SXSW is often a rather stressful event for me, so this year at SXSW I gave myself a set of rules to keep myself from getting depressed, from getting too stressed out, from–well, from crying.  But I didn’t cry during your keynote for any of my usual reasons, and I didn’t cry any other times during the conference, so I’m going to give myself a pass and call this year’s SXSW a success.

Your keynote made me cry for the same reason I had to stop visiting your website.  You may not be too happy to hear about that, but it’s not your fault.  PostSecret is a wonderful project, but I had to stop reading the website because it made me too sad.  My small corner of the world–my job, my city, my hobbies, my friends, my family–is about all I can handle sometimes, and reading PostSecret reminded me that the world is much larger than I’ll ever be able to understand.  Every single person has their own small corner of the world like mine, a corner they probably feel like they can’t handle any more than I can, and all those corners with their beautiful and terrible and painful secrets are sometimes too much for me to bear.  I’ll never know any of these people, and the enormity of that frightens me a little.

The secrets also worry me because they make me wonder about the people I do know.  Do my friends or family members have terrible secrets they’ll never tell me?  How well can you ever really know another person?

Here’s the thing, though: that concept goes both ways.  I’m as complicated as any other human being, aren’t I?  How well do my friends and family know me?  And that’s the other reason I cried during your keynote.  You see, Frank Warren, I have a secret.

When I told my therapist about my secret, I expected him to look surprised.  I thought he would put down his Diet Dr. Pepper, lean forward in his chair and say, “Really?  Tell me more.”  But he didn’t.  Instead he just said, “Oh.  Yeah.”  I get the feeling that I share this secret with others.

I guess my secret can best be described as a debilitating, all-encompassing fear of an apocalypse.  But it’s not the kind of apocalypse you see in movies where Bill Pullman is the president and Jeff Goldblum is the scientist and the aliens/dinosaurs/meteors are coming to kill us all.  It’s the kind where we’re going to run out of oil, we’re going to run out of food, we’re going to run out of money, we’re going to run out of places to keep all the people and garbage and stuff we’ve created.

When gripped with apocalypse fear, I run through the same scenario over and over again in my head.  It’s pretty ridiculous; are you ready to hear it?  Okay.  In the apocalyptic scenario, I’m sixty years old, and somehow I’m still living in the same apartment I do now.  (I don’t really like this apartment, and I know I won’t be living in it when I’m sixty.  Hell, it probably won’t even be here when I’m sixty.  But that’s the scenario, so I go with it.)  I’m sixty, and I live in this apartment, and BAM!  The world runs out of gasoline, electricity, and food, all in the span of hours.  There’s anarchy outside, and I’m alone in my apartment.  Most of my friends don’t live nearby, so I have no way to get to them if I don’t want to walk really, really far.  But then I think, hey!  I have some gas left in my car, probably enough to get me to a friend’s house, and then we can all go find food together.  So I walk out to the parking lot where my 1996 Acura is still there and functional, and BAM!  Someone kills me for a tank of gas.

I know that what I’ve done here is taken all my worst fears and combined them into a single ten-minute play.  I’m afraid I’ll never live in a place I actually like, I’m afraid I’ll be chained to my car forever, I’m afraid I’ll always be a fifteen-minute drive away from my friends, I’m afraid we’re going to run out of everything all at once and there’ll be anarchy, and I’m afraid my death will be painful, lonely, and meaningless.

Sometimes the play has a different ending.  Sometimes my apartment neighbors and I band together in the crisis.  We used to be strangers, but now we’re friends by necessity, and we protect each other and look for food together and take turns going down to the creek to get water.  We fend off hostile groups from other apartments with pointy sticks and old kitchen knives, and at night one of us always keeps watch while the others sleep.  It’s okay for awhile, but then I die of heat stroke and sunburn.

Or sometimes I manage to walk all the way to a friend’s house, and my friends and I band together to help each other stay safe and get food and water and sleep.  But then someone from a rival group kills our leader, and we’re all so despondent and directionless that we disband, and then someone kills me for a tank of gas while I’m dying of heat stroke and sunburn.

