Traci Foust is the Author of the newly released book Nowhere Near Normal- a Memoir of OCD (Simon and Schuster/Gallery) acclaimed by National Public Radio, the San Diego Union Tribune and Marie Claire. Her work has appeared in several journals including The Nervous Breakdown and the Southern Review.

Her recent short story, The Cruelty of Children, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and will appear in the Fall 2011 issue Echo Ink Review and the Trey Stories Award Series.

She is currently working on her second book We’re Taking you to a Place Where you can Get Some Rest, A cautionary collection of essays on mixing Vicodin with vodka and why dating your psychiatrist isn’t always the best way to get your own prescription pad. She lives in a place where her love of cigarettes and bacon is frowned upon.

It wasn’t a dead baby. It wasn’t cancer. There was nothing to be sad about. For God’s sake they should be celebrating. He says he believes she is right, but he can’t stop thinking about the teeth and the hair. There were also bones. The doctor said that’s not unheard of in a teratoma tumor. Not even the worst he had seen. He told James about the one a few years back, took it from a forty-five-year-old man’s scrotum—same as James. He said the tumor had hands. It looked as if it were reaching right up at him. “It wanted a little hug,” he said.

She says the doctor is a jackass. “He shouldn’t have told you that. Why did he have to show you pictures of the damn thing? He should’ve just sewn you up and ended it there. We didn’t need to see those pictures.”

He is still a little out of it when they drive home. Floaty. He closes his eyes and sees two balloons filled with helium. One goes up. The other won’t ascend. Both of them are foil sacks on the same string.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” He asks. His stitches itch. Outside the sky of a Los Angeles winter is all broken jars of terra cotta. When he swallows he feels the place where the anesthesiologist pulled out the plastic breathing tube. A plastic tube, he thinks. For one whole hour a tube did the breathing for him.

His wife never answers about the rain.

In the night he is afraid of something that isn’t there.  He paces and sits, paces and sits, tries to make himself bored by looking out the window. “I should get to that back lawn this weekend,” he says. But that’s just to put something in the air. Later, there are more words to take something out of it.

She asks him if he’s in pain.

He says he’s not.

“Then come and watch some television with me.”

In bed he tells himself this: What they took from his body wasn’t alive. It wasn’t really alive. He thinks about the picture. “And see this? The surgeon had said. He leaned on James’ bed, adjusted the screen of his camera, cupping his hand against the fluorescent lights of recovery room. “That’s three strands of hair. There’s that bone piece I was telling you about. Here’s the teeth. Three teeth.”

When James moved his leg he felt the wad of gauze where his right testicle had been. There was a smell in the room like the inside of a toolbox.

Now his sleep is damp and cut up. For a long time he will dream of marsupials.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Echo-Ink-Review/185522154801221

A Story of my Mother Almost Ending

Thank you for your comments on the preview. This story has been accepted by Emry’s Journal and will appear in their Spring 2012 issue

Traci Foust is the Author of Nowhere Near Normal- A Memoir of OCD

By Joan Raymond, TODAY.com contributor

When other young girls worried about boys and lip gloss, Traci Foust worried about worrying. She also worried about swallowing pencils and knives and whether she would inadvertently burn down her house, kill her family, be sent to an orphanage and then be murdered herself.

For nearly three decades, Foust has lived with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

To help calm her fears, she pulled her hair, snapped her fingers after hearing the word “God,” made sure her collection of Catholic saint statues always faced north, and forced her cat to scratch her.

In her memoir, “Nowhere Near Normal” (Simon & Schuster 2011), Foust, 39, chronicles her OCD journey as a child and young adult. She talks to Today.com about what it’s like living with OCD then and now.

Q: Popular media often portrays people with OCD as simply quirky. What’s the reality?

A: The reality is that you have a hard time holding down a job; you have a hard time being with people. We’re afraid of a lot of things, and we’re irritated most of the time because of over-sensory issues. For me, it’s bright lights, noise and a lot of people.

Q: So OCD is still a struggle?

A: I don’t want anyone to get the idea that everything is sunshine and rainbows. I still have to control the OCD with therapy and medication.

