Okay Fine Whatever Read online

  The names and defining characteristics of some people in this book have been changed to protect their anonymity.

  Copyright © 2018 by Courtenay Hameister

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover photograph © Getty Images / Hulton Archive / WIlliam Vanderson

  Author photograph by Michael McCrary

  Cover copyright © 2018 Hachette Book Group

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  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  littlebrown.com

  First Edition: July 2018

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  This work was made possible in part due to a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland, Oregon.

  Author’s note: Portions of essays in this book have appeared on Live Wire! radio and Back Fence PDX, in Portland Monthly magazine, Oregon Humanities magazine, and on GoLocalPDX.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-39569-4

  LCCN 2017958219

  E3-20180626_DA_NF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Half Title

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Stepping Down

  The Sensory-Deprivation Tank

  Casa Diablo

  A Little Bit of Background

  Adventures in Dating I

  A Brazilian in Portland

  Adventures in Dating II

  Getting Legally High

  Dating the Polyamorous I

  Dating the Polyamorous II

  Build-Your-Own-Burrito Night at the Sex Club

  An Hour with a Professional Cuddler

  Water Aerobics

  Adventures in Dating III

  Fellatio Class

  Adventures in Intimacy

  The MRI

  One Last Leap

  The Epilogue That’s Really Just Another Chapter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Newsletter

  For Mom and Scott—

  Without you, I could never have accomplished anything.

  What I’m saying is, this is all your fault.

  Introduction

  Getting Plucky

  Imagine you are eight years old.

  You are at a community pool in Akron, Ohio, with your entire extended family—uncles, cousins, grandparents, and your older brother, whose opinion you hold in high regard because he can make realistic fart noises using his hand and armpit.

  You have made the egregious mistake of climbing to the top of the high dive.

  You are now standing at the edge of the diving board, looking down into the blue abyss miles below you.

  Okay, like, sixteen feet below you.

  It feels like you’re about to jump out of a plane. Or off a bridge. Or into the ocean in Jaws after you’ve already seen that one unfortunate teenager get pulled under.

  The fear feels insurmountable, but so does the ire of the five kids in line, including four on the ladder and one standing behind you at the other end of the board, glaring, his sun-kissed arms akimbo.

  “Just go!” he whines.

  His plea is one of dozens you’ve heard for the past ten minutes while staring into what, to everyone else, is a calm pool of welcoming blue water.

  Finally, the tension becomes too much for your knocking knees, and you sit down at the end of the board, triggering frustrated sighs and expletives from every diver in line.

  “You can do it, sweetie!” your mother yells, her hand poised in a blocking-the-sun salute. “It’ll be over in a second. Just jump.”

  But you know something she doesn’t.

  It’s too late.

  You already know you can’t do it, and now instead of working up the courage to jump, you’re working up the courage to walk the gauntlet of searing side-eyes you’ll endure on the Climb of Shame down to the scorching pavement.

  This is where you learned it: You are not the leaping type.

  This story is both a true account of the first time I disappointed the crap out of my older brother in public and an encapsulation of how I lived my life up until a couple years ago.

  I was a toe-dipper. A cringer. A wait-and-see-er.

  People wouldn’t necessarily have known this, because through a heroic feat of white-knuckling, I managed to pass myself off as a regular, sometimes-relaxed, initiative-taking adult. And a high-functioning one, at that.

  I had a cool job.

  I hosted Live Wire!, a nationally syndicated public radio show wherein I interviewed fascinating people like Gus Van Sant, Tig Notaro, Mike Birbiglia, and Carrie Brownstein…and tried to keep from fear-puking while on air.

  I was lucky, but I was also terrified. Every week I hosted the show, I looked like I was leaping, but I was still on that diving board and I hadn’t moved an inch.

  It wasn’t just my job that caused me anxiety. Everything did.

  Phone calls to strangers were miserable. Parties where I didn’t know anyone were like the seventh circle of hell but with better snacks. And making an unprotected left turn triggered the same fight-or-flight response most people experience when running from a small- to medium-size bear.

  You can imagine how all of this affected my romantic life. One side effect of my sometimes crippling anxiety: I didn’t have an actual adult relationship until I was thirty-four. Not surprisingly, this turned out to create its own set of issues, which I’ll get into later.

  It wasn’t until the poop hit the propellers at work in an epic, slow-motion, action-movie kind of way that I went to a counselor, who informed me that, in addition to the OCD I already knew about, I’d been struggling with generalized anxiety disorder for most of my life.

  That meant that I had full-on OCD attacks pretty rarely, but my daily level of anxiety about things like work, relationships, finances (y’know, life?) was disproportionately high compared to that of other people.

