mahogany dining table we had worked so hard to afford sat covered with a layer of dust. Candles that I had lovingly placed in silver holders sagged and I left them un-straightened. I went to the local library and took out books. I was looking at one on depression when the librarian came up to me and said, “I haven’t seen you in a while. What are you working on?”
I was mortified. I was working on getting out of bed, which took hours. I don’t think she wanted to hear this. “Oh, some great new projects,” I lied; and she walked away with a chipper it’s-always-great-to-see-local-authors smile. I put the library on my rapidly growing avoidance list. People knew me there and I would have to pretend to be normal.
I dreaded going out of the house. I could hardly drive my car anymore without panic and anxiety taking over. If I had been a drinker I would have self-medicated and become a drunk. Instead I ate cookies and my pants got snugger. I signed up for the gym, lasted through one session, and never went back.
The anxiety was possibly worse than the depression. At least the depression had me in bed each day at one in the afternoon for my three-hour nap, exhausted from a morning of watching TV and doing nothing. “Don’t you want to go to the barn with me and see the horses?” Michael asked.
I knew my horse was going unridden, and probably felt abandoned. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, and drifted off to the sweet sleep of temporary oblivion. Riding seemed an impossibility. Sometimes I would go to the closet in the bathroom where I kept the manicure utensils and nail polishes and look at them, I would pick out a polish and go back to sitting in my chair. I looked down and my feet seemed too far away to deal with, too much effort, too great a stretch.
Michael and I were working on weekly segments for a show to which we contributed on National Public Radio. We would broadcast each week sounding like we had the greatest job in the world: chipper, the world’s most loving couple, the happiest people on earth. Our producer called and told us that radio listeners wanted to meet us, and we were to fly to Minneapolis, where the radio station had arranged a bus trip with our fans to a restaurant about three hours into the country.
I wondered if I could do all this. First I had to pull myself together and pack for the trip. I had to look decent; I could not meet National Public Radio listeners in my blue bathrobe. Then Michael and I had to take a plane trip, something we had done often but that I always dreaded. Fear of flying was high on my list of discomforts. And then, once we landed, I had to do the most heinous thing of all: ride on a bus. It had been thirty-five years since I’d set foot on one. I was totally phobic about buses. I hated public transportation, refused to take it, and now three hours with a group of strangers on a bus going who-knows-where . . . well, it was not something I looked forward to.
The producer of our show, Sally Swift, is a wonderful person—smart, funny, and sympathetic; so I got up the nerve to be candid with her. “I don’t do buses,” I said. I felt like a diva; in fact I was a depressed mess. After about twenty minutes of explanation, we agreed that Michael would ride the bus and I would follow behind the bus in Sally’s car.
“I’ll try to get on the bus, maybe it will work,” I said to Michael. On the flight to Minneapolis I practiced thinking about a bus, and then getting on it. I visualized what a bus looked like. The only buses I rode were the ones from the airport to the car rental place and I hyper-ventilated the whole time. Being a passenger put me out of control, and all my anxiety stemmed from a fear of forfeiting or losing control. If I couldn’t drive the bus or have Michael drive it, it was unbearable. The more I knew that someone else controlled the opening or closing of the bus doors, the higher my anxiety level went. To me, the air in the airport bus was