Securing the perimeter
Downstairs, my roommate is laughing. Maybe. I think it is my roommate, but it could be anyone. She doesn't laugh very often and even if I knew for certain it was her, I couldn't confirm she was even in our house, either. I find all of the noises of the street enter my room--whether the windows are open or not. I sometimes wake up in the night to voices so close I think they're inside my room. A few weeks ago I woke up to a woman crying while her boyfriend shouted at her. It seemed as though they were sitting in my bed with me.
Upstairs, I can hear the rabbit scratching at the sides of his pen. He is an enormous rabbit and he has his own room. My roommate pays extra for the closet off the bathroom. I used to flinch every time I heard him move, forgetting I was not alone in the house. I share this floor with my roommate, her cat, and a rabbit large enough to be steed to another, smaller rabbit.
Living in the city and commuting daily to another one has altered my perception of my public self. Whenever I can help it I stay in my room in Fishtown, blinds drawn. I have almost always operated this way. I have never inhabited a room that was not curated to be exactly how I wanted it. And I have never been the open window type. In the house I grew up in, tucked in my bed, I would imagine cowboys breaking through the windows of my bedroom and attacking me. I sometimes dream of that house and trying to close the doors and windows before an intruder enters, securing the perimeter. I also dream of high school math tests I do not have time to study for. They are the same dream: a lack of control, a battle against time, a return to years past, a biting uncertainty about the now. If I look out the windows of this room, I can see brick houses with jewel-colored doors, the park across the street, and the church on the corner. No one seems to attend it--I've never seen a single person go in or out--but it is comforting that underneath the window guards there is the secret of stained glass. I hide in this room a lot, as I always have in my private spaces. A Room of One's Own?
When I open the door to leave my house, I always feel a little surprised. I peer out, then close the front door behind me. I am so aware of the feeling of walking on the sidewalk, crossing the street. I look at everyone around me and I wonder what they are seeing. When a man yells at me for not acknowledging his hello, calling me a "white bitch with big-ass titties," I get a hint. Suddenly I am thrust back into the world, where I am visible and seen and known. My mother has always celebrated the anonymity of the city, the security of being one with the masses, just another person living their life. I feel anonymous; I feel distorted. I feel that the essence of me is just a little bit injured every time someone looks at me. When they comment on my body, I am undone.
In Anthropology 102 I first thought about the ways our bodies are permeable. We believe we can be contaminated, not just by things like poison and pollution and germs. We are ideologically permeable and we are permeable to other people. We must contain ourselves and we must make sure others are contained. We are, always, part of the world and there is no respite from that fact.
Upstairs, I can hear the rabbit scratching at the sides of his pen. He is an enormous rabbit and he has his own room. My roommate pays extra for the closet off the bathroom. I used to flinch every time I heard him move, forgetting I was not alone in the house. I share this floor with my roommate, her cat, and a rabbit large enough to be steed to another, smaller rabbit.
Living in the city and commuting daily to another one has altered my perception of my public self. Whenever I can help it I stay in my room in Fishtown, blinds drawn. I have almost always operated this way. I have never inhabited a room that was not curated to be exactly how I wanted it. And I have never been the open window type. In the house I grew up in, tucked in my bed, I would imagine cowboys breaking through the windows of my bedroom and attacking me. I sometimes dream of that house and trying to close the doors and windows before an intruder enters, securing the perimeter. I also dream of high school math tests I do not have time to study for. They are the same dream: a lack of control, a battle against time, a return to years past, a biting uncertainty about the now. If I look out the windows of this room, I can see brick houses with jewel-colored doors, the park across the street, and the church on the corner. No one seems to attend it--I've never seen a single person go in or out--but it is comforting that underneath the window guards there is the secret of stained glass. I hide in this room a lot, as I always have in my private spaces. A Room of One's Own?
When I open the door to leave my house, I always feel a little surprised. I peer out, then close the front door behind me. I am so aware of the feeling of walking on the sidewalk, crossing the street. I look at everyone around me and I wonder what they are seeing. When a man yells at me for not acknowledging his hello, calling me a "white bitch with big-ass titties," I get a hint. Suddenly I am thrust back into the world, where I am visible and seen and known. My mother has always celebrated the anonymity of the city, the security of being one with the masses, just another person living their life. I feel anonymous; I feel distorted. I feel that the essence of me is just a little bit injured every time someone looks at me. When they comment on my body, I am undone.
In Anthropology 102 I first thought about the ways our bodies are permeable. We believe we can be contaminated, not just by things like poison and pollution and germs. We are ideologically permeable and we are permeable to other people. We must contain ourselves and we must make sure others are contained. We are, always, part of the world and there is no respite from that fact.
