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Posted on May 6, 2014 by alison

Maude is dead. I’m 36 today.

I’m 36 today, my best friend is dead, I am underemployed, broke, living paycheck to paycheck, borrowing money from family to make ends meet.

Sunday at a wedding I was sitting with two other friends of mine. One friend was describing her recent good fortune. “Good things seem to keep happening to me. I just wonder when it’s all going to stop.”

The other friend said, “Oh, come on. You’re a good person, and you deserve to be happy! You’ve got good karma. Good for you.”

I sat in silence, thinking, so I’m a bad person who doesn’t deserve to be happy? That’s why bad things keep happening to me?

Most of my friends are doing pretty well financially. They own houses and cars and have children and go on vacations both here and abroad. They buy things. I’m happy for them; they are, to borrow a phrase, good people who deserve to be happy. But sometimes I feel like if I hear another one of them say that something “only” costs $500, “only” costs $100, “only” costs $20, I will scream and throw something.

They do things together that cost too much money for me to be able to do. I am torn: do I want them to invite me so I can feel included and have the opportunity to say no? Or do I want them to not mention it at all so I don’t feel bad? Sometimes I still hear about it later.

I have my own jewelry business, but until I can make ends meet I can’t afford to market it properly, so there it sits, semi-dormant for now. I am mostly okay with this. I have other things to worry about, like paying as much of the electricity bill as it takes to keep the lights on.

I apply for jobs. I hear from interviewers, I dress in my job interview pants and blouse and go get interviewed. I send my usual “thank you for the interview” email, to which I never get a response.

To apply for jobs is to live a thousand different lives in one’s head. I interview for a job at a financial company in Northwest Austin, and I picture myself driving there, parking, working at one of the desks in their cubicle farm. I interview for a job downtown and imagine myself taking the bus so I don’t have to park. I interview for a job at the University of Texas, and picture myself working in one of the red-roofed stucco buildings near the tower. But those lives never happen.

I am broke; I have no savings or assets or prospects, but I am not poor. Poverty is not what this is. Poverty means not having family support. It means not having a college education or marketable job skills. It means not having friends who would intervene if I were unable to get food, or if I were to become homeless. It means not being able to apply for jobs or dress in job interview pants or go to interviews or send thank-you emails. It means having my depression go untreated, which luckily it doesn’t. And I know I am lucky to have the skills and support and tools I need to get by, however marginal my “getting by” is.

But if this isn’t poverty, what is it? I think I’m a victim of the eroding middle class, of income inequality, of job scarcity, of the trimming away of workers’ rights, of living in a growing tech city with low unemployment, high competition for jobs, and skyrocketing costs. I could move, but that would be much more complicated than it sounds.

So I am your anecdote. When you are with your friends or family and the economy comes up, you can say, “I have a friend who can’t find a job…” You can explain my situation and make your point that the economy still has a long way to go. You can make your point that sometimes even a college education and 15 years of work experience isn’t enough. Or you can joke about how an English degree isn’t good for anything. It’s up to you.

Maude died on April 15, nearly ten years to the day since I brought her home for the first time. It was recent enough that when it’s time to give Moki a treat, I still grab two treats from the canister without thinking. I can still remember what the fur felt like under Maude’s chin. I can still feel her wiggle her little head back and forth as she buried her face in my hair to sleep at night. I can still hear the little barks she made in her sleep sometimes. I can still picture the way she bounced around the room whenever I came home, so happy to see me.

I wrote those last four sentences in the present tense, and I had to go back and correct them.

So I’m 36 today, but you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I don’t feel like celebrating.

owning it: snark, sincerity and panic at XOXOFest

Posted on September 25, 2013 by alison

xoxofest opening

On Friday, after the opening remarks at XOXO festival, I decided it was time for a nap. I’d been walking and talking and drinking and socializing in Portland for two days already; I was exhausted, things had stopped making sense, and I knew it would only get worse if I didn’t try to relax. So I went back to my room at the AirB&B, got in bed, and stared at the insides of my eyelids for two and a half hours. I couldn’t fall asleep. My heart and my thoughts were scrambling to see which could go at a faster pace.