Q: It’s 2011, but according to studies there’s still a huge stigma attached to mental health issues. Do you feel stigmatized?

A: Absolutely. I hear people say: “Oh my God, you’re in your thirties, you should be off your meds.” People can make you feel like a loser because of the medication, without even knowing how the drugs work. Some people think you should be able to control these (mental health) problems on your own. If someone can control what they believe is a mental health issue on their own I guarantee they don’t have a clinical diagnosis.

Q: Do you remember when you first felt, well, different?

A: I think if you ask this question to anyone with OCD, they’ll tell you the same thing: I always felt weird; I always felt something wasn’t right. I don’t even remember ever being completely relaxed or being able to have fun in the moment. There was always a continuous running dialogue of “what-ifs.”

Q: When were you diagnosed?

A: At about age 12. I was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic before that because a neurologist misunderstood me. When he asked me if I heard voices, I told him my mom and sister talked about me behind my back. He told my mom I was schizophrenic. That set off a lot of drama. About six months later my psychiatrist stepped in and said it was OCD, not schizophrenia.

Q: So that was better?

A: It felt like a relief. I was given all kinds of pamphlets to read. It comforted me that kids my age had this, too. One of the pamphlets said that teens spent 83 percent of time worried about what other people think of them. That helped. One of the things they tell you in group therapy is that nobody is looking at you. They’re worried about what people are thinking about them. That’s such a release.

Q: When did you go on medication?

A: Not until my early 20s. I was put on Buspar and Prozac, and I felt like an entirely different person. I was able to read two gigantic books without worrying about germs or worrying about worrying about germs.

Q: Do you have any advice for parents who are concerned about their kids?

A: The most important thing I can tell any parent that suspects anxiety issues is that for everything that you hear from your child there is something horrific that your child isn’t telling you because they’re embarrassed by it. Parents have to say: I feel there is more you want to me tell me, and when you’re ready, know that nothing is going to make me think you’re a bad person.

Q: What’s life like today?

A: I still have a fear of fire and I don’t go out in the sun. I still have rituals, like checking under the beds, and checking the windows.

Q: What about relationships?

A: I’ve been married three times and have two wonderful sons. I have a great boyfriend now, who understands me. Anxiety issues make you feel like you have to be in control of everything. I don’t blame my OCD for failed relationships. I blame my lack of knowledge on what a relationship was supposed to be.

Q: I’ve had people tell me that they’re glad they have a particular mental health disorder since it makes them more creative, able to see the world differently.

A: I don’t know about that. I wonder what life would be like if I was diagnosed earlier or if I got medication earlier. There are times when I would love to go to the mall or movies without having a pill in my purse.

Q: In your book you talk about problems with germs and lunch meat and your fear of killing your family if the lunch meat wasn’t wrapped properly. What’s it like making a sandwich today?

A: No one goes hungry. It just takes me longer and there’s a lot of plastic and counter wiping. I’d be lost without antibacterial wipes and a dust buster.

Joan Raymond is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared on msnbc.com, Newsweek, the New York Times, MORE and Woman’s Day.

Read complete interview here.

I’ll Stay Here and Guard the Knife Drawer- An Editorial of  Vicodin, Vodka and Vaginas

I’d like to congratulate everyone for making it through Mental Health month. Those of you whose court dates have been pushed up another week, you know who you are. Besides forgetting all that admittance-is-the-first-step nonsense just in time for Cinco De Mayo, it seems we now have our very own thirty-one days to celebrate the inability to make healthy decisions and produce serotonin. So let’s take a moment to back away from the thrill of marking the night the condom broke with another Mother’s Day card and honor one of the most exalted days of Spring.

I’m talking of course about May 4th: National Renewal Day.

Snopes it if you must, this jubilee of all things expiring is a real holiday. We’re talking about an entire day to not only remember your risk-free trial of the Shake Weight is about to expire— along with your hopes of cougaring your way back into your old high school tank tops—but a legitimate excuse to run to the pharmacy for a medication refill.

