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  But here, in the middle of my first cheerleading practice, I found, miraculously, another choice, and it was: to be safe. Once they had thrown me in the air, Andy and Gian quickly crouched down and brought their hands together, creating a cushion for me to land on. And I have never loved anyone as much as I loved them in that moment, when I plummeted from what felt like infinite heights, eyes squeezed shut, not knowing whether there would be anything to keep me from slamming into the floor, and they caught me and cradled me as if my price were above rubies.

  They bounced up and gently deposited me on the floor, and the rest of the squad, which had been hollering encouragement the whole time, exploded into cheers mixed with the occasional “You go, girl!” Walking home after practice I passed by a small flock of pigeons picking at crumbs on the sidewalk, and as I approached them they scattered and took wing. That’s me, I thought with a smile, and decided that if I could go to cheerleading practice every day I would never need therapy again.

  I was wrong, of course.

  Oh, it was all fine to begin with. I was still enjoying myself a great deal when we performed for the Team New York awards ceremony, in a cramped but convivial room at the LGBT Community Center, and I continued to learn the flyer parts, ultimately mastering the half extension (with my eyes open, thank you) and the wolf wall. I also started taking gymnastics classes for the first time since the age of six and eventually produced a passable round-off back handspring, which we immediately added to our choreographed routine. We started cheering for the Sharks, New York’s team in the Independent Women’s Football League. This was a sight to behold: hordes of massive helmeted women tackling one another on the field while two dozen fey men cheered “O-O-O-Offense!” before realizing that our team was actually playing defense, at which point we switched to “D-D-D-Defense!” until we heard the unmistakable tinkling of the ice-cream truck around the corner and all sprinted to get Oreo Bars.

  But gradually the nurturing quality of the group interactions was eclipsed by the fact that they were group interactions. The outpouring of love I had felt at XL was no match for my deadly fear of others, which, having left me alone for a time, now began to reassert itself. I started skipping squad outings to bars when I could, and when I couldn’t I stood around for fifteen minutes nursing a Diet Coke while not talking to anybody and then ran away. Princess started berating me one day for not coming to the bar after the Sharks’ most recent victory and in order to make him stop I told him I had a drinking problem. I felt increasingly alienated from the other squad members, because they had the body of Hercules or the grace of Midori Ito or the social life of Paris Hilton. True, I did finally get the Spirit Stick after months of hoping the people who received it instead of me would plummet from full extensions to their deaths on the gym floor. And at the season’s-end dinner I was, bafflingly, given the Personality Award; I was so unprepared for this that when I opened my mouth to make an acceptance speech what came out was, “Ha! I’ve fooled you all!” which only confused people.

  But then there were also things like the ski trip six of us took one February weekend to Horace’s parents’ house in the Poconos. It rained on Saturday, which meant that we couldn’t ski; we were all relieved, the obligation to ski having been the only downside to the ski trip. So instead we went shopping at the outlet mall and I ate popcorn and bought a really cute bag. After such a successful day, though, I had to go and ruin everything by accompanying the other cheerleaders to a gay bar. Even there things started out promisingly downstairs, where my virgin karaoke performance (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar) was a smashing success despite the song’s being totally in the wrong key for me. Then I went upstairs to the bar and smiled at the handsome, shirtless bartender, who smiled back. Maybe my life wasn’t a cruel joke the Fates had decided to play on me, I thought. Then cheerleader Robbie saw the handsome, shirtless bartender smiling at me and patted my shoulder condescendingly. “Oh, he does that to everybody,” he said, and my soul shriveled into a little ball of self-hatred and despair. Robbie walked away, came back three minutes later, and said, “He asked me to meet him after close.” I said, “Oh,” and went into the bathroom and tried not to cry.

  The evening got worse from there. Robbie, Mark, Steven, and Phil all got roaring drunk (Horace and I weren’t drinking—I because I don’t, he because he had to drive), and Mark and Robbie started dancing shirtless in the go-go cage, clearly having more fun doing so than all the fun I had ever had in my entire life put together. I watched them in agony for a time, torn between my desperate desire to join them and actually enjoy myself for one second and my mortal terror of joining them and making myself a laughingstock. Eventually the former impulse won out; I bravely took my shirt off and joined them in the go-go cage, where I felt like an idiot because there wasn’t enough room for three people and I moved as gracefully as a Parkinsonian C-3PO.

  I gyrated halfheartedly for two minutes, during which time I was so miserable I wanted to put my eyes out with a carving fork, and then I got out of the go-go cage. Eventually the four drunk cheerleaders played out an intensely annoying drama about who was taking which strangers home and who was avoiding taking which strangers home, and in the end nobody took any strangers home. I puttered around the house briefly before going up to my room only to find Phil there giving Mark a blow job. I took this as my cue to find somewhere else to sleep and made up the air mattress downstairs. Then I puttered around for a while longer, helping Horace clean and rolling my eyes with him at the drunken behavior of the other four. I was grateful for the shared moment with somebody I liked and respected. Our bond was already infinitely deeper than the shallow fun the drunk cheerleaders were having, and it deepened further when Horace loaned me his copy of Emma as bedtime reading.

