How I Cured Myself of Debilitating Mental Illness - And Other Stories

I was a strong-willed child growing up. Or, as one might put it less gloriously, I was as stubborn as an ox and fiercely independent.My mother told me at one point that I would make a great drill sergeant when I grew up, if it weren't for my oversensitivity to things like papercuts and itchy clothing tags. Little does she know that I actually am a drill sergeant.

"DUDE, YOU CALL THIS COUNTER CLEAN? JUST LOOK AT IT! THERE'S A STICKY SPOT FROM YOUR PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY IN THIS CORNER, AND THERE ARE BREAD CRUMBS IN ELEVEN AREAS. SERIOUSLY, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU CALL THIS CLEAN. ARE YOU BLIND? THIS IS NOWHERE NEAR DONE! WHY ARE YOU SITTING ON THE COUCH DOING NOTHING, YOU DIDN'T EVEN FINISH THE COUNTER!"

Ahem.

Anyway, there's a picture floating around of me, age three, partially naked, sitting around reading an upside-down copy of Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child. Or it might have been Toilet Training in Less Than a Day. Same thing. I was (and am) still have a cold heart of steel.

Growing up, I was afraid of two things. I was (and am) afraid of dogs. When I was four or five, I got chased by a dog at a party. I wasn't hurt, and the dog was probably just trying to play, but I was still scarred for life. I was also deathly, devastatingly afraid of throwing up.

Yes, as a child, I was the terrified victim of emetophobia, which is the irrational fear of barfing. (See? Like emetophobia... emet... emit... you emit bad things from your body when you vomit... see?) I'm not really sure where this fear began. I do know that when I was seven, I got a stomach bug and was perfectly okay with it, so it must have hit me after this point.

I lived in fear of getting sick to my stomach. I worried about it daily. Uh-oh, I had a twinge in my stomach. Maybe it was that chicken I ate. Maybe I was getting sick! Oh no! I was going to get sick! I was going to throw up! It would be awful! I would die of terror!

And just so we're all on the same page here, what's one of the physical symptoms of anxiety? Stomach problems. Yikes.

A pattern emerged. A family member would get a stomachache. I would worry that they were sick, the epidemic would begin, and I would get sick and barf. I would get so anxious that my stomach would feel sick, which would make me even more anxious. It was awful.

One of the scariest times of my life occurred when my dad was in England for a week on a business trip when I was eleven. Without my dad, my mom had two (yes, two, I never found out how that happened) king-sized beds all to herself, and on a whim, told all of us six kids that we could all hang out in her room for a night and have an epic slumber party. We all jumped at the chance, had a fun evening, and then all crawled into bed for the night.

Full of popcorn, I was just beginning to drift off when I heard the most awful sound coming from the sibling to my immediate left.

BLEEAARRRGGHHH!

Acutely attuned to panic at anything that could be construed as the sound of someone vomiting (for years, I would jump out of my skin if someone spilled a cup of water on the floor... what did that sound like?), I jumped up. Sure enough, there was definitely barf within six inches of my face.

I would have jumped out of bed immediately and run back to the safety of my own germ-free bunk, but before I could move, I heard another weird noise coming from the sibling two down from my right.

BLEEAARRRGGHHH!

Oh crap. There was a stomach virus in the house. And it was spreading super quick!

I ran at marathon pace out of the room of horrors. On my way out, I heard it again. Another sibling was throwing up. I knew I was doomed.

I finally reached the comfort of my own bed, but not before hearing the sound of vomiting yet again.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I just lay there wishing I could be transported to the deepest circle of hell instead. I stared at my ceiling, but I couldn't help but listen.

When I think back to that night, I admire my mom's ability not to run screaming from the house by the fifth barfing session. At the time, however, all I could do was count the number of barfing episodes I could hear.

Somewhere around 3 AM, I lost count after the thirty-second instance of vomiting. I am unfortunately not kidding. When there are six kids, and five of them have the stomach bug, and they're all doing what kids do and vomiting multiple times, well, that number actually sounds about right.

By dawn, still paralyzed in my bed, refusing to use the bathroom in case someone had vomited in the toilet, it struck me.

I hadn't barfed yet.

And in the week of terror that followed, all my siblings threw up multiple times. My mom got the bug. Some of my siblings got the bug twice in a week. Yours truly, wracked by anxiety, was mercifully passed over by the Angel of Death.

It could have been possible that my incredible fear of throwing up actually had a psychological effect on my body, preventing me from actually... throwing up. In seventeen years, I have thrown up exactly once, when I was fourteen. I knew I was fourteen because I was reading The Legend of Luke all night to try to alleviate the anxiety of my nausea, and that book came out in 1999. Unfortunately, I couldn't look at another Redwall book for years after that, and it sucked, because I just loved The Pearls of Lutra.

My emetophobia was a constant present all through childhood, all through adolescence, and all through college. When I was growing up, I used to pray every night that God would spare me from barfing until "I was forty," because I assumed that I would be over the fear by then. But I was now twenty-three, and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I only had seventeen years years left until I had told God that I would be totally okay with Doomsday.

And then, one day, my fear went away. Just like that. Almost out of the blue.

I was sitting in the parking lot of the gym, terrified once again. Then it hit me. What if I could unscientifically calculate my chances of actually throwing up this time around?

So I started thinking.

Let's say, I thought, that I've had at least ten years of this, even though I know that it's been more. I've worried about throwing up at least twice a day each day since then. I'll round it to about fifteen times a week. There are fifty-two weeks in the year, and ten years, so that's 520 weeks. Multiplying together, I have worried about throwing up 7,800 times during the past ten years, and I have only thrown up once. Based on my previous history, there is about a 1 in 7,800 chance that I'll throw up for every instance of anxiety.

Then I looked at some other odds. What could be more likely than throwing up once in every 7,800 times I worried about throwing up?

Well, I was more likely to:

Die walking across the street
Die in an airplane crash
Die from a hornet sting
Die from an asteroid crash
Be audited by the IRS (and I didn't even make $15,000 a year)
Produce a child with a genius IQ
Become a pro athlete (and that was never happening)
Find a four-leaf clover
Win an Academy Award
Date a millionaire
Lose a limb in a freak chainsaw accident

Well then.

And just like that, I was no longer an emetophobic. I had successfully out-logicized my thought patterns. I had championed over my emotions. Maybe it wasn't quite correct, but my brain no longer cared.

I don't think about vomit every single day, anymore. But I still have a tiny bit of dread about hitting forty. Just a little.