As if we needed any.

read the entire article at funny not slutty dot com (Support women in comedy. Tell a friend about FunnyNotSlutty and we’ll show you our wits)

http://www.funnynotslutty.com/

11 Reason’s Why You’re Not Getting Laid in Southern California

Think only men have a hard time finding romance under the perfect sun of Southern California? Despite what reality dating shows say, women are also at a challenge when it comes to meeting someone who doesn’t start every sentence with, “Dude, right?”

Here’s some quick time saving interpretations to real profiles of men looking for love/therapy/sick waves in the Golden State. (Sorry I can’t be more global on this. Apparently, after filling out my starter questions to purposely make it look like I was interested in anything that moves, it was decided 75 miles exceeds my how-far-are-you-willing-to-drive-for-true-love limit.)

1. Kevin 34, X-Ray Tech, Orange County:  I enjoy long walks on the beach or just hanging out with friends  = Hope you like sitting at home in front of the TV. As you can see by my lack of interest in anything, we’ll be doing a lot of it.

2. Skylar 31, Consultant, San Diego: I’m into hiking, camping, rock climbing, skiing, bicycling, kayaking and anything else to keep me connected with the outdoors =  Does K2 have a candlelight dinner section? If not we can always use my tent and waterproof notebook to watch clips of Man vs. Wild while we eat the homemade jerky I make from recycled backpacks and my own sweat.

3. Corey 29, Self Employed, Manhattan Beach: I guess you could say I’m kind of a beach bum. I love the ocean and I’ve surfed every day since I was twelve = See Also: fun evening with Kevin the long beach walker. Toss in a flannel Hoodie which doubles as my towel, the inability to stay awake after 10pm and me being, “stoked” about everything. Except whatever it is you want to do.

4. Salvador 30, Personal Weight Trainer, Oceanside: I love a woman who can take herself to the limits. My line of work involves pushing people further than they ever thought they could go, so I’m looking for someone who understands this concept and loves staying in shape as much as I do  =  Our intimate activities can best be summed up by the Steroidian Truth—sometimes  a shriveled up dick is just a shriveled up dick. I meant it when I said you’ll have to take yourself to the limits. Hope you’re into veins.

Read More at Funny Not Slutty dot com

Traci Foust is the author of the acclaimed new memoir NOWHERE NEAR NORMAL (Simon and Schuster/Gallery Books) Scroll down to see the NPR interview, reviews, pics and the Amazon link

By Heather Logue on Apr 29, 2011

While the majority of California youth were skipping rope and collecting beetles, Traci Foust was scrubbing her hands with Ajax until her skin peeled off, and locking her best friend in a sweltering car, wondering if maybe she would kill her. Yes, these activities are…different, but that is the beauty of Foust’s memoir, Nowhere Near Normal, its utterly distinctive take on childhood. For any of us who have ever turned the car around on the way to work because we’re positive the stove could miraculously have turned itself on (ahem, just once or twice), learning about a girl’s struggle growing up with severe OCD is captivating. The story unfolds with the Foust parents divorcing—the family splitting apart into two locations, and Traci really beginning to struggle with the compulsions and anxieties that make her “abnormal” and drive her family insane. Who needs to unplug all of the appliances every night and lick the electrical sockets? Traci does, because otherwise her family may burn to death in their beds. This frank, strange, and unapologetic logic is what makes Traci a likable (though complicated) narrator. The story leads us through her increasingly complex relationships with her mother and sister, and through the haze of their cigarette smoke we see how lonely it is to be such a different kind of girl. The glance at various approaches to child psychology also intrigues—especially when seeing which professional methods actually have any affect on Traci’s recovery.
As Traci continues to grow up the story electrifies with things at a breaking point with her newly, and zealously, religious mother—culminating in Traci’s impromptu trip to Santa Cruz, a land of sex, drugs, and poetry. Though she eventually returns home, Traci still feels lost, and when Part Three of the memoir opens with news of her mother’s death (a subject touched upon much too briefly)…things seems bleak. The lack of emphasis on her family connectivity towards the end of the book is my only complaint—it feels a little insufficient in contrast to the palpable emotions early on.
But Nowhere Near Normal does inspire in the end, with a conclusion as distinctive as the entertaining and hilarious voice that has been leading us on this trip. Foust has a knack for making you love her, even if her character isn’t always likeable, and even a description of how her great-grandmother tried to burn her own eyeballs with matches is somehow lyrical.
As Edgar Allen Poe (her favorite poet growing up) once wrote, “From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were; I have not seen as others saw; I could not bring my passions from a common spring. From the same source I have not taken my sorrow; I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone; And all I loved, I loved alone.”
And really, I couldn’t sum it up any better.

