Vertigo and Overwhelm
Confronting a life in objects on the verge of an eviction
Note: This essay is Part 2 of my chronicle of dealing with a looming temporary eviction and the ensuing 90-day displacement. Read the first piece for background.
Nineteen days left until the eviction date, that’s less than 3 weeks, and my feelings shift between accomplishment and despair, fear and excitement. There’s a lot to do when moving house, which some of you know because you do it every year or two, and some of you have recent experience of because you bought a house not long ago, and some of you remember vaguely, almost theoretically, having lived in one place for so long that the moving boxes you stashed in the attic have become damp and the edges have gapped and curled and the faces of the boxes have absorbed the grease of cobwebs.
This week, I’ve had vertigo, the actual physical syndrome, which is one of those instances when the metaphor and the thing-itself coincide — a phenomenon I usually appreciate with gusto, like when an apple actually knocks you on the head. If someone asked me how I was feeling, I might have said a few days ago, “I feel off-balance, like I can’t look around or I’ll fall into a hole — like I have vertigo.”
Vertigo is, in most cases, a symptom of an inner ear disturbance, and this is my third time having it. I endured it daily for about 3 months in 2013, and for 3 days last year. Oddly enough, both of those episodes started in June, and both while I was housesitting. One friend suggested perhaps I was getting it out of the way early this year. My housemate, who had to come get me from another friend’s house the first day to walk me home, thought perhaps it was allergy-related and that something is blooming now, in February, that usually flowers in June.
It’s worst first thing in the morning. My body suddenly demands that I roll over in bed and I know it’s going to be difficult to do so without feeling like the bed is being stood suddenly on its end. Sometimes I open my eyes and the room is spinning, and I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which is more disturbing, a slow, frame-by-frame flicker like looking through the blades of a fan that’s just been turned off, or a whirling of the room like a carnival ride.
To sit up before getting out of bed is a several-part maneuver involving positioning myself close to the edge (close, without going over!) so that I can swing my legs over the side and put both feet on the floor the instant I sit up, swinging my body in one compact, discrete motion with my ass as a pivot, so I’m stable when the room starts to twirl. Sitting up makes the illusion of movement very rapid, as can looking up or looking over my shoulder.
The time I had vertigo for three months, that was the deal every morning, but by the time I had made coffee, it generally went away. The last two days, though, it’s been an all-day occurrence, off and on.
The illusion of the rotating room is only one part of it; the other, not necessarily simultaneous, is a dizziness that feels oppressive, like spinning in place and stopping short while also being very drunk and being punched in the stomach. The floor gives way under my feet like I’m on a rocking ship. I can be standing still and stumble. Sometimes it comes and goes like a train rushing through my head. I sometimes describe it as suddenly being very, very stoned or drunk, and then just as suddenly returning to sober normality.
In fact, I find running with that metaphor as a tool is the best way to handle vertigo. I haven’t had a drink or smoked any weed in nearly 10 years, and I don’t use any other intoxicants, either, but I remember quite clearly what it feels like to be fucked up, so I tell myself, “Try your best to enjoy this. You don’t have a choice in how it feels. You know it will be over soon. Pretend you’re high, pretend it’s fun.”
It’s not fun, but if I treat it as a novelty I have to figure out how to cope with, rather than a trial I have to endure, I manage to conjure a lot more grace and humor as I’m stumbling across the now-empty living room or knocking a stack of magazines off the piano.
A murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens, an accumulation of books
Today I was in my storage locker, and I wasn’t able to approach it with the same ruthless efficiency as I had on my last visit. I could tear open a box and sort the contents into “Give to Community Thrift, give to SCRAP, garbage, recycling, oh, cool, I’ll keep this one thing.” Today my goal in there was to tackle a bunch of boxes that required a little more sorting, and good lord, how unfortunate, they were full of good stuff. Carefully stocked art supplies, old journals, finished paintings that I‘m proud of, unfinished collages I can see the end to, my old Ouija board, a box of unused tools that I remember buying on a manic spree, all of them still in their packaging from the hardware store.
I was making a lot of visual art then, as well as conceptual art and photography projects, so I know I had a use for a lot of this stuff, but I’m having a hard time conceiving of a circumstance where I would have needed as many levels as I apparently bought at the Ace Hardware on Market Street while manic and high and sleep-deprived. A yellow plastic yardstick with a carpenter’s level embedded in it, a tiny pocket bubble level, a water-filled torpedo level the size of my index finger, a laser level, a plumb bob, a surveyor’s line that you snap on the ground at a crime scene or on an athletic field to puff a perfect straight line of blue chalk.
