Okay Fine Whatever Read online

  During that first episode after my father died, I imagined that I’d harmed some kids I used to babysit. While I sat in the upstairs loft of the tree house looking out on perhaps the most glorious sunset of my life, I meticulously combed through every memory I had of babysitting them, but nothing ever surfaced. This, it turns out, is a classic symptom of HOCD.

  The terrible thing about HOCD’s intrusive thoughts is that your mind and body respond as if you’ve done the terrible thing you’re imagining. The crime may be fictional, but the guilt, the fear, and the shame are all too real. And so is the massive, crippling anxiety.

  Imagine the worst thing you could ever do. Now imagine you think you actually did it.

  That.

  It turns out these OCD episodes tend to happen to me in times of great stress or when I urgently need to make a huge change in my life and am avoiding doing so.

  In this case, I’d lived with my mother for a year in this tiny little town in the mountains and it was time to go, but fear and inertia wouldn’t allow me to. Enter a crippling OCD episode.

  Now, back to my second OCD episode, in 2013. This time, three days before the Live Wire! ninth-anniversary show, I began to worry I would harm my roommate, Shelly.

  Shelly is perhaps the best person I know. She’s a small, supersonic rocket of a woman—a pixie-like ball of energy, joy, and generosity who works as a web developer by day and an assemblage artist by night.

  Thinking you might harm her is like thinking you might harm a baby kangaroo or that elf from Rudolph who just wanted to be a dentist.

  These episodes are crippling because it’s difficult to function when you believe you’re the worst person in the world. When you wake up in the morning, you’ve forgotten that you are, but your OCD reminds you and the pattern starts again—obsess, reassure yourself, breathe deeply and feel almost normal, then remember that there are knives in the kitchen that you have access to.

  My version of OCD has never caused me to imagine anything specific; it only gives me the idea that something might have happened or might happen. It’s extraordinary that something so vague could be so terrifying, but the mind is magical in super-fucked-up ways.

  So, back to my celebratory ninth-anniversary anxiety attack. It was the night before the show, and the panic was still living in every inch of my skin and bones. It was inside of me and I was inside of it simultaneously, and neither of us was going anywhere anytime soon.

  And while my biggest concern was how to quell this panic, my second-biggest concern was how to function onstage with a mind this otherwise occupied.

  That night, I went to my brother’s house. With a psychology degree and decades as a bartender, Scott knows how to listen and calm people down regardless of the state they’re in—an ability that is greatly appreciated by all the “creative types” who know and love him. He has this trick when you’re arguing with him in which he repeats what you just said in an even, quiet voice that makes you realize that you might be overreacting or being hypersensitive or slightly on the batshit-crazy side. It’s very effective and often quite humbling.5

  I explained what was happening and he calmly told me I didn’t have any choice but to cancel the show. I told him I couldn’t cancel because too many people were counting on me.

  Scott has always been the one person in my life willing to be brutally honest with me.

  He gave me a little smile that said While it’s adorable how important you think you are, the earth will actually keep spinning if you cancel, and he handed me the phone.

  I called the producer and, for the first time in nine years, told her I couldn’t perform the next night. I also offered her a solution: One of the guests we were planning to have on, Luke Burbank, an incredibly quick-witted, charming, natural showman who hosted his own popular podcast, could fill in. We’d actually booked him to see if he’d be a good replacement for me if I ever got sick, so it made perfect sense to try him out, since I was, if you consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently very sick.

  The next night, the worst and the best thing happened: The show was utterly, completely fine without me. That sucked. And it was wonderful. But it also sucked.

  Luke glided through the show as if he’d been hosting it all along, and I could suddenly breathe.

  For a couple agonizing weeks, my friends, family, and colleagues watched me struggle to make the decision they’d seen coming for years. In the end, I stepped down as host and remained head writer and co-producer. I felt my body change the moment I decided. My shoulders relaxed, my chest opened up, and my stomach became virtually knot- and butterfly-free.

  The only time the decision truly leveled me was after the first show I spent at the producers’ table, a month after I’d stepped down.

  The night had gone quite smoothly—in fact, it was amazing to watch a show without the dread ball ruining it for once. I was entertained, I did my job well, and I was frankly quite proud of myself for handling what could’ve been an awkward situation with aplomb.

  Afterward, we all went to the bar across the street from the theater as we always did. The crowd there was usually a mix of show guests, staff, and audience members. I sat down at the bar and ordered a drink.

  I turned around to see who else was there and spotted Luke sitting at a banquette in the corner, talking to the film director who had been a guest. There were a few people surrounding them, listening. Luke was holding court.

  I remembered how I’d felt after every one of the two hundred shows I’d hosted: A tidal wave of relief with a few droplets of pride in it would wash over me as soon as I heard the final theme music and the audience applause died down. Then I’d walk out to the beaming faces of friends who had come to see the show, and strangers would approach me to thank me for a great night, or tell me their favorite parts, or say they knew people from my past, like a guy I’d worked in advertising with or punched at a party in the late nineties.6

  A lot of people don’t get to enjoy post-spotlight moments like this, and yet I don’t think I handled them well; I deflected all compliments with ninja reflexes. I felt strange about getting positive feedback because I generally wasn’t responsible for the best moments of the night—or any of the moments, for that matter. The show was put together by a crew of producers and writers and musicians and staff, and I was just another member of that troupe. But I got to stand in the spotlight for three hours and then step out of it and have everyone attribute the whole production to me, for good or for bad.