  Then I woke up the next morning to learn that after I’d fallen asleep he’d gone upstairs to fuck Steven for an hour and a half.

  Events like this took their toll on my cheerleading. At Pride appearances and Sharks games I grinned and clapped and round-off back handsprang as maniacally as ever, but home felt farther and farther away. No one ever dropped me from a half extension (though I did give Tommy a black eye once during a twist-down) but the rapture of trusting in the hands of others to support me became ever more elusive. I couldn’t understand: I was doing everything right, yet the promise of that bright Thanksgiving morning was growing emptier week by week.

  Nonetheless, I might still have been okay if it hadn’t been for the transcranial magnetic stimulation.

  Anything resembling a complete history of the decline and fall of my mental health would quickly become so soporific as to send a meth addict into a coma. Suffice it to say that I was more or less all right until the age of twenty, at which point my multifarious anxiety disorders broke free from the chains that had bound them and began to ruin my life.

  I can’t stand it when people laughingly say things like, “I got all OCD about filling out that form” when what they mean is, “I filled out that form more punctiliously than necessary.” Obsessive-compulsive disorder is something completely different (not to mention being a noun rather than an adjective). When people have OCD, their minds are filled with intrusive, irrational, repetitive thoughts often so frightening as to render them incapable of concentrating on anything else, and they end up performing rituals to ward off whatever those thoughts make them afraid of, even though they are perfectly aware their fears are groundless. One of the most common obsessions, for example, is a fear that everything around you is contaminated. This is usually paired with a compulsion to wash your hands. People who feel this compulsion strongly can wash their hands until they bleed, and keep on washing—knowing all the while that what they are doing makes absolutely no sense.

  Another disorder on the OCD spectrum, rarer but just as fun, is Tourette’s syndrome. Among other things, this can cause people to call out random words (often obscenities) with no apparent stimulus.

  I have neither classical obsess
ive-compulsive disorder nor classical Tourette’s syndrome, but an ambiguous combination of the two. Instead of obsessing about germs and compulsively washing my hands, or shouting “motherfucker!” every three seconds, when I am under stress I am mentally assailed by hate slurs—racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, any other -ist or -ic you care to name.

  There’s a reason they call OCD the waking nightmare. I grew up with parents who had devoted their lives to the cause of civil rights; my favorite person to spend time with as a child was our neighbor Septima Clark, who had trained Rosa Parks in tactics of nonviolent protest. And in my worst periods it’s as if the Ku Klux Klan had erected a burning cross not on my lawn but in my mind. If I can see a photograph of Leontyne Price, the most glorious opera singer the world has ever known, whose debut at the Metropolitan Opera earned her a standing ovation that lasted forty-two minutes, whose voice in concert has made me hyperventilate and whose artistry has been an inspiration to me since before I can remember, and be powerless to prevent the words “nigger bitch” from battering my consciousness over and over and over and over and over and over and over until they level every thought in my head, not just every idea about bills I have to pay or lunch I have to eat but in the end every understanding of hope and love and belief my body can contain—well, then, it would be better to be dead; it would be better to be dead and in hell.

  Thankfully, my worst periods are few and very far between—only two or three in the last fifteen years—but when you start with the fact that, upon occasion, seeing Harvey Fierstein in a movie causes the phrase “faggot kike” to seize control of my brain, and add 1) a crippling social phobia that renders me incapable of asking drugstore clerks where the protein bars are for fear they will snort at me in derision and mock me after I leave the store, and 2) a generalized anxiety that means the last time I felt completely relaxed was for about twenty minutes on the morning of February 6, 2001, as well as 3) a need to take sips from water fountains in multiples of four or go mad with discomfort—four sets of nine sips is best but if there are people behind me I don’t want to risk angering them and so I can make do with four sets of five or, in extraordinary cases, four sets of three, though any lower than that and I have to do two sets of four sets of sips—what you end up with is a person who is sometimes not in such great shape.

  Medication worked wonders for a time but eventually lost its efficacy and, since standing at the edge of the subway platform in case I realized as the train was coming that I needed to jump was not my idea of a good time, I decided to investigate other possible treatments. Unfortunately, homeopathic remedies did nothing; acupuncture did nothing; a faith healer did nothing (shut up, I was desperate). I ran across credible reports suggesting that psychedelic mushrooms have anti-OCD properties, and so, despite the fact that the eighth-grade assembly on drug addiction had frightened me so much I had never even smoked a cigarette, I decided to grow some shrooms. Sadly, the attempt coincided with a mouse infestation in my building, and the mice ate the shrooms before I could harvest them, which meant that I had OCD and an apartment full of tripping mice.

  So when I read about a New York–based study of a new technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, I was intrigued. This was shortly after I started to lose my enthusiasm for cheerleading; maybe I could get it back, I thought, if I recalibrated my brain.

  In many people with psychiatric problems, goes the idea behind TMS, certain areas of the brain are sluggish or hyperactive, but by aiming electromagnetic pulses at those areas, you can speed them up or slow them down. This is not electroconvulsive therapy, in which doctors anesthetize a patient and then send an electric shock through his or her entire brain strong enough to induce a seizure; TMS is much less drastic and more targeted.

