Monkey Mind by Daniel Smith

Author:Daniel Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

9.

an actor prepares

My parents said I could come home with them if I wanted. It was the easiest thing there was. I would just need to pack my things and we’d head for the interstate. We could call the registrar’s office from the road. But I decided to stick it out, and from the way my parents nodded their heads I could tell they were pleased. What purpose would I serve at home? What good would it do me to putter aimlessly around the house? I would sleep for twelve hours a day and read for a few more. What would I do with the remaining nine?

But there was a catch. If I was going to stay at school, my mother insisted, I would have to seek professional help. “There are two-and-a-half months between now and winter break,” she said. “There’s no reason you should have to get through that time on your own. A trained therapist, someone to talk to and learn from, could be an enormous help. It’s the only way, sweetheart.”

And that is how, on the Tuesday after my panic attack, I found myself frozen in a paranoiac haze on the border between the road that encircled the campus and the asphalt footpath that led to the university’s behavioral-health center.

It was early in the morning. There was no one on the road behind me and no one on the path in front of me. All the blinds in the windows of the building that housed the center were shut against the morning sun. I was alone. Yet I felt as if I were about to waltz onto the stage at Carnegie Hall. Standing there with just a short distance to cover—a mere eighty feet lay between me and the center’s front door—I was thoroughly convinced that once I started walking a multitude of eyes from every direction would lock onto me, all of them hungry for the sight of a student actually freaked out enough to visit the campus shrink, like those eighteenth-century Londoners who’d head to the madhouse on an idle Sunday to ogle psychotics.

I was determined to avoid such a humiliation. There had been too many humiliations, too many compromises, already. The trouble was, my determination left me with only two options as to how to proceed. I could abort mission, continuing along the road until it looped back to my dorm, after which I would be duty-bound to return home; or I could labor against every impulse in my being to affect a demeanor contrary to my actual state, so that anyone who saw me make the trip from curb to clinic would be unable to imagine that I was doing so for therapy. In short, I could give up or I could try to fake it.

I decided on the second.

• • •

When I was eight years old, I auditioned for and won a part in a regional traveling production of the musical Oliver! I was one of Fagin’s kids, a coal-smudged thief in an oversized tweed cap.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.