But usually I’m killed for the gas right away.  I’ve begun to use the phrase, “when someone kills me for a tank of gas” as shorthand for the whole thing.  “My inability to be productive won’t really matter when someone kills me for a tank of gas.”  “It’s okay if I watch TV all day because it won’t make a difference when someone kills me for a tank of gas.” “This problem will seem insignificant by the time someone kills me for a tank of gas.”

The shorthand is necessary, though, because not a day goes by when I don’t think about my apocalypse fear.  I can’t go to the grocery store without imagining what it might look like with empty shelves.  I can’t check my mailbox without imagining all my junk mail in a landfill.  I can’t visit Houston without imagining it flooded with seawater from melted ice.  I can’t look at paper plates and plastic forks without thinking about our “consumption-based culture in which disposability is an added value.”  I can’t look at my coworkers and acquaintances without thinking, “Do they know? Can they see it coming?”  My corner of the world may look normal on the outside, but inside my head it’s covered with a sticky film of impending disaster.

My apocalypse fear came to a head last summer and fall.  I was having at least one anxiety attack per day, usually while driving home from work, usually related to the fact that I work in a far-flung suburb of a city without a lot of reliable public transportation.  I would find myself paralyzed with guilt at all the gas I was wasting getting to and from work, and equally paralyzed at the thought of having to ride both the bus and my bicycle to the office every day.  Then I would feel guilty about not wanting to ride the bus, and then guilty about wasting the gas, and on and on until sometimes I wasn’t really watching the road anymore.  “That’s okay,” I would think to myself.  “This won’t matter when someone kills me for a tank of gas.”

(When I find myself thinking this way, I’m reminded of a comment someone left on a post I wrote on my website awhile back.  I’d had a bad day, and I wrote that it seemed to me like nothing I did was ever going to matter in the grand scope of human existence, so what the hell was the point.  Someone named John wrote, “The sun’s going to go out in a million years, and here I am going to work like a sucker.”  It was exactly how I felt that day, and it was exactly how I felt last fall.)

I didn’t tell anyone about my fear for a really long time.  Running out of food and gasoline and electricity and potable water is a scary topic, and I didn’t want to depress my friends.  I was afraid that they’d hear about what I was going through and say, “Alison, I don’t really want to talk about that right now.”  Worse, I was afraid they would tell me that I was wrong, that all that stuff is never going to happen, that it’s pointless to worry about it.  As I’m pretty sure it’s all going to happen at some point, hearing that would only have made me feel even more alone.  And I already felt really alone.  The collapse of Western civilization isn’t something I’d ever heard anyone talk about in casual conversation, so naturally I assumed that everyone else a) didn’t know, or b) knew but was handling it much better than I was.

Things all came to a head in December.  I’d been obsessing over the apocalypse since June or July, I hadn’t told anyone, and it was driving me so insane that I was probably thisclose to buying a gun and putting all my savings under my mattress.  A few weeks before Christmas, I had a friend over.  I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I guess I couldn’t hold my worry and fear in anymore, and all of a sudden I was telling him that we were running out of food and water and electricity and someone was going to kill me for a tank of gas.  To my great surprise, he didn’t tell me he didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t tell me my fears were unfounded.  Instead he listened, and asked questions, and was generally sympathetic to what I was going through.  I guess I don’t give my friends enough credit.

After I finally told someone about it, I started to feel a bit better.  At SXSW I told another friend, who said that he thinks about it, too.  Then I told another friend, who said that it’s something she and her mom have talked about.  And that, Frank Warren, is why I think PostSecret is important, even if I can’t read it myself.  To take your secret out of your own head and put it somewhere else is often the thing that separates you from insanity.  I still see the world through empty shelves and plastic bags and non-renewable resources and the wasting, wasting, wasting of everything, but talking about it has made living in that world a little bit easier.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Alison Headley

P.S. Other good has come out of this, too.  I’m becoming much more aware of what I buy and what I throw away, I’ve mostly stopped eating meat, and I’m working on chipping away at my gas usage.  It’s a slow process, but if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that I won’t do anyone any good if I sit back and let it drive me insane.