On Sale Now Anywhere Books are Sold (or click on the Amazon Link)

Link to TNB Interview

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/category/nonfiction/

http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/opinion/traci-faust-memoir

Edgar Allan Poe

They pay good money for humiliation at the Red Cindy. Up to five hundred dollars a session. More if they want you to touch yourself which Karen does only for Dr. Wong.

“There’s something in his eyes,” she tells Winnie. On her breaks Winnie reads magazines where the cover photo has little to do with what’s inside. Karen thinks this makes Winnie think she knows things Karen doesn’t. When she tries to describe what she meant about Dr. Wong’s eyes she says, “They look downtrodden.”

Winnie glances up from her magazine. This one has a picture of an oversized pink tea cup with a tarantula trying to crawl out. “But he’s always wearing his surgical mask,” she says. She’s in her black page-boy wig which adds to the effect that a magazine with a tea cup and a spider is exactly what she should be reading. “How can you tell if he looks”—she tries to hide a giggle— “downtrodden?”

Karen’s answer is a shrug. That’s basically all she wanted to say. Often she blurts out things not worth mentioning, peripheral sentences followed up by nothing. She knows she’s doing this, actually prefers her statements to be out there under the shadows of their own little question marks. Karen’s parents, who are both quite old due to Karen being a menopause baby, used to warn her not to give away all her present requests to Santa. “Leave some room for surprise.” Then later her mother’s attempt at supporting her through a late-stage abortion: “There are some things better left unsaid.”

A shrug, she thinks, is a good enough answer to so many questions.

In her used, military-issued combat boots Karen’s feet are as big as a man’s. She can feel the bulk of their stories in her calves, pushing her body forward like a separate person walking ahead of herself down the black tile hallway. The name on her desert fatigues is Miller which of course has nothing to do with her real last name. Her 4:30 waits in the wet room. Businessman from London. Descent attitude. Basic everything. On his customer card under Tell Us What You Like, he wrote that he comes to San Francisco for the weather and the hard salami sandwiches. Under, Do You Have any Medical Conditions, he wrote, unfortunately not.

Karen enters the wet room through the back employee door. The floor in that part of the building never really dries all the way. The turn-of-the-century pipes to the entire bathhouse and the little sex shop downstairs all seem to end in the rooms Karen works the most. There’s a constant odor of Alcatraz. Her steps make rodent noises in her boots. Big rats like from Food of the Gods. London 4:30 waves a little greeting then snaps shut the face covering of his Burqa. Today he wears his blue one. Gorgeous. Silver sparkles in the netting over his eyes and little embroidered snapdragons throughout the silk. It’s the prettiest thing Karen will see all night. Sometimes she wonders if the water and the spit and all the other body fluids will ruin such delicate fabric. Most of them bring their own costumes.  If Karen closes her eyes while rubbing London 4:30  into completion, the soft swish of the material and the buzzing overhead interrogation lights make the whole room like butterflies all moving towards the same sky. Who does the dry cleaning? Do the ever wonder?

In Food of the Gods the rats got into some science experiment nectar then ate the humans because it seemed like the next thing to do.

London 4:30 lies back on a raised wooden slab. His credit card has been charged discreetly by Bay City Health Services for five hundred dollars. Once, Karen actually had to stop herself from laughing out loud in the middle of a session when she thought of what would happen during a slip up, if Mrs. London 4:30 calmly asked over her dark lager and Dunhill, “What is this charge for water boarding?”