But there was no point in lying there awake when I was on a trip, right? I got up, grabbed my things, and got on a bus to meet some friends. I texted a few people to see if they were still where I thought they’d be, but I didn’t hear back. Where were they? Would they be there when I arrived? Had they forgotten about me? Did my phone really even work? Not knowing what else to do, I got off the bus downtown and walked towards my transfer stop.

And then I started crying. At first it was just a little lump in my throat, then some tears in my eyes, and then I was holding back sobs. I could feel my heartbeat throughout my entire body. I couldn’t calm down. I was all alone in an unfamiliar city, and I was a mess. I thought about calling a cab, but then I’d have to talk to the driver. I thought about walking all the way back to my room, but then I’d have to talk to the lady who owned the house. I was so embarrassed. Another woman at the stop noticed me and looked like she might say something, but I turned away. The bus came, and again, not knowing what else to do, I got on it.

When I got off at my second stop, I was in a neighborhood I’d never seen before. I couldn’t find my friends, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to, because by now I could barely breathe. I sat down on a bench and looked at my phone, but I still hadn’t heard from anyone. I was all alone in an unfamiliar city and nobody knew where I was, but it didn’t matter because nobody cared. I sobbed.

I could’ve sat on that bench forever. I was too frightened to get up, and I wouldn’t have known what to do once I got up anyway. Should I take the bus back? Walk back? Keep trying to find people? No matter what I did, everyone would see that I’d been crying, and that wouldn’t work. Why could all my friends handle these things and I couldn’t? Why had I even bothered to come?

I started thinking about maybe just going straight to the airport and taking a standby flight back to Austin, when I realized that there was someone in town who had seen me cry before, and he had a car with him. I texted Ryan.

Alison: Did Jenny take your rental car?
Ryan: It’s down here with us by Ground Kontrol [bar/arcade where there was a party] – I think she’ll be taking it soon. What’s up?
Alison: I came to meet some friends but I can’t find them and I’m pretty far away and they aren’t texting me back and I seem to be having a panic attack.
Ryan: hmm Huff was heading that way. Where are you exactly?
Alison: Hoyt and 21st. I texted him but he didn’t respond.
Ryan: Take a cab to Ground Kontrol, I’ll meet you there.
Alison: Ok getting cash.
Alison: Can you come out when I get there
Ryan: already out.

It helped to have someone tell me what to do, someone who was expecting me. I got up from the bench and looked around for an ATM, but first I found a Trader Joe’s, the sight of which I found unreasonably comforting. At Trader Joe’s I bought some trail mix and got cash back. The cashier said, “How’s your day going so far?” Great, I said.

I called a cab, and when I got in and gave the address, the driver said, “How’s your day going so far?” Great, I said. We got to Ground Kontrol where Ryan was waiting outside. I paid, got out of the cab, and immediately started crying again, in that sort of floodgates-opened way that happens when someone sympathizes. Why does nobody care, why can everyone handle things that I can’t, what’s wrong with me, that sort of thing, all came rushing out.

“I know that all of these trains of thought are a result of mental illness, but that doesn’t make them go away,” I said to Ryan, “and I don’t know how to make them go away! Do I not already take enough medication? What’s it going to take to make me normal?” We started walking down the street, where of course we ran into somebody we knew.

“Hey, what are you guys doing?” Sandy said.

“We’re going this way!” I choked out. I pointed in a random direction and started walking ahead a little, hoping Sandy couldn’t see me crying behind my sunglasses.

But it didn’t matter if he could see the tears, because my distress was pretty obvious. When he and Ryan caught up to me, Sandy said, “Are you okay?”

“Not even remotely,” I said. Sandy gave me a little pat on the back, and he and Ryan kept talking as we walked. I walked along in silence for a bit, and then joined in the conversation once or twice. When Sandy broke off to go do something else, I had calmed down enough to realize that being around other people and listening to them talk about other things was helping to pull me out of my own head.

i wear my sunglasses at night

So Ryan and I met some friends for dinner, where luckily we were seated at the bar so I could sit on the end and hide my puffy eyes behind sunglasses and not participate in conversation too much. I felt a little better, so I went along to a party at an advertising agency, where people actually complimented me on the sunglasses I was still wearing even though it was night. I drank a beet juice cocktail and talked to a few people and laughed and it was good.