  When I saw Luke holding court, I realized that I was witnessing what I had really lost: All that gratitude, all that admiration—all those people believing that I had my shit together and that I was worthy of three hours of their time. I had relied on that gratitude and admiration, though I had never figured out how to accept it gracefully. And now I’d lost that four-hundred-person affirmation that, unbeknownst to me, I’d been using to counteract all the dickish things I said to myself every day.

  I realized all of this in one terrible moment at the bar, and Jim, a friend and one of the show’s producers, saw it happen.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I said, and I bolted to the bathroom, managing to lock the door behind me before the tears fell.

  I sat on the toilet and sobbed as the weight of the decision crashed down on me.

  I rocked back and forth and read the graffiti on the bathroom wall to try to distract myself.

  Joshua West is a selfish prick.

  You are worthy.

  I ate too much cheese.

  I laughed a little and pulled myself together, but then my brain refocused on the trigger image (some Seattle rando7 basking in a glow that used to belong to me), as it was wont to do.

  And more crying.

  I was fine after about seven minutes, but now the problem was my face.

  It looked like a map of Russia and the former Yugoslavia with a pair of frog eyes to the north and a clown nose where Bulgaria should
be.

  The only way I could get out of there without Luke seeing me was to make a run for it. I speed-walked to the bar to grab my purse, keeping my back to him. That meant facing two of the show’s producers, but that was fine because I’d known them for a decade and they were already aware that I was a colossal crybaby.

  Jim followed me outside.

  “Hey,” he said. “They still love you. They all still love you.”

  I felt so pathetic for being a person who needed to hear something like that.

  “No,” I said. “They don’t. They don’t even see me anymore.”

  Those faceless crowds of people didn’t know me and I didn’t know them, but obviously they’d meant more to me than I’d been willing to admit to myself.

  To be clear, I’ve never missed the actual job, but I will always miss everything and everyone the job brought me.

  And it made me wonder: Why couldn’t I push through the anxiety and just enjoy the job?

  I asked that question of William Todd Schultz, a friend who’s a professor of psychology and the author of Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith. He attributed it to my personality type—high in neuroticism and low in extroversion.8 Shocker: Those two things don’t go well with performing. (Welcome to the show, everyone! Also, fuck you, I’m leaving, this is horrible.)

  Extroverts thrive on external stimulation (like hundreds of clapping people), while introverts get their energy from time spent alone and are far more sensitive to stimuli (like hundreds of clapping people). Some level of extroversion is obviously important for a performer. And, according to Schultz, being high in neuroticism is particularly problematic for entertainers, as it leads to more pronounced anticipatory dread, which, as we know, was kind of my jam.

  I asked Luke, the guy who took my place as host, what made it worthwhile for him to get up onstage, as he always looked completely at ease—sometimes more than when he wasn’t onstage. “It’s been said to me by people I’m married to that I’m much better at relating to large groups,” he quipped. “And there’s a reason for that. Your good interactions with a single person—imagine sort of mainlining the best uncut freaking adrenochrome of that. It’s euphoric.”

  I also talked to Ophira Eisenberg, the host of NPR’s Ask Me Another and a longtime stand-up comic, and she put it this way: “When I’m not onstage for a while, I get a little grumpy,” she said. “I can feel that my sense of myself is affected by the audience’s reaction to me. And that’s a little fucked up, but if it’s your job to be propelled forward by positive reactions, doesn’t it naturally become part of who you are? So there’s a portion of my love for myself that’s decided by a bunch of drunk people in a basement, and I just have to live with that.”

  I can relate to both of them. Just because I am, as Todd put it, “temperamentally ill-equipped to be onstage” that doesn’t mean I don’t crave connection. I recently saw a picture of myself walking offstage after reading an essay on Live Wire!, and I was shocked. The expression on my face looked like pure, unadulterated joy, but that’s not what I remember when thinking of a show. The part I remember most is the week of trepidation I felt before each show for the very reason Eisenberg mentions: I believed that my success, failure, or worth as a person was going to be decided by four hundred people I didn’t know. Sure, I might have a successful show, but successful enough to make up for the seventy-eight hours I spent worrying? It’s like cooking Thanksgiving dinner—if you were to see the actual work-to-enjoyment ratio of that meal, you would never do it again. But almost none of us look at it that way; it’s a matter of perspective.

  And Eisenberg’s and Burbank’s perspectives are both unquestionably positive. In fact, almost pathologically so. When Ophira told her first stand-up joke ever, one person laughed. One. She described it as the biggest rush of her life. I asked her why she was so thrilled at what sounded to me like a sink-into-the-floor moment.

  “The laugh was from someone I didn’t know, so I saw that as success,” she said. “Some people have ‘laugh ears,’ where they hear laughs that aren’t there. Other people don’t hear laughs that are there and come off the stage destroyed.”