The people who know how Karen makes her living sometimes say, Oh those poor men must be so sad, such a lack of self esteem and satisfaction in their lives. Karen knows this is true for only a few of them. London 4:30 isn’t sad. Even though she can barely see his eyes under the cloak of Muslim Wife Caught Masturbating in Public, they are not like Dr. Wong’s.  They are not downtrodden. When it’s time to stuff the scarf into London’s mouth, she’s all of a sudden embarrassed of using such a pretentious word in front of Winnie.

Dr. Wong once told her she tries too hard.

____________

Ramen noodles are the only thing you’ll smell in the reception room at Kiros.  Not so at the Red Cindy. At the Red Cindy it’s all about vanilla scented Lysol, maybe a little designer cologne from the customers. Natural orange spray. The owners, Jack and CeeCee love natural orange spray.  They used to let everyone smoke in there before Jack got some sort of benign abscess on his lung and became all involved in air filters and acupuncture and something in a non aerosol can called Prayers in the Grove. People come into the Red Cindy bathhouse smelling of cigarettes and airports. They leave with the coppery scent of old pipes and a little essence of orange oil clinging to their skin. CeeCee says the noodle smell at Kiro’s is all part of their marketing. To act like they have mostly Asian girls working there (which is actually true).

Winnie explained to Karen why so many bisexual men want extremely young looking Asian women. She even asked her if she knew what the word asexual meant.  Karen told Winnie to fuck off, that she wasn’t born yesterday. But stuff like that on Karen never comes out sounding as unborn yesterday as she wants it to.

You used to be able to smoke in Kiro’s back when it was All Night Long with the Kiro Shinto, then a corporation LLC’d it, thought up the ramen thing and now it’s one of the most booked sex houses in the city. Now it’s got a full on finished basement and clean IKEA sofas and a big plasma screen TV in the reception room that plays the news with the volume turned down.

You get to watch Amber alerts while you wait for your soft electrocution session.

They hold all the meetings at Kiro’s. Sex Worker’s Rights meetings. Women’s safety awareness classes. Modern approaches to Medieval flogging. One meeting Karen did not attend was hosted by a theatrical makeup artist to teach the girls better techniques for covering stretch marks and razor burn. But Karen doesn’t wear the see-thrus or do the crotchless thing. Sometimes she’ll rub around down there when Dr. Wong is almost finished with himself, but it’s usually through her latex nurse’s uniform so pretty much useless. He has never asked to see what’s in between her and the uniform.

“There’s no meeting tonight.” A new girl stands from the juice bar in the reception area at Kiro’s. She is plump in the cheeks and shoulders and has no makeup on. Behind her is a fireplace set inside an arc of green and tan tiles. Next to the fireplace is some sort of prayer or gong bell and a watercolor of a pear blossom. The new girl looks like all of these things.

“I’m not here for a meeting,” Karen says. “I’m here to pick up the massage table.”

The new girl doesn’t answer Karen with words. Instead she points to an oversize bag like a huge packed tent. Jack and CeeCee bought the table for the new Happily Ever After room. They don’t expect their girls to know anything about massages, but they do expect them to do things like pick up a fifty pound table and lug it the length of where upper Castro meets 24th Street in the chilly evening mist without help. CeeCee said it was Jack’s deal since he insisted on the purchase. Jack said he can’t move it because of his lungs.

“Shit, it’s a heavy little bastard,” Karen says. She pulls on the straps of the cover while the new girl turns back to whatever she was doing at the juice bar. In her head Karen says, If you help me it isn’t going to break any code of bitterness. The girl turns around and gives her a funny look.

Just as she makes it out into the street the wind chimes on Kiro’s door jingle and Karen feels as ease of weight lifting behind her.

“This thing’s a monster,” the man says. He’s smiling and lifting and then he asks Karen where her car is. “I offered to pick it up for a friend,” she answers, “guess they forgot to tell me it’s the size of a schoolhouse.”

“That’s funny,” the man says and Karen realizes who it is, and she’s worried now that she won’t be able to hold her expression long enough for it not to be obvious that she knows him.

