Tuesday, June 26, 2012

‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out With Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit -- Vulture:

Which is to say, she would teach her kid not how to avoid trouble but how to get out of it. She’d had a therapist, she said, who believed in revisiting trauma to destigmatize it, and the more she’s learned about the brain, “that shit is not the thing to do.”

It was like phantom pain. There was that New Yorker story about the woman whose head itched so badly that her fingertips eventually breached her skull. She recalled, from it, the “mirror box,” a simple device that duplicates the reflection of the remaining limb when the other’s been lost, so that the phantom pain goes away, and this made her cry when she read it, she’d had “years and years of pain, and it’s this simple little trick, the brain is so stupid.” Her OCD, still with her, is better now, and she’s realized, over time, that “the brain is just a machine that sometimes gets a little glitch, and this is just something that got into a loop, and it’s getting reinforced.”

She said: “This is why it’s so fun, by the way, to go put the TV in your hotel room on and, like, put on New Jersey Housewives or something.”