P.P.S. I know that we’re not going to run out of food and water and oil all at the same time.  I also know that thirty years from now is a debatable, perhaps even arbitrary, figure.  My fears are just that, fears, and I don’t put them through an accuracy test before I let them take over.

P.P.P.S. I would never really buy a gun.  You know that, right?

P.P.P.P.S. Thank you Michael and Ryan and Ariel.

Lately I’ve been giving my apartment an overhaul. I’m gradually replacing my old (inherited, scavenged, particleboard) furniture with some vintage pieces that are more durable and suit my tastes a bit better. I bought a sofa to replace my futon, a credenza to replace my (I use the term loosely) entertainment unit, and a pair of end tables and an ottoman to replace my coffee table. My coffee table was too big for my living room and it didn’t match anymore, but it’s still perfectly good, so I stored it away in a closet for potential future use. I didn’t want my futon or entertainment unit anymore, but since neither of those things would fit in my car, I couldn’t take them to Goodwill by myself.

At my apartment complex, a lot of people put their discarded furniture next to the dumpsters to be hauled away. The discarded furniture sometimes stays there until trash day, but other times it’s gone fairly quickly because someone saw it by the dumpster and decided they wanted it.* When my new old sofa was delivered, Michael and I put my futon outside next to the dumpster. We had to carry the frame and mattress out separately (they’re heavy), but I made sure we set the frame back up and put the mattress back on it, to make it look as attractive as possible for potential takers. We left my futon outside at 9 p.m., and it was gone by seven the next morning. When we put my entertainment unit out by the dumpster, it too was gone within hours.

I’m happy about this for several reasons. It makes me feel good that other people think my stuff is worthy of owning. It entertains me to think that a nearby apartment now looks a little like mine used to. But most of all I’m really glad to know that neither Goodwill nor I had to throw my stuff away. I know that I won’t be able to do this with everything I want to get rid of (some things are impossible to display enticingly next to a dumpster), but it makes me feel good to know that at least those two pieces of furniture aren’t going to waste.

* In my apartment in Houston, I was able to make shelves in two of my closets using bookcases and magazine racks I found by the dumpster.

At this point I’m comprised of 87% nonsmoker and 13% smoker.  I didn’t smoke at all for 21 days, and then, sitting on my patio talking on the phone after a particularly difficult day at work, I lit a cigarette.  Smoking it felt unfamiliar, like my hand belonged to someone else, like my lungs weren’t mine, like the smoke in them shouldn’t exist somehow.

So now I smoke a cigarette every two or three days, or sometimes two or three cigarettes every day, but I always make sure I’m alone.  I put each cigarette out when it’s 3/4 finished and think to myself, “That wasn’t terribly pleasant, now was it?”  Then sometimes I light another one.

When I quit on March 15, I had 2.5 packs left over.  Of those 2.5 packs, 6 cigarettes are now left.  The reckoning will come when I smoke those 6 cigarettes (over the next 2-13 days).  If I want to smoke any more, I’ll have to go buy more, and I’d rather not do that.

The point is that it’s much harder to write when I’m not smoking.

The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
The Floating Opera - John Barth
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Time-Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
Empire Falls - Richard Russo
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A bunch of Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris

As you can see, I’m a bit behind on What’s New In Books Lately, so I could use your help.

2. This is the antithesis of books*: in the sixth season of Buffy, when she came back from the dead and was all broke and unemployed, why didn’t she get a job teaching people all her fighting skills instead of flipping burgers at the Doublemeat Palace? I’m sure she could have made a shitload of money showing frightened Sunnydale residents how to fend off the many demons and vampires that lived there.

