At nineteen, I stand in front of the peppers and I feel my heart rate begin to pick up. I try not to make eye contact with the little, white-haired old lady poking at the carrots next door. I keep my eyes down, pretending to be immersed in my task, as if my mind isn’t operating at a thousand miles per hour. I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to avoid; there is something in the brightness of the light, and the endless shelves stretching before me that makes me sweat. I am not here to chit chat. I’m here to get my groceries and get out, as quickly as possible.

The grocery store makes me feel very small, and I can’t help but think of my father, who has always appeared disturbingly comfortable in buildings filled with food. It’s one of few traits I didn’t inherit from him. I got his loud voice, his love of puns, and, unfortunately, his nose, something I would have much preferred to get from my mother. I suppose that makes a love of the grocery store a learned behavior, a place where we are taught to find comfort in familiarity and routine. A desire for comfort is another trait my father and I share, but with different manifestations.

My discomfort in the grocery store is a more recent development, but I can’t pinpoint when exactly it began. Sometime after college started. It feels like such an adult thing to do, to go to the grocery store with a credit card in your name and no parental safety net. Part of me thought it made me smart, as I searched the shelves for the best deal, scanning each tag for the price per unit, for the buy-one-get-ones.

It has become almost a game; how can I get the most for the least? This past summer was the first time I lived alone, and I challenged myself to spend no more than $25 each time I went to the grocery store. This continued into the school year, and somewhere along the line, this money game became an obsession. Food shopping has become an endless cycle of comparison and regret. 

My bags of veggies lie at the bottom of my cart as I stand in front of the refrigerator unit, studying the chicken breasts neatly wrapped in plastic. Organic, free-range, grocery store brand. I look over price, weight, expiration date, searching for the perfect package and wishing for my father.

There is a cramping in my chest and a tightness behind my eyes, because, dammit, I am not going to cry over a package of chicken, but I want to, because I am so overwhelmed and anxious, and I just want someone to tell me what to do and what the right choice is, and how the hell do people do this so easily? How do they move through the world without thinking about that package of chicken that they bought and if it is bad or poisoned or cost too much or will kill someone if they cook it wrong? And then how do they not feel the ache of guilt about panicking over a package of chicken when there are people starving in Africa or dying of disease down the street or losing their loved ones?

This would be so much easier with my father by my side, bitching about the evil deli counter workers and chattering with grocery store staff with more than just mandatory politeness, his large presence a comfort, a shield. The grocery store was a safe place for us, a place we could go together even if we had been in a screaming match earlier that day, but without him, it was hard to feel safe here.

The cramp in my chest squeezes. Maybe I’m having a heart attack. That would solve a lot of problems. I grab a package of chicken, throw it into my cart, and decide the grocery store and I need a break. My meal plan will be sufficient for now. 

At four, I cling to my father’s leg, holding on to the rough denim behind his knees. This will be my earliest memory of the grocery story, a massive building, overwhelming to my small body, but my father likes it because the deli has a section where a man with large hands will shape soft, white cheese into balls. Fresh mozzarella, a staple in our Italian household, although I won’t learn its name until I’m about six or seven. I remember standing with my father, and looking at the small moons of cheese nestled on a bed of ice. I can feel my father shake with laughter, his loud voice booming, already best friends with the cheese man.

My father has a knack for making friends with the people who work at the grocery store. It’s a strange thing to witness, the way he can banter with the people behind the deli counter, how he can charm cashiers with a smile and easy conversation. He makes interacting with strangers look effortless in a way that almost makes me believe that it can be.

At twenty, I climb back into my car holding a crinkled CVS/ Pharmacy bag, a bottle of pills rattling at the bottom. It is January, and I am wrapped in layers of sweaters and jackets, and even though the car thermometer says it is 42 degrees outside, I am sweating.

I toss the pills onto the passenger seat and shove my key into the ignition. The car shudders to life.

My therapist will be proud of me. It had taken her months of coaxing to get me to schedule the doctor’s appointment, partially out of concern for my health. I remember the look on her face when I told her I hadn’t been to a doctor in about three years, not since I started college, and this fact became a weapon in her arsenal.

I don’t like pills. I don’t like taking them. I don’t like the idea of putting a chemical into my body in the hopes that it will cure what ails me. I’ve always had trouble swallowing pills, anything from teeny tiny Claritin to a course of Amoxicillin the size of horse tranquilizers; I have to take them with some form of applesauce or yogurt, tricking myself into swallowing them. Something inside me seizes as soon as I put them in my mouth, my chest and my throat constricting and no amount of water able to flush the pill down. I suppose it is this anxious reaction that prescribes the Prozac currently burning a hole on my passenger seat.

When Anita first proposed the idea of taking an anti-anxiety drug, I rejected the idea hard and fast.

“No,” I said to her. “I can’t take pills.”

That immediately turned on her therapist instinct, and she leaned forward in her chair, pen touched lightly to her lips. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Won’t,” I said. “I don’t take pills.”

“Why?” It was her favorite question to ask.

Again, I thought before responding. “Because it means I’m broken.”

Her shoulders softened at that, and she let it go for the time being. But a few sessions later, she had me making an appointment with a general practitioner with the intention of talking about anti-anxiety medication.

I didn’t tell my mother and father about the real reason for the doctor’s appointment, claiming instead that it is just a checkup. I deployed the weapon that I haven’t been to a doctor in years, and they dropped it, letting me go about my business.

