When Writing Is Therapy
Or: Day I-don’t-know-what: 30 Days of My Blah-Blah-Blah
That kind of day when everything comes together, but not in the way you would want.
You’re dependent on someone else for a place to sleep. It’s a good gig, it’s been a lovely time, but it’s time to go. But, you can’t find a place of your own at a price that makes any sense.
The perfect pants in the biggest size you’ve ever been arrive in the mail and they are too small.
Your sprained ankle feels worse — is it broken? It’s swelling up. Now your lower back hurts because you’ve been walking funny.
It’s really hot, and humid, kind of unexpectedly, and you’ve chosen this moment to go through the few possessions you have with you, organizing and tossing and getting ready to pack for a trip. You begin to feel nauseated, from the heat and from worry. You find the last notice from Social Security saying how much you’ll get if you had kept working at the same rate you had been in 2013, when you had been making just about six figures for a few years. You wonder how much of a hit you’ll take because you’ve been underemployed since then. You wish you’d sued your old company for cutting your hours in half after you came back from medical leave for depression.
You can’t face the dinner date you have tonight.
You’re making seemingly endless preparations to go on a trip. Amsterdam, Brussels, some obscure place in Germany where a friend lives now, Munich, Vienna, back to Amsterdam. In 14 days. You managed to find a place to stay for exactly one of the 7 days you need a place. You leave on Sunday.
You’ve always had weird skin — a condition called ichtheosis. In seventh grade a really cute boy sat next to you in the bleachers and said, “Oooh, you have alligator skin.” You used to have dreams that the first time you undressed in front of a man that he’d be repulsed. It got a lot better, and then menopause. Menopause is the best and it is also the source of much evil.
Lately, you’ve got all these other growths all over — seb kers, actinic bits, skin flaps, all kinds of brown spots and thickenings with awful names and you figure you’ll pretty much never have sex again because you’re too fat and have these ugly spots all over you. On a day like today you forget that 5 years later you were having sex with that same cute boy in a sleeping bag at the beach.
For some reason you try to imagine what it was like growing up in a family of people who didn’t react to each other. Were you supposed to figure out what they were thinking? How often did you feel like the odd one? You think, no wonder the organizing feature of your depressive thoughts is “you don’t belong anywhere.” You go out for coffee because you know complete strangers will smile at you.
You wonder if you should publish this. You think, you are pathetic. You know you are not pathetic and that other people who experience mental health challenges will appreciate your candor. You look outside at the clouds and the fluttering table umbrella. You feel the too-cold conditioned air in the Starbucks blow on your arms.
You think you might be able to have that video call now. You wanted to cancel it earlier but decided just to give yourself an hour or so. Maybe you’ll be able to make your way through it without crying. You know the person you have the call with loves you and has welcomed you into his world with enthusiasm. You start to tear up over that, too.
There’s just no escaping the tears today. It’s that kind of day.
You decide to publish.