Discarding the plane situation
I wrote earlier about my newfound fear of airplanes and my mom's wise words, that I have made my lack of control material. But planes are not part of my everyday life. Fearing plane crashes does nothing for me in the daily transferring of emotions; it is only useful when I am actively stepping foot onto an airplane and letting it leave the ground. Additionally, I have never been in a plane crash. While I have read every Wikipedia entry on plane crashes as a person with anxiety does, it has no traumatic hold on me. The thought of a plane does not send me into a full-body panic or cause racing, incomprehensible thoughts that lead me to take drastic, unnecessary actions. Luckily, I have been in an abusive relationship and that trauma is the perfect raw material to convert into the stuff of daily anxieties.
Now, instead of waiting for a flight to channel my feelings of a lack of control, I can just assume my boyfriend is going to leave me. This is a very convenient narrative to use because a) it brings up wild memories of abandonment from ages eight through twenty, b) it's a widely accepted fear in the world of monogamy and isn't as dramatized or ridiculed as the fear of flying is, and c) it gives me a person to direct my feelings towards instead of an inanimate object (it is hard to be sassy towards an airplane, but it is easy to be sassy towards your boyfriend in an ill-fated attempt to express your need for validation).
This is a satirical way of trying to explain that I am struggling to cope with my feelings these days. There is trauma brought up by my boyfriend moving to Oregon. I can't really voice it yet, but I can feel that it's there by the irrationality of my responses and the way my insides feel blinded (and blind to what actions result). I also think yesterday when I said I am not depressed, I am probably wrong. Sophomore year of high school I felt like there was the world's hugest quilt draped over the world and it followed me wherever I went. Everything was dampened. I would come home from school and cry unrelentingly on the floor of my mom's house. Now I cry every day and tear up constantly. If someone asks me how I am doing, I will cry. This, I think, should be a signal for me at this point: if the genuine care of others brings me to instant tears, I am probably not feeling very cared for by myself.
Now, instead of waiting for a flight to channel my feelings of a lack of control, I can just assume my boyfriend is going to leave me. This is a very convenient narrative to use because a) it brings up wild memories of abandonment from ages eight through twenty, b) it's a widely accepted fear in the world of monogamy and isn't as dramatized or ridiculed as the fear of flying is, and c) it gives me a person to direct my feelings towards instead of an inanimate object (it is hard to be sassy towards an airplane, but it is easy to be sassy towards your boyfriend in an ill-fated attempt to express your need for validation).
This is a satirical way of trying to explain that I am struggling to cope with my feelings these days. There is trauma brought up by my boyfriend moving to Oregon. I can't really voice it yet, but I can feel that it's there by the irrationality of my responses and the way my insides feel blinded (and blind to what actions result). I also think yesterday when I said I am not depressed, I am probably wrong. Sophomore year of high school I felt like there was the world's hugest quilt draped over the world and it followed me wherever I went. Everything was dampened. I would come home from school and cry unrelentingly on the floor of my mom's house. Now I cry every day and tear up constantly. If someone asks me how I am doing, I will cry. This, I think, should be a signal for me at this point: if the genuine care of others brings me to instant tears, I am probably not feeling very cared for by myself.
Fog
This is the most down on myself as I have been since late winter 2017. Things are different now: I am no longer recovering from an abusive relationship (in the immediate sense) and I am not being gaslighted by myself or anyone else. I have a whole-ass college degree and I have been released from the (sometimes) insular hell that was Bryn Mawr. I am fundamentally different in my thinking and in my place in life, but like that winter, I feel a fog hanging over me. It's the first time I've really spent the summer in one of those fogs. I made huge strides in recovery by spring of 2017 and finished sophomore year with a lot of optimism. It was amazing, actually. Recovery. In February and March, I would walk the half mile to therapy in the grey afternoon, through banks of snow, and look at the world around me. I felt both conspicuous and private, as though the cars passing by were both aware of and oblivious to my mental illness. I remember when spring was coming and I took a picture of the dilapidated house I thought was so beautiful. I would go to therapy and when she asked how I was, I wouldn't immediately cry. I had a sense of being able to care for myself during this time. I was making good choices for me. In June I went to China for summer study abroad. I wanted to be as far away as possible from my abuser and another man who had recently broken my heart. I was still having frequent moments of panic when I found out information about my abuser or saw photos of him, but I felt safe being far from home and college, with new people who were removed from the Bi-Co and had different perspectives on being.