  And suddenly it all made sense: I wasn’t a giant fucking wuss; I had a disease.

  I had a disease that not only made me afraid to take chances but also turned me into an Eeyore in a world seemingly filled with Tiggers. Anxiety makes you think that nothing is going to go well, and eventually, that becomes a habit. Eventually, it’s not just jumping out of a plane that might have disastrous consequences, it’s also talking to the checker at the grocery store or just leaving the house.1

  This book is about my attempt to climb out of the ruts in my neural pathways that said everything was going to suck. To rewire the negative connections that quashed any effort to change. To try things that scared me in order to teach my brain that everything was going to be okay.2 It was my version of exposure therapy—to the entire world.

  Spoiler alert: I didn’t jump out of planes.

  I did things that were frightening in more of a “C
an embarrassment turn into a permanent condition?” way than an “I’m going to end up as a heap of bones at the bottom of the Grand Canyon” way. Things like, for instance, taking a fellatio class.

  And speaking of oral sex, I didn’t exempt dating from my project. I went on more dates in a year than I’d been on in my entire life, which, to be honest, wasn’t that difficult to do.

  I dubbed this my Okay Fine Whatever Project because okay, fine, whatever are the words we anxious people utter when embarking on adventures that Tiggers might be excited about, like being dragged to a concert or on a trip or to our own Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony.

  I wasn’t kidding myself that I could magically turn into a brave person, but I hoped that, just maybe, I could become a not-constantly-scared person. A person who was less lonely, less gloomy, and who didn’t feel like such a liar when she told herself that everything was going to be okay.

  If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety, I offer this: Anxious people are braver than the un-anxious, because we do it anyway, every single day. We’re faced with fear on a regular basis, and we push through it in order to simply live our lives. And that’s something to be proud of.

  Also, we’re kind of lucky, we anxious few. Because when you’re scared of everything, everything is an adventure.

  So let the (sort of) adventure begin.3

  1 In my defense, thirteen people are killed every year by vending machines, so you never know what peril awaits you when you walk out that door.

  2 Important disclaimer: This book was written prior to the 2016 election, when an undercurrent of ugliness in our culture was further revealed and encouraged. As a white woman in America, I realize it is great privilege that makes it possible for me to go out and pursue things that scare me, since just driving a car can be an act of courage for a person of color in this country. That being said, I believe that we all have self-doubt, anxiety, and fears that can be overcome, and I hope it’s possible for everyone to find something of value in this book. If you don’t, let me know on Twitter, which is now just the Digital Land of Angry People (note: I am one of them).

  3 A note about memoir and accuracy: Everything in this book happened, but the timing of some events has been shifted to improve narrative flow, and conversations presented are, of course, not word for word but how I remember them. Also, I swear like a sailor. Although my cousin was a sailor and he didn’t seem to swear any more than anyone else in my family, so I guess I swear like a Hameister.

  Stepping Down

  Wherein I Unknowingly Plant the Seeds for a Series of Tiny Adventures

  Imagine1 you’re an accountant. (Or, if you’re an accountant, imagine you’re you.)

  Now imagine2 that numbers terrify you. Your pulse quickens and your throat closes up as you’re buttoning your shirt for work in the morning. Brushing your teeth, you feel disconnected from reality as your mind races, picturing the thousands of numbers that await you on your computer screen. When you finally reach your desk and see all the spreadsheets laid out in front of you, you feel like someone has attached electrodes to your upper body and is slowly turning up the voltage. Your chest tightens and buzzes with energy, making it impossible to get a full breath.

  If this happened to you every morning, you would never continue your accounting career. That would be madness.

  Now imagine you’re a performer prone to unpredictable bouts of stage fright.

  Welcome to another day at work.

  This was what show days felt like for me when I was hosting Live Wire!, a radio variety program that’s recorded in front of a live audience in Portland, Oregon, and airs on about a hundred public radio stations nationally.

  Every week, in the days leading up to the show, I felt the anxiety as more of a dull pain than a stabbing one. At each Monday writers’ meeting, I would grimace as I felt the first stirrings in my chest of what I called my dread ball. The dread ball began its life the size of a pea, but by Wednesday, it was decidedly watermelonish, heavy and tight and filling my chest with a muffled smoldering that threatened to explode out of my lungs, which, it turns out, I needed in order to breathe. By show day—Saturday—my dread ball had turned into a giant, human-size hamster ball I’d walk around in, the rest of the world dulled by the view through the plastic.

  I did lots of things on the show—read essays, performed in comedy sketches—and those things were sometimes great; fun, even. It was interviewing people in front of an audience that filled me with dread (balls). It’s strange to meet someone for the first time in any situation—imagine doing it in front of four hundred people who paid good money to see a compelling conversation. And when every person you interview is a leader in his or her field: a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, the creator of the wiki software, the stakes go even higher.