  I was definitely in the latter group.

  Unlike Burbank. “In stand-up, you only remember the people who laughed,” he said. “I would record a set I thought was killing and replay it to hear three people laughing. It’s a survival technique the spirit employs.” You don’t do the math, he said, otherwise you realize you’re having a .05 percent success rate.

  As for me, I could never not do the math. I am what psychologist Nancy Cantor referred to as a defensive pessimist: a person who doesn’t necessarily expect the worst to happen but who prepares for it just in case. (Sure, we probably won’t get in a debilitating or disfiguring accident on the way to the 7-Eleven, but just in case we do, I’m going to press 9 and 1 on my phone so that once we crash, all I’ll need to do is dial one number.) The problem is, defensive pessimism won’t get you through weekly three-hour performances. You need to be able to push through the fear and the nerves and the YouTube comments over and over and over. You need what Luke and Ophira have in spades: a powerful, down-to-your-bones belief that in the end, everything is going to be okay.

  I didn’t have that feeling. I didn’t think that I’d ever had it.

  So when, during that epic anxiety attack, my body and mind seemed to be turning on me, in actuality they were trying to save me. If I’d continued hosting the show, I probably would’ve eventually had a heart attack. Maybe some things are worth dying for, but applause isn’t one of them.

  In the months that followed, as I eased into my new role at work, I noticed myself becoming increasingly unsettled. Not hosting the show created a huge mental chasm where worry used to live, and now I needed to fill it.

  At the same time, I was frustrated by the fact that my anxiety had finally taken something huge from me. I’d always lied to myself, told myself it was manageable. Sure it was—in the same way that a stubborn cowlick or a white tiger is manageable. Which is to say, manageable until it ruins your sixth-grade class picture or rips half your neck out.

  And this job wasn’t the only thing anxiety had taken from me. It also took away my optimism. Living with a constant, low-buzzing anxiousness can rob you of your ability to imagine good things happening, or even recognize them when they do. You’re always waiting for the other Croc to drop. (Things are dark in your imagination. Everyone wears Crocs.)

  I started thinking about ways to get beyond my anxiety that didn’t involve psychopharmaceuticals or hours of talk therapy, ways I might slowly teach my brain that fight-or-flight wasn’t the correct response to every single situation. Could I reintroduce myself to the world? Show myself, like one shows a baby, which things were there for fun and edification, which were there to attack me with a knife, and how not to get the two confused?

  Was it possible to relearn optimism?

  That’s when the Okay Fine Whatever Project was born.

  I realized that if left to my own devices, I would spend most of my time either huddled in my house binge-watching Netflix or out with friends ordering the same drinks and hummus plates we always ordered even though what we really wanted was cheesy tots but since shame-eating wasn’t a group activity, fuck it, we got hummus. I needed some external force acting on me to get me to escape my hummus prison.

  I thought if I could create a situation in which I had to try new things for work, I might actually become braver. I might be able to get outside my hair-trigger brain and see things it hadn’t allowed me to see before. I might even eventually become a badass.

  I wrote to a friend who was an editor at a local website and proposed an idea for a column: I would do things that scared me and then write about them.

  I would call my column the Reluctant Adventurer.

  These were baby steps. I was not riding over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Not dropping everything and hiking the Pacific Crest Trail by myself. Not even hiking Mill Ends Park by m
yself.9 My goal was simply to try some things I wouldn’t normally try. To do some things that caused me mental discomfort when I imagined them. In doing the show, I’d overshot my mind’s acceptable level of adventure by a bit. I just needed to scale it down.

  I asked my editors to keep an eye out for comfort-zone-expanding experiences. I made my own list of activities in Portland that might fit the bill: Naked ecstatic dance (I hated my body). Sensory-deprivation tanks (I’m claustrophobic and afraid of the dark). A professional cuddler (oh my God, where to start?). Activities that wouldn’t trigger a full-on anxiety attack but would make the pessimist in me throw a mini-tantrum before finally saying, Okay! Fine. Whatever. I’ll do it.

  That’s how my Year of Living (Relatively) Dangerously10 began.

  1I know I just told you to imagine you were eight years old, and now I’m taxing your imagination yet again. Just bear with me.

  2I promise this is the last time I’ll ask you to work.

  3 Sure, some might see a correlation between the wrath of Achilles and the rage of Ash in the Evil Dead movies, but Achilles was largely driven by honor, whereas Ash was driven by the desire to blow the heads off zombies.

  4 Yes, I did fall into the somewhat large category of “radio host,” but my category was whittled down to “host of a radio variety show” and then even further whittled down to “host of a radio variety show that records in front of a live audience.” At the time, it was me, Garrison Keillor, and John Moe of Wits. Unless there was a large underground community of radio-variety-show hosts I was unaware of.

  5 He once asked me to sneak a bag of popcorn into the dollar movies, and we argued about it quite heatedly. I yelled at him that I didn’t want to get caught. “How would you get caught?” he asked. I told him that they would smell the popcorn in my backpack. He looked at me and slowly repeated what I’d said. “They’re going to…smell the popcorn…in your bag…at the movie theater.” See? Humbling.