They walk together, each holding one side of the ridiculously large table. So stupid and funny—trying to find a balance in the bay mist that never fully exhales into rain. When they stop in front of the Red Cindy, Karen doesn’t feel embarrassed about where they are. Why should she? She’s sure now this man is Dr. Wong. What she wants to do is ask him why he was at Kiro’s. Does he go there when he’s not with her in the exam room? Does he know the bitchy girl with the chubby shoulders? The man hails a cab and Karen says Goodnight, thanks, very sure now it’s Dr. Wong–same wrists, also the way he tilts he nods and smiles to say you’re welcome like an old Chinese man even though he’s not that old. She watches the red tail lights in the wet air until the street slopes down hard and the lights are gone completely.

__________

After the dog collar snaps into place Karen’s 10 pm has to be hit hard with knotted ropes. More than once he’s asked for a tazer even though he’s been told several times it’s illegal. Karen tugs on the leash and walks him around the stage-prop dog house onto patches of Astroturf where 10 pm can piss and scratch at the ground and eat kibbles from a bowl he said someone made for him.  She cracks the rope over his back and the sound that fills the room is like falling face first into a swimming pool. 10 pm says, “It’s not hard enough. It’s not hard enough.”

When Karen first started working at the Red Cindy it was Winnie who’d been put in charge of showing her around, going over her handbook, observing and critiquing her technique from the surveillance camera. At the end of a session Winnie would help Karen clean up whichever room she was working and give her tips on how to make the humiliation experience a pleasant one. “You’ve got to hold character,” is what she said the most. “I saw you laughing. You can’t laugh. You absolutely cannot laugh.”  Even when Karen didn’t laugh Winnie said this. “We’ll lose tons of money and clients if you laugh. It’s about punishment. You’ve got to remember this. They want to be punished.”

Karen got it. She got it right from the beginning. Maybe she didn’t read the same obscure magazines as Winnie and didn’t make a thousand dollars a month in tips like Winnie (not that she couldn’t she just wasn’t a full timer) but the psychology of why these men were here, why a perfectly respectable, usually quite wealthy, well mannered person would spend the equivalent of what she paid in rent to not get any real sex, to be spat upon and chained and beat, to have clothes pins clipped to their openings and told to cry because they were useless pigs despised by the world—the  defective reasoning of it all had somehow been almost too easy for Karen to understand. When Winnie gave her a Jungian book on the interpretation of torture in literature and let her borrow her DVD of Venus in Furs, Karen felt annoyed. A few weeks later she returned both items—yes and yes about reading the book and watching the movie though she had done neither one. What Karen did do after her first two trial weeks at the Red Cindy was hang out with her roommates, smoke pot, eat Lean Cuisines and Peking duck, email her mom to say please stop forwarding cat pictures from I Can Has Cheezburger, fell asleep in front of Conan O’brien, barely woke up in time to catch the bus to her morning Abnormal Psych class, and somewhere in the center of all these familiar edges, in between picking up a disposable razor to shave her legs and opening her cell phone bill, she saw clearly every detail of what she would ever need to see about these men and why they went to the Red Cindy. By whatever sense stops a woman from walking into a dark parking lot then tells her it’s ok to have unprotected sex with a man she knows she will never see again—Karen understood her clients came to her in the hopes that her whips and her saliva and hateful words would dispel them from the terrible things they wanted, that their secret desire to be in hyper control of everything from wives to a teetering sexuality required a pause between sick ambition, a sense of freedom one can only achieve by leaving their own skin. All the penetration in the world would never bring these men to a place where they would ever be as close to their true selves than the hours they spent paying for pain. By the end of a few months at the Red Cindy it was clear to Karen a person would have to spend two months on a psychiatrist’s sofa to clear up what she could in two sessions.

What was also clear was that Dr. Wong wasn’t a part of any of these things, and that as long as he showed up to his sessions she could work at the Red Cindy for quite a while without turning into a bitch.

Traci Foust’s debut memoir NOWHERE NEAR NORMAL- a Memoir of OCD (Simon and Schuster/Gallery Books) is on sale now