When I was younger, I was a rampant liar—or a storyteller, depending on which parent you talked to. By twelve, my father had beaten almost all the lies out of me through a combination of verbal discipline and corporal punishment. My lies were no longer as prolific as they once were, except for one: I have been lying to my parents for years, faking away anxiety and depression and pretending that life comes easy to me. My logic, I thought, was simple; I don’t want them to worry about me. But sometimes I’m not sure who I am trying to convince more of this—them, or me.

I don’t know how to tell them about the medication. It feels like an admission of defeat, and I am sure that they will see it that way too. I’m sure I inherited their logic on medication; I middle school, despite the suggestion of several teachers, my mother refused to get me tested for ADHD.

“They’ll put you on meds,” she would say. “I don’t want you on meds.”

I didn’t entirely understand her reasoning at the time, but being young and impressionable, it made an impact, and even years later, I couldn’t shake the idea that medication was a bad thing.

My thoughts keep me distracted on the drive home, so much so that I almost miss our driveway. I slam on the breaks and quickly turn into it. The pills slide off the passenger seat and onto the floor. Once I am parked, I fish around for them on the ground, and once I retrieve them, I shove them deep in my purse, glad that no one is home to hear the telltale jangle of medication against plastic. I sit in the driver’s seat of the car for a moment, and just breath.

At eighteen, I enter the grocery store beside my father as he leans heavily on a shopping cart. His knees don’t work well anymore, not since he tore his menisci and had to have them removed almost six years ago. The automatic doors hiss open, releasing a rush of cool air. Grocery stores have a very distinct sound, more so than other retail locations. The beep of checkout, the clatter of cart wheels against the linoleum floor, the hum of freezers and AC and lights. It’s a sound that has come to define my Sunday mornings, the same way a church choir might define others’. This is our routine, my father and I, one that will end sooner than I would like. I am hurtling quickly towards college and out of my parent’s house, and soon I will be in the grocery store alone.

My father mumbles something about going to get my brother a sandwich from the deli, despite his hatred for the woman who works there. My mother and I long ago came to the understanding that my father is a drama queen. She calls it his “martyr complex”, his desire to be seen as some kind of self-sacrificing. Maybe it’s a product of being the oldest of three sons, of having to be “the responsible sibling” his whole life. Maybe it’s what makes him so easy to talk to; it makes him quick to laugh, quick to smile, quick to please. He leaves me to collect the veggies from the shopping list my mother gave us, despite his desire to browse. I don’t like it when he leaves me alone in the grocery store, but to accomplish things, I must let him. I will ignore the flipping in my stomach because it will make his life easier, make him happy. Sometimes I think we’re more similar than I’d want to admit.

At twenty-one, I walk down the frozen foods aisle with my father, him pushing an almost overflowing cart while I check items off the list my mother had again insisted we take.

“I don’t get it,” my father says. “We don’t take medication.”

I almost laugh, thinking of my mother’s adverse reaction to even the thought of medicating me for ADHD, despite the fact that it probably would have helped me succeed more. Instead, I take a deep breath. I had known this conversation was coming from the moment I had first told my mother I was taking meds for my anxiety, just 10 mg of Prozac each morning. She tells my father everything (and vice versa), so even if I didn’t tell him, he would find out.

“Well,” I say, thinking about price tags on packages of chicken. “I do.”

“But you don’t need it,” he says. I can hear his confusion, and I don’t know how to tell him how good I have gotten at hiding the anxiety from him and my mother. I am their oldest child, their organized, controlled daughter. The child who is most likely to pay for their retirement home. The one who has her life together.

I’ve been lying to my parents about the anxiety for years, shuffling through life with a “fake-it-till-I-make-it” attitude that is no longer helpful. It was a band-aid on the problem, and now that façade is beginning to crumble.

I take another deep breath. “I do need it.”

“No, you don’t.”

I don’t know how to tell him about the panic attacks, about the constant shifting in my stomach, about the sleepless nights, and, when it gets bad enough, about the desire to not be on this planet anymore. A part of me thinks he will understand, knowing the pressure of being an oldest, best child. This is my chance to come clean.

“It’s not forever,” I say instead. “Just until I no longer need it.”

My father is quiet. The wheels of our shopping cart squeak.

“It’s helping me,” I say, falling back on the same words my therapist used when she explained it to me, trying to fill the silence with anything I could. “All it’s doing it showing my brain the correct way to react to things.”

“How do you react that’s not correct?” my father asks. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

I suppose that’s something every parent wants to believe, but I don’t say that. Instead, I say, “panicking, mostly,” as we turn out of the aisle, towards the checkout.

“Keep an eye out for an open lane,” my father says. “Everybody panics.”

I sigh. I know from experience that the more I try to explain, the more frustrated I will get. My father is stubborn, and once he has set his mind to (or against) something, it stays that way. We used to fight, he and I, loud screaming matches that almost always ended in tears, usually for me, and it took me years to learn which things were worth the fight.

“Seven’s open,” I say, pointing, and deciding that this is one of those things not worth the brewing argument. Maybe one day I’ll be able to explain it to him in a way that he understands, in a way that he can accept. But for now, I decide to change the topic and let us enjoy the routine of a Sunday afternoon at the grocery store.