But I guess turning everyone into mini-slayers wouldn’t have helped her maintain a low profile, would it?

*On second thought, Buffy probably isn’t the antithesis of books. I bet it’s wrestling or “Flavor of Love” or something.

For the most part, though, I’m comfortable with my lo-fi lifestyle, with its 30-year-old bed*, its 12-year-old car, its hand-me-down furniture and electronics. The lo-fi life has freed up a lot of my money, and since I’m prone to unnecessary and debilitating worry, it’s freed up a lot of my brain power, too. It took me quite awhile to let go of the notion that owning things is what makes one an adult**, but once I did, I decided that I’m okay not being a homeowner or new car driver right now.

Or at least I was comfortable with my lo-fi lifestyle. Recently I started to become uncomfortable, particularly in my lower back, particularly while sitting or laying on the futon in my living room. I tried to make the futon more comfortable using carefully-placed throw pillows and folded blankets, but it didn’t really work. Then I thought maybe I could sew up some good pillows to help support my lower back while I sat in my living room and read a book or wrote or watched my Buffy DVDs. Neither of the two pillows I made did the job, though. I thought I was going to be stuck with my back-killing futon forever until I realized, hey! I get a steady paycheck now! I can afford to buy a couch!

Yesterday I made my most expensive furniture purchase ever, by a very large margin.*** I went to Room Service Vintage intending to buy a sofa, and walked out with an olive-green velvet couch, a blue vinyl rocking chair, and a set of two matching end tables. It’s all from the seventies, because I like things that were made in the seventies. I was made in the seventies!

I realize that the color of the sofa is a bit lurid, in the burns-your-eyes-out sense. But when it comes to decorating my apartment, I’m a little like the overweight kid in school who makes fun of his own weight before anyone else can. If I make my apartment look as ridiculous as possible on purpose, I don’t have to feel bad about the fact that nothing really goes with anything else, and everything looks weird. “I like how nothing matches!” I can tell my friends. “It’s all got sentimental value!” To that end, my next step will be to hang this on my wall.

* This always requires some explanation. My parents bought it to use as a guest bed, then my sister slept on it for a few years when she was really little, then it was a guest bed again for a long time, then it became mine when I moved into my first apartment. It was in fantastic condition when I got it, and it’s still super comfortable, so I see no reason to replace it for now. It was made in the seventies!

** I believe one could argue that while ownership isn’t what makes one an adult, the financial responsibility necessary to effect said ownership is part of what makes one an adult. But, uh, I don’t really want to talk about that.

*** Which isn’t actually saying much, since my most expensive furniture purchase before yesterday was about seventy-five dollars.

2. Smoking and driving. I used to think I loved to drive, but now I think what I really liked was smoking while driving. Driving’s boring now, and every trip feels like it takes an hour.

3. Smoking while driving and listening to a really good song on my iPod. Since quitting, I’ve had to listen to NPR instead of my iPod while I drive. The change of routine has helped me think less about the fact that I’m not smoking, since a) NPR requires more of my concentration, and b) I don’t have to hear the same songs I’ve heard before and think, “I smoked a cigarette the last time I heard this song in the car.”

The upside is that thanks to NPR, I now know all about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, Sarkozy’s visit to Britain, online curriculum for high-school students, and the ramifications of the San Francisco plastic bag ban, and I also know how much Tracey Ullman hates bloggers, pimply fucks named Craig who live in their parents’ basements and use their blogs to say that they wouldn’t sleep with Heather Locklear because she’s too old. The downside is that going sixty-five on the freeway and enjoying a delicious cigarette while listening to the Pixies was fucking fantastic.

4. Smoking with friends. We went roller skating on Tuesday night, and when we all walked out of the building, the first thing that happened was that we noticed the ambulance and all the police cars in the parking lot, but the second thing that happened was that two of my friends lit cigarettes. I really, really wanted to stand there and smoke with them and talk about hey did somebody fall down on the rink or was there a knife fight out here or what and boy are we going to be sore tomorrow from all this skating, but instead I took a long, beautiful whiff of secondhand smoke, said, “See you guys later!” and went home.

