APRIL 2019

I stride west on Seventeenth Street toward my psychiatrist’s office half a block from Union Square. When I reach the building, I take the stairs up to the third floor—no elevators for me if I can help it—and breeze straight into Dr. Salam’s office.

Dr. Salam is a gorgeous Lebanese woman in her early forties, and one of the top psychiatrists in Manhattan. I’ve been seeing her for five years now, and she knows me inside and out. Our appointments are monthly; we alternate between Skype and in-person sessions.

For much of middle and high school and even college, I was mortified that I had to see a psychiatrist. It didn’t help that, until Dr. Salam, I didn’t like a single one of the doctors I saw. First there was Dr. Perry, a man my grandfather’s age whose breath smelled like rotten milk. After three years of my complaining about him, my dad thought I might be better off seeing a woman, and I switched to Dr. Lipman in high school. But Dr. Lipman was icy and removed and her office was always freezing, and being around her made me miss my mother so much that I refused to go back after six months. Dr. Antonio was just okay—when we spoke, I could tell he didn’t particularly care—but he let almost all our monthly sessions take place over the phone, and I put up with him for the remainder of high school. Dr. Antonio retired right before I started my freshman year at Barnard, so I switched to Dr. McCann, an on-campus psychiatrist who was just out of med school and clearly had no experience treating OCD patients.

Over the next several years I weeded through numerous doctors in Manhattan, all of whom continued to prescribe the antidepressant that was managing my disorder, but none who went much deeper than that.

My symptoms still flared. I had a decent number of friends—Andie, Lex, and Isabel had been my ride or dies since elementary school, and I’d made a handful of close friends at Barnard. My instincts had always been good when it came to friendships; even from a young age I was drawn to the girls who lifted me up, and I had little tolerance for those who did not.

My romantic relationships, though, were a disaster. I wasn’t naive; when my breasts made an appearance in seventh grade, the year after Mom died, I knew boys were looking at me differently. Though I never said it out loud, I knew I had a prettier face than Andie or Lexy or Isabel. Adults told me I looked exactly like Mom, and Mom was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known.

Colin Buchanan told me I was the prettiest girl in the eighth grade the night he asked me to go to the movies. It happened over an AIM conversation—because that’s how relationships evolved in middle school—and we went to see Zoolander that weekend. During the commercials we shared a tub of popcorn, and Colin admitted that a few of his friends had been skeptical when he told them he liked me. I didn’t ask why—I already knew—but he was kind enough to tell me anyway that a significant portion of the eighth-grade class thought “the thing I did with doors” was weird. My cheeks grew piping hot.

Colin also brought up the time in American History when I’d run from my chair and jumped on top of Mr. Brenner’s desk to reach the clock, which read 11:11. I’d kissed the clock eleven times, then touched it eleven times with my left hand, followed by my right, while everyone in the classroom except for Mr. Brenner and Isabel gasped and snickered with laughter. I remembered the humiliating incident with painful clarity; afterward I vowed never again to check the time in a public setting and thankfully had yet to slip up.

Colin had squeezed my hand as the movie theater darkened. “I told my friends I don’t care about any of that,” he whispered. “Everyone has done some weird stuff in their past.”

I tried to let his words console me, but my mind wouldn’t rest. The thing is, it’s not my past, I thought as the opening credits of Zoolander played. It’s my present. As far as I know, it’s my future. It’s me.

A week later, Colin invited me over to his house to play tennis. I was nervous, but Andie urged me to go. She said that after we played tennis Colin might ask me to be his girlfriend, and I could still have my dad pick me up before dinner.

The Buchanans’ house was a newly built mansion on the water with a pool, a tennis court, and a bowling alley in the basement. A lot of people in Westport were wealthy—my family included—but my mother had always called flashy homes like the Buchanans’ nouveau riche. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in October, and Colin and I played two sets of tennis before we were dying of thirst. He suggested we go inside for some Gatorade.

I hesitated, but what choice did I have? If Colin and I were going to be an item, I would have to be able to go inside his house like a normal person. I followed Colin across the expansive green lawn, through the terrace, and into the Buchanans’ enormous, newly renovated kitchen. Colin handed me a cold bottle of orange Gatorade and led me into the den, where his older sister Lindsey and a few of her friends were camped out in front of the TV.

“Happy Gilmore!” Colin exclaimed, plopping down on the couch next to them. “This movie rocks.”

He shut the door behind us, and that’s when I realized how stuffy the room felt. A wave of nausea rolled through me. Reluctantly I slid down next to Colin, my stomach spinning with nerves. Lindsey and her friends—I knew they were the “popular” sophomore girls—had barely registered Colin and me, their eyes glued to the screen.

I’d been so thirsty after tennis I’d drunk the whole bottle of Gatorade, and three-quarters of the way through the movie I was squeezing my thighs together to hold it in. Finally Happy Gilmore ended, and I prayed the girls would get up to use the bathroom or search for a snack, anything so that I wouldn’t have to do my door ritual in front of them.

Lindsey flipped the channel. “Ooooh, Friends!” she purred, and her friends squealed in approval. They were staying put.

“I actually love Friends.” Colin turned to me. “Do you watch it, Skye?”

I knew if I didn’t make it to a bathroom in the next sixty seconds, I was going to pee myself; I also knew I wouldn’t be able to leave the den without knocking on the door in my systematic order: one count up to eight, one count down from eight. The compulsion was too strong an urge; it swelled through my whole being, a fire burning from my fingertips down to my toes.

Colin settled back into the couch, and I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I got up off the couch, a sharp piercing in my bladder, and in that moment a second compulsion seized me, another one I couldn’t ignore. The voice inside my head told me that if I didn’t knock on every wooden item in the room, I would get a bladder infection and die. I wanted to cry—both from discomfort and the inevitable humiliation I was about to bring upon myself—but that didn’t extinguish the compulsion that was eating away at my insides.

Obediently I stood up from the couch and ran to the wooden TV stand. I knocked eight times. I felt Colin and Lindsey and her friends all watching me as I moved on to the coffee table and the wood floors and the side table and the stool, and I wished with every fiber in my body that they could understand that it was physically impossible for me to stop. Lastly I knocked on the door in my usual pattern—one two three four five six seven eight; eight seven six five four three two one—before flying out of the room and to the nearest bathroom.

It felt so good to let my bladder break that for a minute I didn’t care about the mortification that awaited me. I washed my hands, did my knocks on the bathroom door, and stepped into the hall, where Colin stood staring at me, mouth gaping. He told me I could use the phone to call my dad if I was ready to go home, and it was the last time we ever spoke.

That early experience was a precursor of my doomed love life to come. No one wanted to date the crazy girl. But I was pretty, which meant that if I solely wanted to hook up with guys, I could. And I did want that, especially when everyone else started doing it. I wanted to French-kiss; I wanted to feel a guy grow hard in my hand; I wanted to keep up with my friends as they rounded the bases, one by one.

The difference was, my friends were hitting these milestones with their boyfriends. Sophomore year of high school, Andie gave her boyfriend, Tommy, a blow job after they’d been together for over a year and he’d been begging her for months. A few weeks later, I hooked up with a guy I’d just met at a party in Southport and gave him head in the laundry room. I was too drunk to remember his name, but I told the story proudly.