I feel a fog hanging over me. It is palpable to me in moments: when I first arrive at work, when I get my first message from my long distance boyfriend in the morning, when I think about my life after August (when I think about the empty weekends). I am not depressed. I have Sertraline for that, and it does its job with the enthusiasm I haven't been able to muster for mine. There is room in inaction for the fog and it takes that space greedily. I only feel good when I am making budgets or cleaning or walking to some distant place. It is easy to take postgraduate advice to enjoy this time, before things in my life are set and the world is open to me. It is easy to say that if you are not making $900/month, living with strangers, and feeling alone in a vast world in which even your hometown is no longer yours. It is easy to talk about cobbling together a number of part-time jobs when you are gainfully employed with benefits and you have some idea of where your life is going.
I have said before and I will say again that having the next sixty years of my life before me is one of the most daunting and unpleasant thoughts I have had lately. I can't imagine what I will do with the next year, and if the next sixty years are anything like the past two months have been, I certainly hope I do not live to the age of my ancestors. In March, a psychic told me I'd live to be 89-90, or older. She also told me to throw away my perfume and that I would see success later in life. I wanted to ask her about now, but she did not seem focused on that. It is hard for people to focus on the now, talking endlessly about the possibilities of the future. But I am living in now, unhappy. I am spending seven hours a day describing the letters of a racist old lady from 1890. While sometimes amusing, it is mostly incomprehensible. Furthermore, it is politically complicated.
I am deeply, incredibly privileged. My unhappiness in this moment does not compromise my acknowledgment of that--there are no structures that have caused me this misfortune. I am trying to fight very hard against my belief that I have caused it, but that is no easy battle.
I feel a fog hanging over me. It is palpable to me in moments: when I first arrive at work, when I get my first message from my long distance boyfriend in the morning, when I think about my life after August (when I think about the empty weekends). I am not depressed. I have Sertraline for that, and it does its job with the enthusiasm I haven't been able to muster for mine. There is room in inaction for the fog and it takes that space greedily. I only feel good when I am making budgets or cleaning or walking to some distant place. It is easy to take postgraduate advice to enjoy this time, before things in my life are set and the world is open to me. It is easy to say that if you are not making $900/month, living with strangers, and feeling alone in a vast world in which even your hometown is no longer yours. It is easy to talk about cobbling together a number of part-time jobs when you are gainfully employed with benefits and you have some idea of where your life is going.
I have said before and I will say again that having the next sixty years of my life before me is one of the most daunting and unpleasant thoughts I have had lately. I can't imagine what I will do with the next year, and if the next sixty years are anything like the past two months have been, I certainly hope I do not live to the age of my ancestors. In March, a psychic told me I'd live to be 89-90, or older. She also told me to throw away my perfume and that I would see success later in life. I wanted to ask her about now, but she did not seem focused on that. It is hard for people to focus on the now, talking endlessly about the possibilities of the future. But I am living in now, unhappy. I am spending seven hours a day describing the letters of a racist old lady from 1890. While sometimes amusing, it is mostly incomprehensible. Furthermore, it is politically complicated.
I am deeply, incredibly privileged. My unhappiness in this moment does not compromise my acknowledgment of that--there are no structures that have caused me this misfortune. I am trying to fight very hard against my belief that I have caused it, but that is no easy battle.
Thoughts on Escaping
I think romanticism is one of my mortal flaws. I have a long history of daydreaming, reading a website called Letters to Crushes (which used to be a big deal but now seems deserted), and making secret plans for U-Hauling. I am quietly obsessed with the idea of marriage and I watch a lot of YouTube videos of extremely young Christian moms talking about cleaning their houses and their alarmingly heterosexual marriages. Neither Christian, heterosexual, nor interested in birthing anyone, I can't exactly pinpoint my attraction to this kind of media. Yet in the last year especially, I have watched endless episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker, The Bachelor, Married at First Sight.
In the last year I have also developed an intense anxiety around flying. When I was a child I was afraid the pilot would "fall asleep at the wheel," which became a family joke. I have flown across the world many, many times, and there was a lengthy period post-infancy that allowed me many years of fearless air travel. Then I hit twenty-one and started researching plane crashes, train derailment, and other transportation disasters. I now sit in airplane seats with my eyes closed, saying Hail Marys to myself repeatedly whenever there is any turbulence at all. I told my mom about this a few months ago. Having traveled with me countless times throughout my life, she was used to an intrepid traveler whose fear of sleeping-at-the-wheel had been in remission for more than a decade. She was surprised, she said. But she also told me it made sense. Here I am in a period of my life that feels so unstructured, so wildly out of control, so ungrounded and unmoored. Flying in the airplane is a direct physical manifestation of those feelings: it is the most ungrounded one can be. Putting myself in an airplane feels to me like relinquishing the only control I really have right now, that I live on planet Earth and can feel it beneath my feet. Relinquishing control is intolerable these days.