  I never finished college, which is a bit of a sore spot for me, and it felt like once a week, I was sitting onstage holding up a huge arrow pointing to the giant hole where my education should’ve been. I was always worried I would seem like an idiot by comparison to my guests, which was in itself kind of idiotic, since I did tons of research on them prior to their arrival, and it’s not like Bruce Campbell was going to come on the show and want to discuss The Iliad.3

  I stuck it out, though, because I had lots of reasons to. I got to collaborate with insanely talented people who made me look way smarter than I was. I met extraordinary artists like David Rakoff, Cheryl Strayed, and Bob Odenkirk and got to ask them about their creative processes, which turned my job into a paid decade-long MFA program with a well-stocked craft-service table. And the best part: The show gave me essay-writing hard deadlines that would’ve resulted in public humiliation in front of an audience of four hundred to seven hundred if they were not met. The constant fear of this humiliation made me create more new work than most of the writers I knew.

  So there were plenty of good reasons to stay as well as one not-so-good reason: the nagging, terrifying idea that this job was the most interesting thing about me.

  I already knew I had trouble talking to strangers at parties, and my eHarmony profile had caused exactly three men in dad-jeans to beat a path to my digital door, so I didn’t feel like I had a ton of personality traits to recommend me. This job caused me great angst, but it also gave me great anecdotes, and when someone asked me, “What do you do?,” I could answer with a job title shared by only about three other people in the country.4 That felt like a selling point for me.

  Of course I realize I’m not a product, but when you’re a single woman in your forties, it’s difficult not to think of yourself as a brand. (Tired of the everyday? Looking for something slightly divergent from the norm but not intimidatingly so? Try Courtenay! She’s arty!) And if I was a brand, my flagship product was the show.

  Once I’d made the mistake of allowing my job to define me in that way, I could no longer consider quitting it without feeling like I would be quitting myself.

  And then, on March 14, 2013, three days before our ninth-anniversary show, none of the identity stuff mattered because I was having a massive anxiety attack. Not a hit-and-run anxiety attack, but the kind that sits down and orders a double. The kind that wakes up with you and asks how you slept. The kind that laughs when you tell it that you have a show in three days and could it go bother Garrison Keillor, because he seems like a guy who could benefit from a little nervous energy. (And, apparently, a sexual-harassment workshop.)

  If you’ve never had an anxiety attack, it’s a lot like that feeling you have when you almost get into a car accident or someone startles you. But what if that feeling just didn’t go away? What if it hung around for hours or even days, like that one friend who won’t leave your party and eats all the guacamole you were planning to binge on later?

  In this case, the panic attack was triggered by an OCD episode, the second one of my life.

  The first one happened a year after my father died.

  My father was a good, kind, sometimes naive and a
wkward man who’d spent his entire adult life living with bipolar disorder. He’d gone to West Point and done two tours in Vietnam, and when he came back to the States at thirty-five, he decided that he wanted to be a doctor. So for most of my childhood, he was either out of the country, studying for med school, or working. Despite manic depression and dyslexia, he still managed to become a family practitioner and an army colonel, which was totally badass, but as you can imagine, some of the family stuff fell through the cracks.

  My mother picked up more than her share of the slack, and she, my brother, and I became a sort of three-person unit that my father had trouble breaking into.

  I was a particularly sensitive and neurotic child (read: “giant pain in the ass”), so I took his absences personally. When I was in college, he reached out to me and my brother, trying to create a relationship. My brother reached back. I didn’t.

  When I was twenty-seven, my father pulled into a Holiday Inn parking lot and took a pill that he knew would stop his heart. He died within minutes.

  The guilt I felt was immediate and crushing.

  I left school in Texas and went to live with my mother in the southern mountains of Colorado.

  I’d lived there about a year when the OCD hit. I was spending the weekend in a tree house built by some friends of my mother’s that sat at the top of a butte with 360-degree views of the San Juan Mountains. It was a completely inappropriate place to fall apart.

  Some people’s OCD manifests as compulsive rituals, like hand-washing to get rid of germs or repeatedly driving around the block to make sure you didn’t hit anyone your last time around. These activities are all triggered by intrusive thoughts—irrational thoughts you don’t want and can’t control that shove their way into your psyche like a lesser Kardashian at a Vanity Fair Oscar party.

  My version of OCD was just the intrusive thoughts without the compulsions. There are different versions of intrusive-thought OCD, and mine was harm-focused (HOCD), the sort wherein your mind convinces you that you’ve done something awful, like stabbed or killed someone, but you can’t for the life of you come up with what you did.