This was perfect kindling for depression. Sergeant was always in my ear, rattling off the things that made me less than acceptable, and that special place of “wonderfulness and ease” that I dreamed about was always just beyond me. I could get there if I could just be a little bit better.
The promise of heaven is great even if I had to go through hell to get there, it has to be worth it.
—ROB BELL, LOVE WINS
One day Sergeant ordered me to look over at another girl and then said, “Oh, look, she's so tan. Too bad you're so pale white and disgusting! You need a St. Tropez tan [a popular tanning oil at the time]; you need to get some Coppertone tan lines.”
After school that afternoon, I climbed up onto a friend's roof (with her approval). I lay there on a giant piece of tinfoil, dowsed in baby oil. Being fair skinned, I didn't tan. I burned to a crisp like a sizzling piece of bacon. Not quite the perfect bronze picture that I was going for.
Sergeant was quick to say, “Fail!”
Cord Check Time
Then came the cord checking. Before leaving the house, I had to do my cord checks. I would crawl around on the carpet checking the television and lamp cords. I would straighten them with my hands and lay them just the way they had to be laid, straight, from the outlet to the object. I would tug gently on them and smooth out every ripple. If every cord in the house was not lying perfectly straight, I would become unbearably agitated and couldn't leave the house.
This ritual could take me an hour, and there were many, many start-overs. In my Mental Movie, my unforgiveable negligence would result in an electrical fire and the whole condo burning down and innocent people being killed. Let's just say Sergeant had my ear and undivided attention. I wanted to save people from harm.
Cord checking—and doing it right—ensured that I would avoid all potential threats. Sergeant repeated over and over to me that the cords had to be checked perfectly, and nothing else would do. His badgering was monotonous, like a metronome, and I would do just about anything to get it to stop.
Even though [repetition] had no impact on the validity, its cognitive bias is called the illusion-of-truth effect and it's a powerful effect of clever agenda setting. If something is repeated to you often enough you will start believing it's true.
—ADAPTED FROM BEN PARR'S, CAPTIVOLOGY
If I had girlfriends over before school, I would try to do a superfast cord check, hoping they didn't notice. Of course, they'd often bust me doing this and laugh at me. They even nicknamed me “Cord Checker.” They got lots of laughs out of this, and I chuckled with them trying to make light of my strange behavior. They couldn't have known that for me cord checking was a life-or-death matter.
The leaving-the-house ritual became so onerous that I was frequently late to school. The hall pass lady knew my first name and how to spell it correctly. For every time I was late to school, I made up a different story. The cat had gotten out. An important phone call had come just as I was leaving. My mom needed me to wait for the refrigerator repairman. Forgot my books, left my curling iron on, forgot my lunch—you get the idea. Lying to the hall pass lady was just one of the thousands of lies I told throughout my “Sergeant Cover-Up” days.
I became a crafty liar and a damn good actress. Sometimes I would cut class and go back to my house and start over with the cord checking, especially if I couldn't tolerate seeing Sergeant hold up my mom's melting face in front of me, sort of like cue cards of what would happen if I didn't do my drills. This was incredibly motivating. While I was there with my cords, Sergeant might add something like straightening couch cushions and throw pillows.
Perfectionism is exhausting.
—MADELEINE L'ENGLE
The great painter Salvador Dali is quoted as saying, “Have no fear of perfection. You will never reach it.”
Cleaning Time
Then I started forcing myself to clean. I would clean and scrub down the refrigerator and the vegetable and fruit crisper compartments over and over again. I would convince myself that tiny pieces of green lettuce were stuck in between the shelves and behind the crisper where I could not reach. All that I could think about and see were tiny and stuck pieces of lettuce, and that was making my cleaning job a failure. Sergeant would show me a visual flash card of the stuck lettuce and it said, “FAILED!” The lettuce would be another fine example of my deep imperfection and negligence.
My cleaning might have made the house look great, but on the inside it was hell.
Dating Time
Once a very popular guy a year older than me asked me to go to a movie with him. I don't even remember what it was. I sat frozen through the whole movie, staring straight ahead as though seeing through and beyond the screen. I was in my little trance, doing what was now a daily caloric intake drill: One strawberry Pop Tart equals 200 calories, a glass of milk is 120. I added up everything to see where I was that day. When I completed that day, I went back and did the same thing for the day before.
A couple of times during the movie, I sort of mumbled my number of calories out loud. When he said, “What?” I replied as normally as I could, “Oh nothing.” We were completely not sharing the same experience.
To make matters worse, before he drove me home, he pulled the car over and parked on a street in north Oak Park that was dimly lit with lampposts. This I knew instinctively was our time to make out. I really didn't know what I was doing, but I knew that this was the time to be foxy. I had seen that when people in movies make out, sometimes the girl writhes around all seductive-like and moaning. Just like everything else, I tended to overdo it. I was like an unbridled bucking bronco kicking around in a yellow station wagon.
That boy never asked me out again, and this was just more proof of my imperfection.
Crank It Up a Notch
In the animal kingdom, especially with dogs, a fixation is an indication of an unbalanced mind and an unbalanced mind is a sign of weakness. Dogs attack weakness if they sense weakness.
—CESAR MILLAN, THE DOG WHISPERER
For a very brief time I went out with another popular boy in my high school. This guy, I really fell for. His aloof attitude, shiny jet-black Elvis hair and overall good looks made me feel like I needed to work even harder for his approval. Well, he lost interest in me, and I got dumped. He moved on quickly and easily. Of course, girls tend to obsess about these things more than boys do, but I absolutely could not move on. I became stuck in the thick tar of rejection. This boy not wanting me was an indisputable sign of my imperfection, right? If I didn't fix this, it would set the stage for my entire life! My world with Sergeant was black and white, no in between.
Leave it to Sergeant to swoop in with new taunts. The more I obsessed about being dropped like a sack of potatoes, the louder Sergeant got: “If you were smarter, more exotic, more interesting and beautiful, he would want you. But you are just not any of those things. I can't blame him. You have bad heredity, and that mixed with your ongoing stupidity is so undesirable.” I didn't merely have to suffer the excruciating insecurities of being a teenaged girl; I had to endure Sergeant, too. It was all too much.
I can practically hear you saying, “Enough. I don't want to hear about Sergeant anymore.” Believe me, I don't want to spend too much time on him either, best buddy. Just bear with me, though.
The plot