I think my preoccupation with marriage and the raising of children is the metaphorical inverse of the airplane fear. If I were to get married, immediately start producing and rearing a bunch of small children and devoting my energy to being some sort of homemaker, I would effectively give myself plans for the next 19-40 years. Certainly, marriage is not the answer to one feeling lost. I have seen people go down this route. It is not a wise one. But I can be compassionate with the parts of me that are imagining some sort of certain future. Even if it would be an unhappy (and for me, a politically hypocritical) future, at least it would have a structure to it.
I think the marriage fantasy is tied up in a number of things (the parts of me that both crave and reject intimacy, my own parents' divorce and my family's current reconciliation with unpleasant collective truths), but I also think it allows me an aspect of escapism that I have been missing post-college. In school I always had an "escape plan," the thing I'd do if I ever decided to give up on the whole college thing. I wanted to open a B&B or a bakery or a combination of the two. Other people I know had dreams of lesbian farm-ownership and other things that seemed to have come from a Tom Robbins novel.
The world is open to me post-graduation. If I want to move to Oregon to be with my boyfriend of one month, I can. I've moved to an unfamiliar part of an unfamiliar city and I live with two strangers, after all. But still, I cannot escape. I take the subway and the trolley to a faraway Trader Joe's on a Wednesday night and I still see my college ex there. There is no real escapism for this period of time, although I so desperately wish I could fast-forward to twenty-seven (maybe that girl will have figured out how to budget?) and skip this part. The Pussycat Dolls have a song called "I Hate This Part." It's unrelated to this post except that I was reminded of it just now. I do hate this part right here. I said it before" relinquishing control is intolerable. Nicole Scherzinger understands.
In the last year I have also developed an intense anxiety around flying. When I was a child I was afraid the pilot would "fall asleep at the wheel," which became a family joke. I have flown across the world many, many times, and there was a lengthy period post-infancy that allowed me many years of fearless air travel. Then I hit twenty-one and started researching plane crashes, train derailment, and other transportation disasters. I now sit in airplane seats with my eyes closed, saying Hail Marys to myself repeatedly whenever there is any turbulence at all. I told my mom about this a few months ago. Having traveled with me countless times throughout my life, she was used to an intrepid traveler whose fear of sleeping-at-the-wheel had been in remission for more than a decade. She was surprised, she said. But she also told me it made sense. Here I am in a period of my life that feels so unstructured, so wildly out of control, so ungrounded and unmoored. Flying in the airplane is a direct physical manifestation of those feelings: it is the most ungrounded one can be. Putting myself in an airplane feels to me like relinquishing the only control I really have right now, that I live on planet Earth and can feel it beneath my feet. Relinquishing control is intolerable these days.
I think my preoccupation with marriage and the raising of children is the metaphorical inverse of the airplane fear. If I were to get married, immediately start producing and rearing a bunch of small children and devoting my energy to being some sort of homemaker, I would effectively give myself plans for the next 19-40 years. Certainly, marriage is not the answer to one feeling lost. I have seen people go down this route. It is not a wise one. But I can be compassionate with the parts of me that are imagining some sort of certain future. Even if it would be an unhappy (and for me, a politically hypocritical) future, at least it would have a structure to it.
I think the marriage fantasy is tied up in a number of things (the parts of me that both crave and reject intimacy, my own parents' divorce and my family's current reconciliation with unpleasant collective truths), but I also think it allows me an aspect of escapism that I have been missing post-college. In school I always had an "escape plan," the thing I'd do if I ever decided to give up on the whole college thing. I wanted to open a B&B or a bakery or a combination of the two. Other people I know had dreams of lesbian farm-ownership and other things that seemed to have come from a Tom Robbins novel.
The world is open to me post-graduation. If I want to move to Oregon to be with my boyfriend of one month, I can. I've moved to an unfamiliar part of an unfamiliar city and I live with two strangers, after all. But still, I cannot escape. I take the subway and the trolley to a faraway Trader Joe's on a Wednesday night and I still see my college ex there. There is no real escapism for this period of time, although I so desperately wish I could fast-forward to twenty-seven (maybe that girl will have figured out how to budget?) and skip this part. The Pussycat Dolls have a song called "I Hate This Part." It's unrelated to this post except that I was reminded of it just now. I do hate this part right here. I said it before" relinquishing control is intolerable. Nicole Scherzinger understands.