  The only problem was that I didn’t actually have the illness the study was investigating. The doctors were looking for people with major depressive disorder—the kind that can prevent you from feeding yourself and sometimes from bathing—and whatever was going on in my brain, it wasn’t that. Furthermore, people with OCD were specifically excluded, and though I didn’t have classical OCD, what I did have was certainly close enough to disqualify me.

  However, I had exhausted all my other options, so I just signed up and lied through my teeth. True, they would be aiming the magnets at parts of my brain associated with a disorder I didn’t have, but hey, I thought, it’s not as if I can get any worse, so what do I have to lose?

  At my entrance interview I therefore exaggerated my depressive symptoms as much as I could and left out my obsessive ones entirely. One of the first questions they asked, for example, was whether I woke up earlier than I needed to and whether, if so, I could go back to sleep. I did in fact wake up earlier than I needed to, generally at around eight or nine, which for people in the theater is the middle of the night, but I didn’t think that would be convincing enough, so I told them I usually woke up between four and six and was unable to get to sleep again. There were about thirty of these diagnostic questions, all of which I answered as haltingly as I could, dulling my affect and crying the first chance I got. That night they called me and said I was eligible for the study and could I start on Monday and I said yes definitely.

  This turned out to be a bad idea.

  First of all, TMS was very boring. I went every weekday over the course of two and a half months and sat in a chair for forty-five minutes with a machine the size of a large stereo component at my back. A flexible tube connected the machine to a little plastic hat, which sat just above the hairline on the left side of my head. Twice a minute, electromagnetic pulses from the plastic hat would poke at my scalp like a manic woodpecker for several seconds. The pulses were slightly painful for the first few minutes of the first day, but after that my nerve endings got used to them. The study protocol forbade me to read or fall asleep, and my head was immobilized, so I ended up staring at the Monet print on the wall and contemplating my own existence. This was not fun.

  And what’s more, it didn’t do me any good. In fact, showing up every day and lying only made me exponentially more anxious. Compounding this anxiety was the repeat interview I had every two weeks; with each one it became increasingly difficult for me to keep track of my previous answers. Crap, I would think, did I tell them last time that I had spent less than three hours a day in productive activity the previous week, or that I had spent more than three hours a day in productive activity but had had thoughts or feelings of incapacity, fatigue, or weakness? Soon enough I was waking up between four and six every morning and unable to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t figure out whether to say that I was waking up between four and six every morning, which now had the virtue of being true, or that I was waking up between two and four every morning, which had the virtue of indicating that I was getting worse, which was also true. I ended up deciding on the latter, in case they could turn up the voltage or use a secret backup protocol that would really fix me, though I did worry that if my trajectory didn’t change I would soon have to claim to be waking up at eight-thirty in the evening. Unfortunately, they did not turn up the voltage, and if there was a secret backup protocol they never used it on me.

  Before long the anxiety I had previously felt was as naught; I was filled with such terrifying dread every time the phone rang or someone asked me a question or I picked up a spoon that I became almost incapable of speech. Every morning, after sitting bolt upright at five with my heart pounding and unable to breathe, I cried for an hour and a half before waking my boyfriend up to comfort me—he loved this—until one day the understanding came crashing onto me in an instant that he wasn’t good enough for me (a medical student and a painter, he regularly said things like, “I can’t decide whether I want to join Doctors Without Borders after I graduate or run a gay community health center”). Since I couldn’t bear the guilt of keeping secrets, I faithfully reported this understanding and all its permutations to him. For a month and a half I would call him and he would say “Hi, how are you?” and I
would say something like “I’m really anxious because I met somebody today I was very attracted to and I think you and I shouldn’t be together and that I should be dating a millionaire who speaks eight languages” and he would say “Okay, well, can we talk about that when we see each other tonight?” and when we saw each other that night I would sit in silence and watch episodes of Law & Order, not new ones because I couldn’t pay enough attention to take anything in, but old ones I’d already seen, but not old ones with Benjamin Bratt or Jesse L. Martin because the OCD was haunting me with a vengeance and I preferred to avoid situations that would fill my brain with racist slurs, and then my boyfriend would say “So do you want to talk about what you said earlier?” and I would say “No” and pace around the apartment hitting myself in the face and then I would fall asleep and sit bolt upright at five the next morning with my heart pounding and unable to breathe and start the whole thing over again except for the time when I decided the reason I had felt a little better after my last TMS session must have been that beforehand I’d taken a Benadryl at two in the morning and so I stayed up until two in the morning again and took another Benadryl and stared at the ceiling wishing I had never been born until it was time to get up.

  This interfered somewhat with my ability to be an effective cheerleader.

  I could still plaster the simulacrum of a smile onto my face, and I could still yell “Go, New York, let’s go!” But it took all my willpower to do even this much. I was able to wrench about 5 percent of my attention to eating and bathing and gesturing with pom-poms—all of which activities now required huge expenditures of psychic energy—while the rest of my brain devoured itself like an ouroboros. How could I put any real effort into a half extension when my mind was torturing itself to death?