Ink Blots & Jewish Therapists: How I First Found Out I Was Crazy

I remember my first trip to a psychologist. I sat impatiently in the waiting room, swinging my 13-year-old chubby legs back and forth while I rolled my eyes almost continuously, making sure my mom sitting beside me could hear my sighs. I had been to therapists before, but with my family, while my parents were going through their divorce. That was always fun for me, I got a kick out of us all sitting around as a group, listening to the shrink say things we all knew would rile up someone. It was kind of like a game, I enjoyed the drama, the theatrics; it was really a treat for the asshole of a 9-year-old I was. And if we were separated and put into one-on-one sessions with the therapist, I was young enough so that board games and puzzles were incorporated. What’s more enjoyable than playing connect-4 with a stranger while she covertly tries to figure out whether or not you kill small animals on your downtime?

This was different. This was just about me. And while I usually enjoy things that are just about me, I was not happy about this. I was in middle school and clearly my mom could not understand that she was one, stupid and two, didn’t get what it meant to be cool. I suppose she had finally decided to take me after one of my temper tantrums threw her over the edge. I was always flipping out, probably because I was almost constantly angry and annoyed.

Some things don’t change much.

I suppose there were some very real issues going on with me, but I was thirteen, I was a girl, I was in middle school, my hair always looked greasy, I was about twenty pounds overweight, and my teeth were funny-looking. All strong forces working against me at the time. These, combined with the fact that middle school children are the spawn of actual Satan designed to destroy the minds and souls of everything around them, made me continuously infuriated. I would go to school, exhaust myself by trying to make it through the day, hate myself on both a physical and spiritual level, try to remember who I was “soooo over” that day, and then finally come home. At this point, I would want to crawl down into an underground bomb shelter, far away from the stains of society that made up my seventh grade class, and live as a hermit for the rest of my life, playing The Sims and watching The Mummy Returns. Instead, I would eat Doritos and fight with my mom.

In all fairness, my fights were pretty extreme. I would yell, cry, scream, shout that I was going to end my life, shout that I was going to blow up the town, threaten to set my mom’s hair on fire, and so on. I’ll never win any awards for composure.

So after one too many fights that ended in me throwing myself on the floor in tears, or running away, or smashing the nice dishes, my mom had finally had enough. So that’s what brought us to the waiting room of a fat, old, Jewish man I’ll just call Dr. Schwartz (I know I’m not a renowned author or anything, but there are all these crazy stories out there about people suing over stuff like that. I mean, even if it seems unlikely that this successful shrink would decide to sue a 26-year-old waitress-wannabe-writer for the $300 in her bank account, I still don’t really want to take any chances.)

The word “squat” is hardly used to describe anyone, except for those few unfortunate individuals it describes PERFECTLY. That was Dr. Schwartz. He was short and round, to the point where when he sat in his therapist wheely chair, I could see the sides of it screaming for relief from the pressure of his hips. He had curly dark hair, a mustache I found to be disconcertingly thin (it reminded me of Hitler, which was a cause for alarm for multiple reasons), and glasses that always seemed to be a little bit foggy. He would take big, deep breaths between sentences as if the very act of speaking was so profound and taxing for him that he needed all the energy he could muster. While talking, he would often times throw in very unnecessary pauses; I don’t know if it was for dramatic effect or if he momentarily forget where he was because of all the fog in his eyes. A lot of times, after saying something, he would make a humming noise, and, in turn, whenever I would say something, he would answer first with “hm” and then begin whatever spiel he had saved up. He annoyed the shit out of me.

The very first thing Dr. Schwartz asked me once I entered his office and had settled myself in, was what I wanted to be when I grew up. Honestly, if you think this is a good opening question for an adolescent girl who is forced into therapy, maybe you’re the one who needs the help. I stared at him blankly, quickly glancing at his diplomas and degrees which were framed and placed on every single wall. I didn’t recognize the names of any of the schools, so I had every right to assume they were completely made up. He also had a picture of a beautiful woman and two gorgeous kids hanging above his desk. Judging by his appearance and the fact that all three people in that picture were blonde and attractive, I also had every right to assume it was cut out of a magazine.

“A teacher.” I finally stated.

He seemed pleased with that answer, which satisfied me because that answer was a total lie. As if I would ever be a teacher. I had my heart and mind set on being famous and what teachers were famous? (This was, of course, before I found out about Mary Kay Letourneau and my goals shifted slightly.)

I guess I wasn’t lying to be malicious, but I just did not want to give anyone the triumph of me actually getting something out of this whole process. I did not want to be benefited, or treated, or helped, or…cured. I was fine as I was and it really wasn’t my fault that LITERALLY NO ONE UNDERSTOOD HOW HARD LIFE WAS FOR ME.

I never dreamed of ever actually opening up to this man, of telling him how deep beneath my skin and in my bones there was this swirling, angry maelstrom of just pure shit. That most nights I curled myself into a ball on my bed, aching from the fibers of hair on my scalp to the arches of my feet. The type of ache that is difficult to describe, and nearly impossible to comprehend. That this swirling mass of pain often resulted in me yelling at people, or crying, or hurting myself, and I really didn’t know why. If I told him any of that, he would win. I would lose. And I was so, so tired of being a loser.

