There were times when Willa was sure she could feel her meds trying to do their job. She pictured them like a phalanx of little army men, valiantly trying to hold the line, pushing back, often losing ground before getting pancaked by an enemy airstrike.
That’s how it felt during her drive home from FitFams after her first day as studio manager.
The confusion, as well as the dirty looks from some of Jem’s regulars — how had they become so ferociously loyal so quickly? Were they her cousins or something? — made it difficult for Willa to focus on coaching. She forgot to cue the left arm exercises. She stumbled over the script for the right leg. Her music stopped, inexplicably. A client walked out. And class ran five minutes over.
“Thanks so much for coming!” she sing-songed to the clients as she validated their parking and tried to pretend that everything was just fine.
As she emptied the waste baskets, folded towels, and filled out the day’s electronic report, thoughts of self-loathing banged around in her head like shoes in a dryer. Why didn’t you confirm the schedule change with Jem? Why couldn’t you shake off the awkwardness of that interaction and coach a good class? Why are you letting a stupid fitness job upset you so much? Why are you chewing six pieces of studio gum?
She checked the FitFams app, sure that her students would fall off her schedule, one by one, like lemmings at a cliff. Then her anxious brain spun out to thoughts of lemmings, and how James had come to her in tears with something he’d learned on YouTube: In 1958 a group of documentary filmmakers, in an effort to make a segment about lemmings more dramatic, had tossed a bunch of them off a cliff.
Willa tried to slow her brain while she wrote some notes to the next instructors (“please don’t forget to refill the soap dispensers” and “have a great class!”), then headed to her car. She pulled out of the garage and into the growing night.
Like most kids, Willa had been afraid of the dark, particularly in the yellow-and-black-carpeted basement of her New Jersey home. For some reason there was no light switch at the top of the stairs, only at the bottom. So when you wanted to go down there, you had to descend into the dark bowels of hell and fumble for the switch. Likewise, when you were ready to come upstairs, you had to turn the light off first and then scamper up the stairs in the dark.
Willa would beg her mother to go with her.
“No,” her mother would say. “Sing the ‘National Anthem’ while you go down the stairs. I’ll stand at the top, and if you stop singing, I’ll come down and help you.”
This, of course, did little to alleviate Willa’s fears, because now — instead of picturing a chloroforming, leather-gloved burglar from a recent episode of “Charlie’s Angels” — she imagined Dracula was going to rip out her throat. But her Barbie dolls and their Dream House were down there, so she had to be brave.
When depression struck hard three years ago, Willa didn’t want to go outside at nighttime. Darkness had seemed like a viscous substance, something that could fill her mouth and cause her to drown.
In the psychiatric facility, Case Manager Gene had asked Willa to name her depression and give it an identity. Doing that, he’d reasoned, would create “cognitive de-fusion,” allowing Willa to say, “I feel depressed,” which was easier to manage and address than “I am depressed.” Like many of the exercises at the facility, this one seemed kind of dumb at first. She was never good at visualization. Asked to do it as a means to “see the win” in soccer, she’d try to picture dodging a defender and hitting the upper 90, but the ball would turn out to be made of pudding and explode into a gloppy mess on her foot.
When she pictured her depression as a thing, all she could think of was a big, ugly, cartoon vulture that sat on her head, squawking cruel things as its dirty talons gripped her scalp. Some days she had the strength to bat it away. Other days she didn’t.
Tonight, the vulture was bearing down so much that she felt as though she could not sit up straight. She searched her brain’s toolbox, and brought out “deep breathing.” This she followed with “cold therapy,” reaching into her tumbler of water and pulling out a slick cube of ice, then gripping it in her palm. This was supposed to trigger the mammalian diving response, and raise serotonin levels, but all it seemed to be doing right now was getting her hand and her pants wet.
So she decided to try something else, something that Gene would never have recommended. At a stoplight she pulled out her phone and opened Instagram. In the newest photo on her grid, she was posing next to a FitFams machine. She had her blonde hair in a high ponytail. The wrinkles between her eyebrows were smoothed out with FaceTune. She had on green leggings and a gray, cropped FitFams tank that showed off her decent abs. A filter made their definition more distinct. Her smile was dazzling.
The photo had garnered 78 likes in 24 hours. She put the phone down in her lap and exhaled. People love me, she thought. I’m going to be OK. She let the dopamine wash over her. And then she drove to a bar to drink.
Wonderful imagery.