And then I had a few realizations and made some decisions.

1. It’s time to own it.

I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy during my panic attack trying to make sure nobody knew it was happening. I was afraid to take cabs or go back to the house or call anyone because I didn’t want people to see me like that. I thought about texting around to see if anyone had a Xanax I could take, but I didn’t because then people would know I needed it. When Ryan and I ran into Sandy, I was mortified despite the fact that Sandy is a perfectly wonderful person who no doubt has friends or loved ones who have had panic attacks.

But what’s the point of doing all that pretending? I write about depression and anxiety here, so most people know I deal with it. Why do I care so much if they know exactly when I deal with it? I used a lot of emotional resources I didn’t have in trying to pretend, when I should have just been like, “Hey, guys, I’m having a panic attack. Can someone either come get me or tell me where to meet them for maybe a walk or a decaf coffee or something?” If anyone thought poorly of me, they could just fuck right off.

When I say it’s time to own it, I don’t mean that it’s time to make everyone stop what they’re doing and focus all their energy on me. It’s not an attention thing. I just mean that it shouldn’t be a big deal to say, hey, I’m not doing that great. Let’s keep walking, talk amongst yourselves, and I will calm down shortly. And maybe from now on it won’t be a big deal.

2. It’s time to get real.

The subtext of all the negative thoughts I had when freaking out was lost on me at the time, but given a day, I was able to sort it out.

Has everyone forgotten about me?
Why does nobody respond?
Why does nobody care about me?

All of those thoughts have their roots in a sort of self-absorption that, while I can’t control it when I’m panicking, isn’t an ideal way to be otherwise. I’m the protagonist of my own life, but I’m not the protagonist of the world, and other people have their own problems that have nothing to do with me. I found out later that of the people I hadn’t been able to find during my panic attack, one was searching for his lost luggage, one was wandering around town with a dead phone, and the third had gone for a much-needed nap, which I didn’t know because I was texting her old phone number. Nobody was thinking, “Fuck Alison.” They were all just living their lives.

And anyway, I shouldn’t frame everything that happens to me in terms of what other people can do for me. I should think about what I can do for them. At the very least, I should tell people I appreciate them.

a shop door, favorited

So I spent Saturday handing out some word favorites. When someone did something nice, I said so. When someone told a story from their life to help me feel better about a story I told, I let them know it helped. Most people got off easy, with a “Hey, it was very observant and helpful of you to notice that problem and fix it,” or a “Thanks for making me feel less lame about XYZ,” or a “I love having you and Cinnamon as conference roommates!”

A few people got a speech. The speech always ended with me telling the person how much I value them, but it still took a pretty long speech to get there. I talked Warren’s ear off about how our brains try to trick us into insecurities and about how people need to be more sincere. Rusty’s speech was in the form of an outline that was like

blah
blah
1. blah
2. blah
3. blah
  1. blah
  2. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

or something. Oh, and during most of these speeches, I cried a little. But that was okay, because I’M OWNING IT.

(It’s not lost on me that giving people a giant speech about my problems in order to tell them I think they’re neat is nothing if not self-absorbed. Baby steps, though.)

3. If I’m not familiar with your genuineness, I don’t care about your snark.

xoxofest at yu contemporary

I spent Sunday in a sort of relaxed stupor. Mostly I sat at a table on the first floor of the building where XOXO was being held, puttering around on my phone (I have a smartphone now! I’ll be back to defend myself later), writing, or talking to people whenever they came by. Ryan sat with me for awhile, and we picked up a conversation we’d started a few months ago about Twitter comedy. I’d told Ryan that I didn’t like so-called Twitter Comedy, that thing where people just tweet a bunch of jokes that are So! Carefully! Crafted! and sometimes funny, but don’t ultimately mean anything to me. He’d asked me to be more specific, but I couldn’t at the time.

