“I avoid looking forward or backward and try to keep looking upward.”
–Charlotte Brontë

Meanwhile, extra child or not, I needed work. I applied and was hired at Random House as an assistant to two editors. I started to breathe again, to find a way to speak to people without checking whether my ex was lurking somewhere, although I found dating impossible.

My response to the touch of a man was to flinch. I felt alienated from the life of the body, increased by my own strictly controlled diet and compulsive exercising. Without alcohol or drugs, the only way to blunt the edges was endorphins available after a ten-mile run or an insanely hard aerobics class. I was disassociated enough to wake up on a train hurtling into the Bronx, having fallen asleep but not just asleep, like falling into a well. I thought I had narcolepsy or a brain tumor that suddenly turned the lights off. In fact, it was depression. I was protected by people who gently woke me up, suggested I needed help, sat beside me, and ensured my possessions were safe.

These times of fugue state, caused, according to Google, by trauma, stress, or unresolved internal conflict, check, check, check, also resulted in odd moments like waking up in a laundromat with a handsome man looking down at me holding a cup of coffee and asking me out on a date. Confused, I agreed, and we ended up at the movies a few days later in the front row of a sold-out screening of A Passage to India; the actors looming above us and down below, I wondered how this person had made this date, and if there was a doppelganger following me around, agreeing to things while I slept. He was keen to see me again, but the thing had the shape of a fairy tale; Sleeping Beauty passed out in front of a dryer, so I declined while assuring him he didn’t want to be part of my ongoing quagmire.

“I’m insane,” I told my therapist. “I can’t do this anymore.”
She listened carefully and asked, “What is ‘this’?”
“Be sober. Show up. Go on. Stay awake.”
“And yet, you are.”
“I keep falling asleep in public.”

And then there were the panic attacks, which I had never thought were a real thing until I had several, tunnel vision, unable to breathe, the impulse to drop to my knees and scuttle into a dark corner like a hermit crab. “It’s defensive,” my shrink said. “It will get better.”

Dutifully, armed with strict instructions, I went back to see my parents, who were in a state of chaos, my father begging for forgiveness, my mother implacable, either the baby or me. He chose my mother and then came to me in tears with an admittance that he had scared and hurt me. Seeing my father like this was unbearable and made me hate my mother, who seemed brutal in her complete rejection of this girl, this child born the day after my birthday, who looked so much like me. We were almost twins.
“She’s like Lady Macbeth,” I told my shrink.
“Well, she’s angry.”
“Why didn’t he talk to me? I tried so hard to get close to him.”
“I doubt they were doing much talking, Molly.”
And then we both laughed.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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