a perfect performance, I felt so good, sort of like a superhero. I saved my cats from impending doom, and momentarily I felt that I had a little power myself, saving them and all.
Pretty soon, checking the burners on the stove, in a perfect and precise way, was just one of those things I had to do every night before going to bed and every time I left the house. It was just the way it was and just way too weird to tell anyone. It never once dawned on me that I had an illness with a name. I chalked it all up to being a weird kid: me, Sergeant, my games, my drills, my tasks, my performances. It's just the way we were, and I accepted it. Okay, maybe I knew I was a little broken way deep down inside, but what could I do?
My brother Brian called me Kirsten Weirdsten, sometimes with a teasing tone. He found my creativity an undesirable character flaw. That was the Weirdsten part. We had different dads and our minds worked differently. He, like my oldest brother, has the mind of an engineer, and I have the mind of a sensitive poet; we just come at things differently. I also felt like he was always trying to control me, and I wanted none of it. I already had one Sergeant to report to, thank you. I knew that letting anyone know about Sergeant would make me even more Kirsten Weirdsten. I knew that if I told anyone about Sergeant, he would yell in my face until the end of time and I'd be forced into a straitjacket and taken to a mental hospital where people get locked up for life.
Sergeant Style
Perfecting, tapping, staring, checking, cleaning, transferring, dieting, blinking, swallowing—the challenge was to do all of these things with no one noticing. Sergeant and I had numerous covert operations.
It was a new school year: 1978. Feathered hair was still a big trend. My brown hair was short, feathered in layers, and swooshed back. I had the Kristy McNichol cut, and I loved it. (She played the youngest daughter on a hit TV show called Family.)
By now, Sergeant and I were a highly functional and exacting team; after all, he demanded perfection. I was an A student and was ready for any challenge. In my back pocket, resting on my rear and sometimes poking me in the butt, were my perfectly sharpened—like surgical tools—number-two pencils. I was ready for any test by any teacher at any given time. I was focused on doing well.
I didn't like the lead residue left on my hands after sharpening my pencils; but I couldn't always go wash my hands immediately after. By not washing, I felt as though I was not finishing my task to full completion, and this bothered me. I would think about the “transfer of residue” to other things that I touched. This could lead to an infinite amount of “transfer.” I would be responsible for adding invisible grime to the universe. This made me feel guilty that I wasn't cleaner—not to mention the terrible stink of a sawmill that I had with me. In class I would think about my stinky hands over and over again, and I couldn't seem to get them out of my mind and stop worrying about them. If I only could have washed my hands!
This inability to forget unfinished tasks is known as the Zeigarnik effect [who knew!].
—BEN PARR, CAPTIVOLOGY
Boobs
My boobs looked different in the bathtub and when I was changing my top. I looked down. “Yikes! These are weird.” I poked at one of them to see what it would do. My boobs didn't really look very booby-ish; they looked like tiny, pointy, stretched-out white balloons with light pink-colored tips. Yuck! They looked like they had started growing and abruptly stopped. I could really see why my mom thought I should cover mine up with a training bra at first. I was on board with this idea; the faster I could cover them, the better.
I didn't like the dark brown hairs showing up on my lady area either; they made me feel more wrong. My dad liked to talk to me about my vagina and about me becoming a woman. He said he'd throw a party for me when I got my period; this way everyone would know I was a woman. I was very uzmfortable when he talked to me like that.
Sergeant offered me a place where my boobs didn't exist anymore; where my dad couldn't frighten me with his talks, drugs, and loud music; a place where I was not left alone in the house waiting for my mom to come home from work, where I was no longer Kirsten Weirdsten.
Temporary Euphoria
The summer I was twelve, I underwent a metamorphosis. I heard my brother and his friends talking about chicks being “foxy,” and I was certain that this was my new bull's-eye. Achieving foxy would bring me the peace I had been working to achieve with Sergeant for the past several years. If I could get foxy, I would be accepted and happy and would no longer feel like a walking bruise.
I started wearing tighter, more revealing clothes, lots of makeup, and big 1980s hair. I experimented with the frosty blue Maybelline eyeliner that I saw models in the magazines wearing.
I started hanging out with the young wolves in the alley. There would often be a gang of them slouching against garbage cans, staring at their dirty gray sneakers, kicking rocks, smoking cigarettes in their army jackets, or sitting on the broken pavement in front of a garage, not necessarily their own. Let's just say none of these kids had school spirit or were particularly popular, but I thought they were cool, living on the fringe and not caring much about anything.
We wolves (because now I was one of them) would smoke bowls of pot that looked like tiny branches, golden or red hairs, clumps of dirt, and seeds that would crackle and snap when they were lit. We would smoke a few puffs, cough violently, and keep passing the joint around, our eyes glassing over and turning pink. No one seemed to give a fuck, and to me this felt pretty good. Smoking pot gave me some relief and letup from Sergeant. Plus, I loved the sensation of floating and laughing at silly things. Sergeant was barking out orders more and more these days, and I wanted to silence him. The pot delivered.
We wolves had something else in common: we all had time on our hands. We didn't have places to be, like the dinner table, and we didn't have anyone looking for us. When I was high, even though I never felt totally right, I didn't feel as wrong either.
However, one time while stoned, my braces were bothering me so much that I couldn't stand them in my mouth a second longer. The hard wires in the back were poking inside my soft, fleshy cheek. I couldn't stop thinking about them, obsessing about them and the pain they caused. Sergeant helped me to come to this conclusion and presented a winning end goal: “comfort.” I decided that I had to take them off myself with a variety of tools I found at my friend's house. It's embarrassing to say this now, but one of the tools that worked especially well was a pair of toe-nail clippers. I hope I washed them before I gave myself dental surgery! I know, gross. However, they were the perfect tool for hunkering down and pulling out the wire. After I pulled out the wires the best that I could, I picked off the metal boxes glued to my teeth. My determination to get them off was greater than the pain I felt taking them off. In a driven panic, I almost got rid of every piece. The orthodontist was in shock the next time he saw me. I'm sure my mom didn't like the bill, either!
When eighth grade started, I had such a bad attitude that all seven of my teachers called a conference with my mother and said, “What happened to your daughter?!” It seemed as though nobody knew.
Not only had my personality done a 180, but we'd also moved closer to the high school I'd soon be attending because my mom had found a good deal on a condo. That well-traveled and well-known land of my old neighborhood had now evaporated into the distant past “when I was a kid.” I was becoming a teenager, and that meant no more kid stuff. No
