Sasha Debevec-McKenney

TRUE LIFE: I’M ADDICTED TO TEXTING was filmed at my high school. I recognized the parking lot where the mother and daughter fought over how much the girl texted. It was the parking lot with the tennis wall, where as a kid I would whip a tennis ball hard-as-I-could, close my eyes, and hope the ball would come back and hit me in the stomach. I loved having the wind knocked out of me. The softball girls bullied me in that parking lot because I was so fucking weird. I couldn’t help myself: I put up pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt in my locker, I had notebooks full of baseball statistics, it’s not surprising I was bullied. I only let it surprise me the first time.

I wanted a list of all my obsessions, a list of what I wanted my new therapist to know about me. I imagined welcoming her into my mental illness like J-Lo welcoming MTV: Cribs into a second home: with a confident wave and popped hip, showing off my deepest, darkest walk-in closet. Inside, I had many conspiracy theories, a collection of hair dryers, boxes and boxes of paper, almost exclusively matching outfits, I had certain blocks I couldn’t walk down, my lifestyle was so expensive, you couldn’t imagine. 

I loved walking in the street and looking into people’s cars, making vast assumptions about their lives. I walked past my own car, which I kept mostly clean. I loved to assume a life for myself. I was a famous writer, and I lived on a lake. I ate pancakes for breakfast on weekdays, and I had deleted Tinder. My actual life wasn’t far off, which put me on edge. I looked around for the Punk’d cameras. I was always ready for cameras. I loved when my socks matched my bag. I loved when I could compress my compulsion to maintain conversation. I loved holding my electric toothbrush in my mouth. I loved how it knocked against my teeth, and how my whole head shook.

When I woke up, nobody had texted me. I wanted to be MADE into someone who did not value herself based on whether or not she fit in, though I feared the bullying had taken that away. Since then, I had been to fourteen different therapists. I had weaned myself off Sertraline, I had been gaslit by multiple supervisors, I found friends who could take care of me. I knew to avoid crowds. To make a list of conversation topics before the conversation. I knew to quit the job with the blue aprons. Blue wasn’t my color, and when the world I saw around me wasn’t what other people saw, I learned it was useless to explain. I knew when to turn my phone off.