Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [13]
On the surface, things seemed great. Underneath, though, they were beginning to come apart. The Voices were coming louder-and faster, startling me with their surprise visits to my brain. Only I didn't know they were in my brain. I heard them coming at me from the outside, as real as the sound of the telephone ringing.
They popped up when I least expected them. Occasionally they were friendly, but mostly they reviled me, shouting in their hoarse, harsh tones: “You must die, you bitch,” they shrieked. “Die! Die! Die!” They filled me with anxiety. I'd turn around thinking somebody was in back of me, and no one would be there. On several occasions I tried beating through the bushes to flush out whatever or whoever it was that was taunting me. Of course I was a bloody-fisted loser every time.
I grew increasingly tense and nervous. I was always afraid I really was going to die, because that's what the Voices said would be my fate.
Once again hiding the Voices began to take up much of my time and energy. When the Voices began to screech and cackle, I looked to the floor. Sometimes I held my breath, hoping, somehow, to outlast them. Sometimes they got so bad that I had to make up some excuse—having to go to the bathroom, or suddenly feeling sick to my stomach—and leave the room.
The most important thing was to keep from looking around to see where they were coming from. If I did get caught whirling my head around, I would try to cover up.
“Oh, I just thought I heard a noise,” I would say, acting nonchalant. I often found myself laughing out of nervousness, but for the most part, people didn't seem to catch on.
Still, the pressure was building.
My fear of the Voices was beginning to spill over into the rest of my life. I was always terribly anxious, because I never knew if those around me could hear them too. I watched my friends’ faces expecting to see their expressions turn to horror when they heard these Voices calling me “whore.” When the Voices called me a “fucking bitch” I watched my professors to see if they would throw me out of class.
When I heard the Voices yelling such terrible things, I grew afraid to make eye contact with the people I was with. I was afraid they had heard the Voices and now knew the terrible secrets about me that they were revealing. What tortured me more than anything was when the Voices laughed at me. It was a kind of hysterical laughter, as if I was the target of everyone's jokes. I didn't know why they were making fun of me so viciously but I hated myself for being the sitting duck for ridicule. I became extremely self-conscious in front of everyone for fear they too would nail me to a taunting cross.
I began to feel that my friends hated me. That's what the Voices said. I felt they regarded me as scum. That's what the Voices said too. I kept on seeing my friends, kept on partying with them, kept on laughing and joking, driving around and dancing with them. But in little ways, I began to act on my strange feelings.
One weekend, Tara threw a big birthday party for Lori Winters, and invited a lot of her own friends from home. As they began arriving, I began feeling pressured. These people didn't like me. They were talking about me. They were going to start making fun of me. I didn't want to be around, so I jumped into my car and drove four hours home to New York. Then, I turned right around and drove back to Boston.
I took a class in abnormal psychology, and pored over big fat books with teeny tiny print. Every atypical symptom in the lectures and the textbooks seemed to apply to me. I felt overwhelmed by the material, but at the same time a little comforted. At last I didn't feel so alone. There were people out there who felt the same way I did. In fact, I decided, it was really possible that everyone experienced Voices as a young adult, but, like me, chose not to discuss them.
I spent my junior year abroad. While