That day, Ariel had tweeted a link to this article, which sort of boiled it down for me. Twitter Comedy feels like it’s all coming from one general viewpoint, one I agree with but get tired of hearing about. Ryan said that maybe my problem is that I don’t really do a lot of that boring stuff mentioned in the article. I spend my time writing, reading, or making tangible objects while watching old TV shows. He’s right that I don’t do all the same things as Scott Simpson’s Boring People, but I do recognize myself as one of them to an extent. I’m an atheist with fancy jeans who likes steel-cut oats and Mexican Coke, and I definitely do not stop talking.

Then we got into a discussion about snark. I said that Twitter Comedy reminds me of that thing people do where they make fun of things because it’s easier than saying what they really think. A whole lot of that goes on at web-related conventions, both SXSW and XOXO, and I’ve always had a hard time with it. Part of the reason, I think, is that snark belies the fact that the snarker (and the snarkee for that matter) is a real person with feelings. We’re all real people with feelings, but if someone’s only made of jokes as far as I can tell, I have no evidence of Real Person or Feelings and therefore have a hard time remembering that those things are there. When I’m surrounded by a lot of snark, I end up feeling like I’m the only person whose feelings get away from them sometimes. I’m the only person who deals with depression, or panic attacks, or sitting down on a bench and being scared to stand up. Everyone else is fine and wonderful and perfect and has no problems.

But, Ryan said, you follow a lot of people on Twitter who make snarky jokes. What makes them different? And that was when I blurted out the thing that boiled it all down for me: “If I don’t know your genuineness, I don’t give a shit about your snark.” And that’s really it. To enjoy your jokes about how everything sucks, I need proof that you do not actually think everything sucks. Or, if you do think everything sucks, I need proof that you have a personal reason for thinking everything sucks. I have a lot of jokey Twitter friends that I might unfollow if I didn’t know them otherwise.

Obviously this is just my personal take on snark. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who don’t need proof that people are real like I do. I’m a very fragile and sensitive person (OWNING IT), but I know not everyone is like me. And I also know that snark is something people use deliberately to avoid the emotional peril of being a real person with feelings. If that’s what you’re doing, I understand, because I’ve done it too.

4. It’s time to get out of my own head.

Because the thing is, people don’t just offer up genuineness apropos of nothing. They offer it up as part of an exchange of ideas, or an exchange of vulnerability, or similar. I can get as angry as I want at people being snarky instead of genuine, but how do I fix it?

I fix it by asking people about themselves. Where are you from? Have you been to Portland before? Do you like the festival so far? What have you liked most? It’d be hard for someone to answer those types of questions in a non-genuine way, and hearing those answers will help me see people as real, will help me get out of my own head, will help me stop thinking constantly about what other people can do for me.

So, if I met you in Portland but didn’t ask you anything about yourself, I’m sorry. I should have, because you are interesting and cool! But sometimes I live in the back of my head instead of in the front.

(I know that a lot of the talks at XOXO addressed vulnerability, and I wish I had seen them, but I only had a festival pass. I look forward to watching them online and finding out that other people said all this stuff before, and better than I did, and recently!)

(I don’t always love to get comments on my posts about health, mental or otherwise, but in this case I welcome them. In fact I might feel weird if nobody says anything. SAY STUFF, PLEASE.)

elysium, fringe, the apocalypse, etc

Posted on August 21, 2013 by alison

Lately I have been watching the fifth season of Fringe, and then yesterday Brendan and I went to see Elysium. So I was thinking I might like to write a post about how interesting I find post-apocalyptic narratives these days, but then I realized that it’s been over five years and I never updated you all on this.

Would it surprise you to know that I don’t really think about the apocalypse much anymore? And that when I do think about it, it doesn’t really bother me? It doesn’t surprise me at all, because now I know that that months-long period of gripping fear was caused solely by my having gone off my anti-depressants.

I was going to tell you what happened two months after I wrote that post to make me go back on my meds, but I don’t really want to talk about it. I don’t even like to think about it. Don’t freak out; it’s not like I punched anyone or ran naked through the streets or anything. I didn’t have to be restrained or hospitalized or put on suicide watch. I just had to start taking my medication again. And I did.

