By Katie Prout, Chicago Reader, September 29, 2021
Early in April 2020, my boyfriend Carter asked, not unkindly, if I’ve ever been diagnosed with anything besides my generalized anxiety disorder.
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently, my pockets full of rocks. He warily eyed the front of my pink raincoat, which bulged like the pouches of bullfrogs. “Can we keep the rocks down to maybe five a day?” he said. We shared the apartment with four other people and two dogs; in our tiny bedroom, the rocks I’d been collecting from the nearby Lake Michigan beach lined the base of our lamps, pooled on the warped surface of the plastic bedside table, and balanced on the radiator. “Ooohkay,” I lied.
It wasn’t just our new rock roommates, he said now. It was the way I cleaned for hours when my body and brain felt bad, or the way I went immobile whenever a bad call or text came in from home. My anxiety got so intense that I fractured a molar from grinding my teeth and my jaw once popped out of its socket; my dentist thought I had been in a car accident. Then, there was my terrible sleep, with its 3 AM wakings, muffled screams during night terrors, sleep paralysis, and, on limber nights, the convulsive jerks that torqued my whole body, startling Carter awake.
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