Episode #1: Raw Nerve

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Description: This week, I recount the torturous tale of how I was rent from my baccalaureate womb and now face a brave new world.

I’ve always been a bit of a raw nerve. Where normal people have one feeling, I tend to have twenty. I also have a tendency to do what my therapist calls “catastrophizing,” wherein I script the most horrible scenarios possible in my head, and then act as if those scenarios are legitimate or predetermined. A few months ago, I crashed my bike and broke the screen on my iPhone. I had done that shallow, Southern Californian thing and developed an almost personal relationship with my Apple product. And as I got back up and headed home, my mind went to what my friends would say, how they would make fun of me, how they wouldn’t understand that I knew I was being ridiculous at wanting to cry over my cracked iPhone, but that I needed to be babied, just a little bit. And then I immediately got mad at them all over this imagined cruelty. I avoided telling anyone but my family for a few days and I could feel my resentment growing.

I finally did tell them, after the emotion wasn’t so raw, and I got the reaction that you’d expect, “Man, that sucks!” stuff like that, even a bit of the babying I wanted. But I still harbored a tiny bit of resentment at them because of my imagined disaster scenario.

Emotional instability is something I’ve dealt with my entire life, and (except for a few periods of melancholy throughout the year) I can usually keep it under control. Until now.  I graduated college six months ago, and I’ve never felt more lost.

As much as I’d like to blame the system, my teachers, my parents, Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush, American views on education, and of course, my birth month, I’m loathe to say that the fault is my own, at least partially. School worked for me. If anything, it was designed for exactly my type of personality: ambitious (when given tasks), innovative (but not revolutionary), and the ability to kowtow to authority with sycophantic relish. But I never learned to set goals for myself (well, goals that didn’t involve education). I hate to admit this because this lack of personal accountability and drive is one of the criticisms that people on both ends of the political spectrum like to throw around when they want to put their two cents in on “our broken education system,” and I hate hate hate giving ammo to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. And yet here I am.

            In college, if I had a six page paper due next week, I would stress out about it for five days, churn it out the night before, and get an A. I don’t say this to brag (well not entirely…) but to illustrate how ill suited my skills are for the real world. There are no deadlines for my writing. I’m not going to get a grade for the story I’m currently working on. Rather than free me up, graduation has tied me down. Without school, I just feel the stress without ever actually sitting down and finishing something. Worse still, now I have time. Time that would have usually been filled with driving to school, walking to class, stressing out about papers, occasionally writing papers, that has to be filled with something. And my emotional instability no longer has the distraction.

            That’s not to say I’ve been completely inactive. I read, I cook, I go on bike rides, I clean (sometimes). But there’s always a darkness at the back of my mind, like a weed, obsessing, tearing apart every conversation I’ve had with my family and friends that day, trying to figure out if the moments I thought were “good,” were really good, or if they were just acts of obscene cruelty or worse, apathy in disguise. It gets to the point where I long to hang out with my friends, but when I do, I have absolutely nothing to say because I feel so emotionally drained from trying to catalog the moment while I’m in the moment.

            I recently started working as a substitute teacher, which has helped a bit. I don’t think being a substitute teacher is on anybody’s bucket list, but the pay is decent and I can work the days I want. On good days (good weeks even!) I find that I can allow my life to just be. I feel more like myself. All of my relationships become frosting and bacon, something that I enjoy rather than require. But in not-so-good moments, for example these past two weeks, I can feel all my emotions physically pressing down on me, like that man who had all the stones put on him in the Salem Witch Trials, who died saying, “More weight!”

            This week, I’ve been determined to fight back. In a move that would make Elizabeth Gilbert proud, I’ve tried to talk with my emotions, let them know that I hear them, but that they’re not allowing me to live, that they’re suffocating me. I put a sign over my closet that says, “Breathe deep and calm the fuck down.” It works. Sometimes. What’s been working more and more is to try and take pleasure in the moment. Everyone in California goes through a shallow Buddhist phase at one point, and after reading an article on Wikipedia, I guess this is the start of mine. It’s Orientalism at its finest, to be sure. “Oh those Eastern religions are ever so fascinating, don’t you agree?” But it’s helped the most, so far.

When I’m in the shower, I try to notice the sensation of the water as it first hits my skin, the sound of the droplets as they hit the tile, the gentle fluctuations in pressure caused by my house’s outdated piping. My therapist has told me that I need to focus on the moments that are 4-6, and not just the ones that are 0 or 10. Implicit in this is also the need to stop grading moments, especially as they’re happening, because it makes it seem like there’s a possibility that a moment can be improved if it’s only at a three or a four. But I’m coming to realize there isn’t.

I think pleasure in life comes from choice. There are certain things I must do: shower, brush my teeth, go to work, be civil to people I’d rather not be civil to. But I can choose how I go about them. I can sing in the shower, I can put Nutella in my coffee, I can sub for a second grade class instead of a seventh grade one, or not go in that day and work on my writing at the coffee shop down the street. I can take in the moment, and understand that my day is not a gold-silver-bronze type situation, but a string of pearls that I get to thread. And I can breathe. And I can meditate like they do in the movies. And not grade the moments. And breathe. And be comforted by the fact that I’m not sane, but I will be some day.

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