I apparently wanted very badly to be stable but was not, for a long time, willing to do the work to achieve stability. I bought display easels in various sizes. I bought a tabletop tripod. I bought many, many tools for organizing, accordion files and magazine boxes and two of those fold-out jewelry caddies, as if, by the act of sorting and organizing objects, it would sort my thoughts, the process would ground me, the containers would contain me.
I still, when feeling disorganized, have a penchant for buying organizational tools, forgetting that I find brightly colored accordion files or wire magazine holders useful when I put things into them on day one, but useless for retrieving things from ever again.
I’m feeling the same urge now as I did in my High Manic Period for sorting and arranging, for containing and organizing, but without the lunacy. (I’m bipolar; it’s well-managed, as they say in the psych industry.)
This process of packing to move, and to move the objects both into and out of storage, means I am having to touch everything I own, both at home and in this bunker that is a time capsule of both my greatest successes (as an author, an artist, a poet, a paid expert in things related to the web and to words) and my most ridiculous failures, all self-induced in some ways, most not permanently tragic but some sins of both omission and commission deeply hurtful to the people I loved. When I went into rehab, those same people, my dear friends, packed up my apartment for me. They put it in boxes and put the boxes in the storage locker. I don’t know what’s in these boxes, because I didn’t pack them myself, and they’re labeled by category “Art studio,” “Clothes,” “Books from Office.”
(By contrast, now, I am numbering boxes and photographing the contents with the number of the box visible and a list of the most salient items; I am scanning the bar codes of entire boxes of books into Goodreads and sorting each set of scans onto a digital “shelf” that is also a box number.)
The entree into both storage and rehab was a long time ago, and spare me the lecture about how much money I’ve wasted holding on to this stuff. I’ve chosen to pay a little extra rent to put off having to deal with things (literally, quite), to avoid having to make choices like, Am I still a visual artist? Is keeping these notebooks prudent or its opposite? Will I ever play this drum set again? I’ve chosen to pay extra rent to hold onto the translations of my outdated software how-to books, the 1,000 other books, read and unread, the wire sculptures, the go-go boots, my grandmother’s spice rack, my first wok.
The thingness of things
So there I am in the storage locker, unboxing tools from various containers, finding levels, and standing up, feeling overwhelmed, the floor rising up toward my head, the towers of boxes looming toward me, telling myself, it’s just vertigo, but really feeling like I was having a flashback to being my old, crazed self, accumulating this stuff instead of trying to figure out whether and how to get rid of it.
For me, mania triggered buying sprees, and if you’ve ever heard a story about someone’s crazy uncle coming home with 12 snow shovels or 12 Cadillacs, I’m here to tell you, it feels mystical and right to be amassing several versions of the same type of object, or several copies of the same exact thing. It’s like a series of objects is also its iteration; the objects become a process of definition that is not only pleasing but necessary, completing an ineffable but crucial task. In moments of otherwise terrifying lunacy, where it feels like you have access to all the world’s knowledge but no way to harness your supernatural abilities, physical things really are grounding: corporeal objects you can touch, objects perfect within themselves, objects that are perfect examples of exactly what they are, objects that don’t need fixing or adjusting, objects so thing-itself, so in-and-of-themselves, Platonic ideals in phenomenological form, that they tether you to a world that would be perfect if it was exactly like it is, but but but more so.
Coping saw
My task now is to consolidate, to pare down, to get rid of not only multiples but of anything that I don’t need or use or love. I will not have time to complete this task in the next 3 weeks. I will not have the gumption to do all the sorting and selling and giving away. I will have boxes I just cannot decide about left in storage, and I will put boxes into storage marked something like “Shit I need to deal with after I move out.”
I am an optimist; I am also a pragmatist. I have to do the best I can to get things out of my storage locker so that I have room to put my current belongings in it; I have to pare down the stuff in my apartment so that I don’t need more space than I already rent. I could have been working on either of these projects for a long time, but I haven’t. That’s a fact. Adhering judment to this fact accomplishes nothing. (I used to beat myself up; I wish I could practice the same nonattachment to objects I’ve learned how to practice with value judgments.)
I may end up with a couple boxes marked miscellaneous. I may end up with more levels than I need. With any luck, the room will stop spinning when I wake up tomorrow, and when the feeling of overwhelm, of “I simply cannot do this,” returns, I will tell myself, “Just remember you’re not high. You can’t control this feeling, so you might as well enjoy it. Pretend you’re competent, pretend you’re on top of this. Turn your vertigo into something useful. Open a box. Touch the contents. It’s just matter.”
You can follow my travels through eviction and displacement here, on tumblr, and on tinyletter. All my places.
