When I was a little girl, when things were difficult, I would count words and I would count numbers.
There are three numbers every sequence of letters in the world will come back to. 3-5-4. After that, you get stuck in an endless loop of 4. 4-4-4-4…..
Take the word stair. Five letters. Five has four letters. Four has four letters. There you are, in the loop. Try staircase — nine letters. Nine has four. Four has four. Four, four, four. Loop. Street, same. Button — six letters; six has three; three has five; five has four. Three, five, four. Every word in the universe gets reduced to three, five, four.
I know this pattern from decades of trial and error.
From when I could count, whenever I was stressed or overwhelmed, I'd retreat into my own head and isolate something I could see. A car passing. The rain on the window. The jacket on the chair. I'd take that word and turn it into letters, and turn the letters into numbers, and the numbers, no matter how hard I tried to sever the mind-muscle connection, would make their way to my fingers, counting. Three, five, four. If I couldn't sleep, I'd count the pattern until I could. But more often than not, it was the pattern that kept me awake. 3-5-4.
By ninth grade it was bad enough that I couldn't concentrate in math.
Algebra was the worst because algebra is just numbers and words and numbers and words. As the teacher talked, I'd pick out one word he’d said and run the loop. Algebra — seven letters. Seven has five. Five has four. Four has four. Three, five, four. 4, 4, 4. The teacher would say whiteboard, ten. And I'd go again. 10, 3, 5, 4.
I had insomnia. I'd lie in bed at night, three to four hours at a time, thinking pillow, desk, light, blanket. It was a seemingly unbreakable habit, the way nail-biting is a seemingly unbreakable habit. As long as my eyes were open, as long as my brain registered language, I couldn't stop.
In tenth grade I figured out how to short-circuit it. I would inject a ridiculously loud and fast flurry of sounds to shock my mind. For example, I would play songs where the words were flying so fast there wasn't time to count them. Debates worked too. After about four weeks, the loop quieted, and for years it would only surface once every month or so, briefly, at my weakest moments, before I stamped it out as quickly as I could.
—
Once, in that same year, in ninth grade, in that same class, math, the teacher put a riddle on the board for ten percent extra credit on the next unit test:
13, 8, 5, 4.
There was no context. He told us to find the pattern. For twenty minutes, people tried addition, subtraction, division. I’d recognized it right away, but was hesitant to answer out of fear that explaining it would drive me back into the same cycle of counting, in the next class, at dinner, that night as I tried to sleep.
But just before the bell rang, I raised my hand. The pattern is the number of letters in the number preceding it. He was impressed. The kid sitting next to me — one of my closest friends at the time — asked how I'd gotten it so fast. I told him: this is how I put myself to sleep when I'm stressed.
He laughed and announced it loudly to the class. That's why she got it so quickly. She does this every day like a crazy person. Everyone thought it was funny. Everyone thought I was smart. Some thought I was neurologically different.
—
The last time this had happened, I had been in first year university. Since then, it’s been 5 years, and I thought I’d beaten it for good. The memory still lingers, of course, but I’ve been able to manage it, for the most part.
Two days ago, I was in a meeting, the girl across the table said Taylor Swift.
Taylor — 6
Swift — 5
6 + 5 = 11
11 has 6
6 has 3
3 has 5
5 has 4
4 has 4
Five and four. Five and four. Five and four. Four. Four. Four.
I don't think most people realize how loud words can be. How loud an internal monologue can be. Five and four, five and four, until you can't stop, and you don't know why it's happening to you, and you know you should be focusing on everything else.
I guess counting numbers is my forecast. The way certain economic indicators predict a recession — there are certain behavioural patterns that predict the good and bad times.