So that’s how it went for a little while. I would go in to see Dr. Schwartz on Thursdays after school, and basically fabricate stories to tell him for my own entertainment. To think that he didn’t notice at all would not be giving him enough credit because before I knew it, I was going in on a Saturday to take some…”tests”. This actually didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I was excited about it; this meant my level of craziness was different, special, and I had to go in on the weekend to get it all figured out.

A thought struck me on the drive to the office that sunny Saturday morning. All of my sisters had little things about them that made them unique and known throughout the family. One was a gymnast, one was super skinny and cute and played softball, one was the little baby. Then there was me. I was just a nightmare. But maybe this was it. Maybe I was the crazy one. Maybe I was the one who had to be driven off to head doctors on the weekends, while everyone else stayed at home eating boring pancakes and watching mundane TV. Maybe I was the one that just couldn’t be figured out; the one who was unpredictable, and deliciously insane. Had I finally found my niche? The thought thrilled me for reasons I didn’t quite fully understand at the time, and I felt a shiver of anticipation run up my arms as my mom and I pulled into the building’s parking lot.

That Saturday was spent taking all those psychiatric tests you see on TV shows. The ink blot test, the fill in the blank test, the “give a caption to this picture” test, and so on. I couldn’t believe that they actually had these things in real life! I thought it was either totally antiquated or purely made up for entertainment and television purposes. Without completely realizing what I was doing, I started to envision myself in a movie in my head. I think I almost convinced myself I actually WAS in a movie. The gripping story of a poor, sad, misunderstood (really cute) blonde girl, taken to shrink after shrink, trying to get a diagnosis, a solution to all the problems that troubled her innocent, young head. It was brilliant…and perfectly cast. This being crazy thing was turning out to be a lot more fun than I had originally thought.

Before I knew it I was trying to give the most dramatic and intense answers I could think of to all the questions.

“Kaitlyn, describe this picture.” The woman running one part of the exam would say, holding up a white piece of paper with the image of a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl on it. They were staring right at each other. And that was it. That was the whole picture. Just two people staring at each other. And I, a thirteen-year-old girl who had to get out of bed on the weekend, was expected to give it a story. Fuck all of them.

The mother is a struggling schizophrenic who also has a severe case of Munchausen syndrome by-proxy,” I began. For anyone who doesn’t know what Munchausen by-proxy is, it’s a mental disorder that causes a person to either make his or her child sick, or keep his or her child sick, solely for the love of the attention this garners. Fun fact: the mom of the dead girl ghost who is throwing up in the movie ‘The Sixth Sense’ definitely has this disorder, and that fun fact is exactly why I even knew what it was. I had recently become obsessed with that movie and almost everything about it, and had spent many hours researching certain aspects of it, including the theory that the main character couldn’t see dead people at all, but instead was being consumed by untreated schizophrenia. And that is how an adolescent girl had those words in her vocabulary.

I saw the shock on the woman admin’s face, smirked intrinsically, and continued on, “The daughter is a lesbian who gets bullied so much at school she almost welcomes the fact that her mom might kill her eventually. That being said, she is so tired of being fed cookies baked with rat poison, she doesn’t think her poor body can take it any longer. She is asking her mother to just please cut it out. Her mother is having vivid hallucinations currently and doesn’t see her daughter in front of her at all, but instead sees a demon dragon, determined to kill her with just one breath of lethal fire. They will both be dead within the next hour.”

I leaned back, trying my best to keep my face straight. I used as many of the phrases I had heard in movies or read in books as I could think of, and I really hoped I had not only astonished, but also terrified this woman. I worked to keep my expression from showing that, though; I more so wanted to convey a look of bewildered insanity. A look that said, “What, who me? I’m crazy? Oh, ha ha ha, I didn’t even notice. You probably wouldn’t have guessed it because look how cute I am. Hold on while I go torture these insects I keep in a jar in my backpack…”

I’ve never been great at math, but I’ve always been pretty calculated.

That’s how all the sessions went that day. With each reaction I got from the doctors, my confidence grew, and my answers became more and more detailed. Ink blots that looked like sunflowers became people battling multiple personality disorder, a drawing of a chair became the chair that someone would turn into kindling and use to burn an orphanage down because it wasn’t really an orphanage, it was a torture chamber. It was like I couldn’t stop myself, I was saturated in the natural high of shocking these people with only my words and imagination. I was winning. And when the final test concluded, I was sad to go. But I smiled the whole drive home.

I never found out exactly how I did on those tests, or what the results were, or what they said about me. I kept bugging my mom about it, to no avail, until finally she just snapped at me, “They said you are very intelligent” and threw me a slightly suspicious look. Ah, so they had probably figured out that I was doing a bit, and creating my answers with a purpose. Well, I had to hand it to them-they were a little brighter than I had originally assumed, but they also deserved my creations, and should really haven’t insulted my intelligence with their stupid paper tests to begin with.

I didn’t see Dr. Schwartz for much longer after that. I ended up taking martial arts classes with my stepdad as a way of anger management (I guess…it pacified my mom, and definitely helped me let out some steam, so that’s all that matters), and soon we moved to New York. I’ll never forget him, though, and how he and his people were only the very beginning of a long list of doctors I’ve worked hard to shock. That squat, foggy, Jewish man was the shot gun start to a race I’ve run with craziness ever since (a race that will fill many more pages, on other days). I still create stories like the ones I did that Saturday. Only instead of telling them to my therapists, I write them down now.