Swish by Joel Derfner

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?
    And it wasn’t just the impossibility of concentration and the wishing I had never been born that got in the way (and the fever pitch my OCD reached in the midst of such a multi-ethnic group as Cheer New York); physical obstacles began to arise as well. At one practice I finally threw a round-off back tuck, which I celebrated by throwing three more, falling, and breaking my left hand. This meant that I had to cheerlead in the Gay Pride Parade in a cast.