Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself

I react to stress much like a horror movie villain reacts to being whacked upside the head by the terrified-yet-resourceful cheerleader. We both roar, retreat, rub our tender spots in solitude. Then, just as the residents of Predictable Plot Twist Terrace are heaving big, naive sighs of relief that no more teenagers will be forcibly de-spleened... YAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH! We come busting through the nearest wall with a gore-encrusted scimitar and a smile, ready to dispatch our stressors (be they marital problems or bat-wielding blondes) with extreme prejudice. Vengeance is administered. Gallons upon gallons of red-tinted corn syrup are splattered around the joint. What you don't see - even in the deluxe, unrated director's cut - is what happens After. The curses have been hurled, the possessions divided, the ties that bind painstakingly unraveled. Susie Q. Debate team has been neatly relieved of both Louisville Slugger and spleen. We both stand in a stranger's living room, sweaty and panting, wondering what the hell just happened.

Laughter may be the best medicine, but it is surely an over-the-counter one, dispensed in a cheery yellow carton right next to "Time", "Hindsight" and "Don't Pick at It". For sheer illicit neuron-tickling, nothing beats panic. It's always been my drug of choice. Kitchen fires, transmission troubles and emotional meltdowns are like flame coursing through my veins (not to mention across my stovetop). Beneath the pounding pulse and dampened palms, I'm eerily calm. I can almost feel each polished wooden bead click softly against its neighbor as my mental abacus calculates how to remedy the situation at hand. I have pondered careers as an EMT, a crime scene cleanup specialist and an air traffic controller (the latter when "Pushing Tin" was in heavy rotation on HBO; if John Cusack played a compost farmer, I'd probably spend a few weeks waxing rhapsodic about moldering banana peels). I actually enjoy helping others move; relocating a person's entire life in several short hours (in a truck with screechy brakes, while being char-broiled under the summer sun) is nothing if not a dull, controlled panic. The majority of the time, I crave the solutions, not the cheap thrills which necessitate them.

Whirring computers, blatant infidelity, three feet of snow and more on the way… I’m on it. I’m a fixer. Unfortunately for me – and the rest of the few, the proud, the compulsively fidgety – there is no solution tidy enough so as to be completely invisible. Life’s like grape juice… there will always be traces; ghostly, indelible, utterly infuriating streaks announcing that Yes, This Actually Happened. When operating in a state of jaw-grind, barrel-of-a-.38 terror, everything else tends to melt away. It’s a strangely soothing, almost autistic state… you cannot look at anything but the problem, because there is only the problem. The rest of the universe has been smudged into a deep, fuzzy nothingness. There comes a point, however, when you’ve got to snap out of your reverie, step back and regard your handiwork. Naturally, it is never quite as you imagined.

The time, the unholy quantity of time… that’s what surprised me. I’d spend an hour splayed across the couch, just thinking, so peculiarly free of obligations that I almost expected to float away the second I sat up.

At our darkest, snot-drenched worst, my husband and I spent hours each night sitting in bed, talking, crying, dissecting and debating. Drawing circles and loops and Spirograph patterns around an impossible problem, wondering why bright young things such as ourselves couldn’t just solve the damned thing already. When one or both of us was utterly spent, we’d collapse in the dark, burying damp, puffy faces in rough pillowcases. Occasionally, one of us would snake a tentative hand across the blankets, out of kindness or a distant hope that maybe skin-on-skin might correct what mind-on-mind seemed powerless to address. We’d sleep for five fitful hours, stumble off to work, come home, repeat the entire process. It was exhausting, agonizing and fruitless, but it was something, and clearly, something had to be done. Something always has to be done. Relatives still bring gelatin desserts to terminal cancer patients. Jell-O never cured anything, but it’s a testament, a wobbly neon monolith to the irresistible urge to throw yourself head-first at a bad situation. You’ve got to ride that panic like a big, shimmering, jiggling wave… otherwise, you might get washed away.

I got washed away. I drifted, idiotically poked jellyfish, subsisted on kelp, family and antidepressants. I washed up in Philadelphia. Staggering ashore, I was stunned. I was still alive. I felt glad, self-confident, hopeful for the future. I had a cute little apartment, a precocious little boy, a pack of wonderful, supportive female friends. And yet there was that odd, tender spot inside, like a nagging sprain. And the time – oh, lord, all that damned time.

The couch and I bonded. It began to seem like the ideal partner – supportive, a fine listener and an excellent lay (insert rimshot here). It might have been dumpy and the world’s ugliest shade of industrial blue, but it was a nice, solid surface to cling to while being battered by the big truths. I had spend the past six months acting, reacting, booking therapy appointments, hustling my panicked little ass off. All of which had made it conveniently easy to blur out everything else. Like the fact that I was going to get divorced and be a single mother at twenty-four. Like the radical personality changes this trial by fire had instilled in me. Like the realization that I’d spent the past seven years – important, formative years – with a man who, while generally sweet and supportive, just wasn’t terribly into me. I somehow doubt that the authors of the bestselling “He’s Just Not That Into You” will ever release a sequel entitled “P.S. – And You Still Married Him, You Dipshit!” The topic is just a wee bit too weighty for the pop-psych section of Barnes & Noble.

When the good ol’ adrenal glands have spurted their last, when your heart rate has dipped back down to a steady thrum, when you have re-donned your rain slicker and skulked off into the distance, preparing for the inevitable sequel… there is not despair, exactly. Or at least there doesn’t have to be. Every event has the capacity to make an individual better or worse. I choose to be made better, to let each kick in the ass propel me that much closer to the person I’d like to be. There isn’t a bad feeling, or a good feeling, so much as a scooped-out, empty feeling. Everything extraneous has been removed and tossed down the Insinkerator, and you’ve got no choice but to regard your new life with a kind of shell-shocked bemusement. Guess what, tough gal? Yes, This Actually Happened.

It’s time for a road trip. In the words of the late, luscious Soul Coughing, I’m “running on fumes, I got to get right with this.” Tucked away in the bachelorette pad, it is a slow, strange process. I still pause at least once a day to grin, sniffle and mutter, “Huh, these are MY coffee mugs”, as though they were a dusty ruin of a long-dead culture rather than six bucks’ worth of IKEA-ish porcelain. I need to hang up the scimitar, come down off the ceiling, go crashing through some nature preserves, freshen up my bug bites. This actually happened, and it’s actually still happening. It’s time to fuel up the Civic, open the road atlas and get right with this.