The Textual Confessional
43
No matter how times and in how many ways I explained to my
father that 1 could not make myself stop the head twitch—and
all the other twitches that were soon to follow—he reflised to
give up his misguided faith in my ability to do, or not to do
anything I wanted if I would just work a little bit harder at it.
And although I couldn’t prove it at the time, 1 knew he wasn’t
capable of shaming me into stillness; if he had been, trust me.
I’d have been cured (51).
The dinner table became a battle ground between Wilensky and her father, with
her dad becoming increasingly angry, frustrated, and disappointed that his
daughter was developing new tics by the day (51-52).
By the time she was attending Vassar, Wilensky was hoarding food in
her donu room and had become a compulsive packrat. And as she grew tired of
trying to disguise her tics like she had succeeded in doing in high school,
Wilensky selectively attended classes at Vassar to avoid detection. Lectures held
in large, dim rooms were her preference, “as it was easy to appear invisible
among so many faces”; conversely, seminars were to be avoided at all costs
because of their small size and their requirement of student participation (125126).
It wasn’t until the early 1990s, shortly before entering her M.F.A.
program in creative writing at Columbia, that she sought professional help for
her disorders because her rituals had become life-threatening: walking headlong
into busy streets to step on manhole covers, banging her head against the
bedroom wall, and driving with her eyes closed when approaching intersections.
The final straw was when she considered cutting the skin of her big toe with a
razor blade (139). Following that incident, Wilensky consulted a psychiatrist
who treated her with a combination of therapy and drugs, including Prozac,
which she disliked because of its side effects and her perception of it as a “shortorder solution to a gourmet problem” (163-169).
Dissatisfaction with the first psychiatrist led Wilensky to Dr. Fierstein,
a Tourette’s specialist who prescribed Prozac and Haldol—a