I go through Shrinks faster than my sugar-deprived nephew goes through a bag of Skittles. It just is what it is.
We meet, we talk, we break up. It's usually a one-shot deal, like a blind date gone wrong. As soon as they begin diagnosing the cause of my 'illness' – I'm out. There is no cause. It just happened.
I was your average college student, attending the local four year option because it was cheaper, and besides, several of my high school friends had made the same choice. I was getting decent grades, drinking my share of six-dollar booze, and living quite contentedly in a tiny, off-campus apartment with Lynn, my best friend of almost nine years.
It was around the end of my freshman year, about the time of my eighteenth birthday that everything just snapped. Like a twig beneath a heavy boot. Snap. That's all, folks.
Suddenly I couldn't go to class. I would get nauseous just thinking of it, outright sick if I attempted it. I had to leave my internship with the local paper because I couldn't stomach the thought of working alongside of others. They still allowed me to contribute to their online content, but they refused to pay me if I wouldn't attend their quarterly meetings.
I stopped going on dates, I stopped weekend excursions with friends, I stopped everything, basically. I holed up in my tiny apartment, where the world wasn't quite so terrifying. I started freelancing to pay for rent, doing odd here-and-there sort of jobs, mostly blog content. I enrolled in online classes, and I frequented chat rooms for company.
My roommate had made the transition far simpler than it might have been. Lynn was the soft sort, a sympathetic personality, and an enabler. She took care of my external needs, like grocery shopping. Our other friends chastised her for this; they said she was only making the situation worse. I disagreed, naturally.
I had created a new world for myself, a world that I could handle. It was comfortable here and it worked for me.
"I found something," Jacey said, setting her purse onto the high-rise countertop. Jacey was a mutual friend of ours and the most dedicated to 'finding a cure.' Was there a cure for lunacy?
"Let me guess, a new pill? Hollywood's latest and greatest remedy? Does it come in liquid form?"
She scowled as she unzipped her bag, removing item after item until her fingers found the folded piece of paper. She strode across the room, handing it to me.
I had to chew on my lip as I accepted it; for some reason, the surety of her attempts was always funny to me. Each time she 'found something' she was so confident that it would be the final time. That it would finally work. I'd be cured.
"Oh, good. Nathan Shaw's phone number."
Jasey seemed overly disgruntled as she snapped the piece of paper from my fingers and stalked back into the kitchen, wedging it beneath an old, Spring-Break magnet.
"Nathan Shaw is a traveling psychiatrist. He makes himself available to come to patient's homes instead of forcing them to meet at an office. He's been a guest on several news shows, has appeared in most big magazines-"
"A celebrity shrink." I rolled my eyes, turning my attention back to the laptop resting on my knees.
Jasey was beside me in seconds, her hand closing the screen.
"Abby, I'm serious. He's supposedly really good. Maybe he can…"
"Fix me?" I laughed, finding it ever amusing, albeit somewhat endearing that none of my friends could bring themselves to use words like illness, or disorder, or issue. My quackiness was the persistent elephant in the room.
"Not fix, Abby. Help. Help you to cope."
"I'm coping. I have a job, I have a boyfriend-"
She snorted, surprising us both with her uncharacteristic lapse in control. She coughed into her closed fist, flicking her eyes from one corner of the room to the other, as if she'd find the words she needed suspended in the air around us.
"A boyfriend you have never met, Abby," she said slowly. "You have an online-only relationship with someone you met in a chatroom. You don't even know what he looks like-"
"We skype, now. He's tall, he has dark hair-"
"Abby."
"Ok! But really, what do we even know about this guy?" I asked, re-opening my laptop. My Google homepage greeted me as I typed in the name Jasey had written for me.
"He's probably just some over-hyped, media-enthusiastic phony," I said, clicking on the first available link. Jasey sighed.
"Nathan Shaw," I read, scanning over the Wikipedia entry. "Born in Caswell, Maine. Attended Brown University. M.D. in psychiatry, specializes in anxiety disorders and phobias."
I scrolled further, a recent picture of Nathan Shaw appearing on the screen. I gasped.
"Jasey, he's like, our age. He can't be more than a few months out of school."
"He's older. He's twenty-four," Jasey said, shrugging her shoulders as she sat beside me. The abused green couch sank awkwardly in the center under our combined weight.
I whistled, nodding my head dramatically.
"Oh good. Four years. He's practically my grandfather, in that case."
Jasey threw her hands in the air, groaning.
"Seriously, Abby, you have some excuse for all of them. Do you want to spend the rest of your life here? There's so much world out there, Abby. This needs to stop."
I was stunned silent by her sudden outburst, so accustomed to her usually calm, calculated demeanor. She had never reprimanded me for my disorder-illness-issue before.
I glanced at the piece of paper hanging on the fringe, and then back to the photo of the impossibly young, fair-haired doctor staring at me from the screen. He looked like a fraud- more Hollywood glamour than medical know-how. But if it meant that much to Jasey, I would at least humor her by confirming that myself.
"I'll call," I conceded, frowning as she leapt to her feet, convulsing into a bizarre interpretation of our happy dance.
"I have a feeling," she sang, tilting her head as she waved her arms wildly to the side. Now it was my turn to groan.
She always had a feeling.