tossed my way. i think there is a collective underestimation of how intelligent, deliberate, and calculated adolescent girls can be. they are steps ahead. i have not felt steps ahead like that for a while. i do not want to. i do not want to be a machine. when i am done with my makeup, i go to a concert. my friend and i share drinks, and when the show is over, we eat garlic knots. we are like, how come nobody told us garlic knots are the best food in the world?

–

the results of my second MRI are uploaded to the patient portal on sunday evening, when i am sitting in a coffee shop with a friend, trading complaints about how Boston is freezing all of the sudden as if we couldn’t possibly have seen this coming. i click on the message the doctor left me, see one photo of my spine, read a few words i only vaguely understand, and excuse myself to the bathroom. i smile at the other people in the bathroom line. when it is my turn, i throw up violently. then, i stand there, hinged at the hip, doing quiet heavy breathing in a public bathroom, and i feel very scared. wanting to be okay is very scary. 

my body is sometimes a better communicator than my brain. it is telling me that we are on the same team. we might have some trouble, but we are devoted to persistence. Rayne Fisher-Quann, in a different piece of hers, repeats the line: i want to be devoted. it reminds me of the ending of my favorite book of all time, Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, which reads i wish i could love something so much i would die from it. it is scary to be so devoted to or so in love with anything because it requires presence, vulnerability, the humility of unabashedly clocking in. but what is there to do without devotion? even when we insulate ourselves from accessing them, these general consequences to openness are the crux of being alive. that i have gone so far to shelter myself from emotion just reinforces how meaningful the emotional experience is. whether i want to give them space or not, give them voice or not, emotions still live in my body and circulate through my blood like reminders of my own personhood. sometimes they are so visceral they feel like threats. they eventually demand confrontation and i think that’s pretty amazing. to vomit in the Tatte bathroom and come back out, chewing gum, saying “that was weird!” feels like proof that i am still inside myself. it’s kind of a feral example, but i find it a little bit magic.

right now, i am taking the magic wherever i can get it. the bathroom my roommate and i share directly faces the street, so we have to cover the window in our shower with sheets of swirled plaster, but the beautiful thing that happens is when the light comes in through the sheets it makes these tiny little rainbows all over the tiles. we are twenty-two which means we have each cried, thrown up, and danced against all the color in that shower. it makes me think of a line from one of my favorite stories: how in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of concentrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose?

i am trying to get better at finding the magic in moments of solitude. when i drop friends off and am left alone in my car, when i leave the coffee shop bathroom and am now trying to synthesize what happened into my continued sense of identity (guess now i have to put a finger down if anyone says “never have i ever thrown up because of an email”), when i am trying to sleep at night in my ridiculous grippy sock outfit. these are my most intimate moments with myself, when the choices i have made are stripped away from their framing and left as the base of what they are: evidence of the life i am living and the person that i am. 

for what it’s worth, these days, i am really pulling for me. i am not going to talk about specific diagnostics, but you can know that i am showing up to all my doctor’s appointments. i am answering when they call me. i am making friends with the other people in the waiting room. i am going to start being better about keeping a journal. i am sharing a tub-sized lavender latte with my friends while we all sit on the floor. i am the chillest girl in the MRI machine. i am the least chill girl in Tatte. i am a normal person.