6. Smoking while talking on the phone, especially during in-depth discussions.

5. Using smoking as an excuse to move away from conversations at parties. It used to be that if I was running out of things to talk about with someone, I could just say, “Well, I’m going to go smoke a cigarette,” and then go outside and smoke a cigarette. Now I don’t know what to say. “I’m going to go get something to eat,” doesn’t work because I’m trying not to replace cigarettes with food, and “I’m going to go get a drink,” doesn’t work because drinking just makes me want to smoke.

Even better, if I didn’t want to talk to anyone at all for a few minutes, I could just go outside and stand there by myself and smoke a cigarette. If anyone saw me, it didn’t look like I was upset about something or hiding or loitering or anything, it just looked like I was very busy smoking this cigarette, thank you very much. Now I guess I’m going to have to become a loiterer, or that girl who always has to go get something from her car, or a person who takes forever in the bathroom.

7. Smoking while sitting on my patio, having a glass of red wine, and writing.

8. Standing outside with the dog at night when a cold front is coming in and the wind is blowing through the leaves on the trees in that crisp way that lets me know I’m going to need a jacket in the morning. And smoking.

Public service announcement:

Today is Day 13 of Not Smoking. I’ve been able to get this far for two reasons:

1. I was sick with the flu for eight of those days.

2. I am sticking to this philosophy, telling myself that if I crack and smoke a cigarette, it does not ruin all my efforts to quit. Trying to quit smoking is really good for me even if I don’t do it perfectly. I’m willing to bet that putting a lot of pressure on myself to be the perfect quitter would have made me crack by now, but I have not cracked. Giving myself permission to fail is the thing that has given me the strength to succeed so far.

My point is this: in the future, you may see me smoking a cigarette. Maybe I’m smoking because I’ve cracked and let myself have one even though I didn’t want to; or maybe I’m smoking because I’m hoping that this cigarette will be the LAST ONE, the one that will make me hate it forever; or maybe I’m smoking because, fuck, I really enjoy smoking, and having just one cigarette every now and then is better than having a pack a day. If you see me smoking a cigarette for one of these reasons or any other reason, please do not ask me about the cigarette or say anything like, “But I thought you quit!”

I know. I’m trying.

Whoever gave me this flu can totally suck it.

1. When I was hungry and tired and waiting for a big group of friends to go to lunch, I cried.
2. When I thought I was going to have to spend a lot more money than I’d anticipated on dinner, I cried.
3. When it was over and everyone was gone and it was time for me to pack for my roadtrip, I didn’t pack for my roadtrip; I sat down on the couch and cried.

I’m making these situations sound much less complicated than they were, but still! What was my problem? I wasn’t being robbed or mugged or attacked by bears or even poked in the eye or anything. I was at an internet convention downtown in a relatively safe city, where there are no bears and people don’t poke each other in the eye, at least not when they’re unprovoked. Why did I get so upset?

(In retrospect, it probably had to do with this.)

The point is that I do this sort of thing to myself pretty often. I get worked up about problems that don’t really matter too much, if they even exist at all, and I convince myself that everything is just awful and whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing I’m not doing it right and my hair looks stupid and I’m never going to amount to anything at all, ever. When I’m in moments like these, I’m often unable to stop myself and remember that it’s all in my head, that none of it is true, that my hair is fine, that I’m going to be okay.

The sad(dest) thing about this is that the crying is what I remember most vividly from SXSW last year. All that crying and I didn’t even have a good time. This year we are not going to do that. This year, there are rules.

The rules:

1. I am going to make the best of wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, and whoever I’m with, and not worry about what I should be doing instead.
2. I am going to sleep.
3. I am going to spend time alone.
4. I am not going to worry about what other people are doing.
5. I am not going to worry about what other people think.
6. I am not going to the Boiling Pot.
7. I am not going to wait for anyone but you.