2007-2008 was the second time in my adult life I’ve tried to see if I might not need medication, and it was worse than the first by a long shot. I won’t do it again. Now I look at my pills as something I have to take to be alive, just like if I had a heart condition or an endocrine disorder. My brain chemistry is faulty, so I take medication for it, and I will do so for the rest of my life. And that’s okay.

I guess I do think about the apocalypse some these days. It’s hard not to. Our consumption-heavy, disposable way of life isn’t sustainable, and it’s breaking down. People who don’t want us to look into alternative energy sources, reduce our dependence on oil or change the way we produce food are still in power, and it will take a long time to change that. We’re starting to turn it around a little, but ultimately I think it’s too late.

Besides my mental health, there are a couple of other reasons why the apocalypse doesn’t bother me as much. The first one is that I’m less alone than I was before. I live with Brendan, I have friends I see pretty often, and my sister and her husband live nearby. If some apocalyptic shit went down in Austin, there are plenty of people with whom I could band together to find food and water, fight roving bands of looters, and keep each other from being killed for a tank of gas.

The second reason is that I’m stronger now. I’ve been working out! I do this regimen where I go for walks on some days and do strength training on others. Eight weeks of strength training means that I’ve started to see changes in myself. I can lift two ten-pound dumbbells over my head repeatedly! I can do twelve prisoner squats in a row! I can plank for twenty whole seconds! I also get less winded every time, so that’s a good sign. Anyway, if the apocalypse comes, I might be pretty good at kicking and punching people until they stop trying to kill me for a tank of gas.

The third reason ties into some of the post-apocalyptic things I’ve been watching lately. I won’t spoil Elysium for you, but I will tell you that I didn’t love all of it. I thought the good characters were boring and undefined, the bad characters were two-dimensionally evil instead of being evil for a reason (a pet peeve of mine), and a couple of actors delivered their lines in a stilted way that made them hard to understand. Worst of all, Neil Blomkamp hit the emotional notes in the narrative so hard that they stopped working on me. One of the first things I learned in my college beginning fiction class is that if you hit the reader over the head with what they’re supposed to feel in a story, they can see that it’s the author saying HEY, I WANT YOU TO FEEL THIS, OKAY? and it pulls them out of the story. If it’s more subtle, then the reader is feeling what the characters feel, not what the author wants them to feel. I know that summer movies aren’t known for their subtlety, but since I liked District 9, I’d been expecting more from Blomkamp.

What I did like about Elysium was that in the absence of widely available consumer products, people on Earth appropriated whatever technology they could find to meet their needs. All the cars and laptops in the movie were old, but had been retrofitted with miscellaneous new parts. The cars were like that in the future portions of Looper, too. And I’m only two episodes into season 5 of Fringe, but they’ve already watched an old Betamax tape to learn how to fight the people who have taken over Earth.

I’ve talked to some people who say that governments, corporations, and other organizations are going to find a way to prevent societal collapse. A few of them genuinely believe it, and a few others have said, “I have to believe that, otherwise I’ll go crazy.” Well, I don’t really believe it. Large systems with lots of people tend to move slowly, and as I said before, I think it might be too late for slow-to-implement solutions. So it inspires me to see stories in which marginalized people are able to use what they have in order to overcome obstacles.

(I know that Fringe and Looper don’t fall into the believable-collapse category, but Elysium sort of does, and I’ve found the way people appropriate old technology in all three to be believable.)

So, the third reason. I’ve been making a lot of stuff lately. You guys already know that I sew and knit and make jewelry, but now I also work with wood and concrete! I don’t know how good I am at that stuff so far, but I do my best, and sometimes I even make something nice.

Last weekend I was at a friend’s party, and he was showing me his workshop. He makes swords and does all kinds of things with stones and minerals, and his tools were similar to those I’d used when I worked at the jewelry studio, so of course I was fascinated. We were talking about rock tumblers, and I said that I really wanted one, but they’re kind of expensive. “You could make one yourself,” he said. “There are schematics all over the internet.”

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know if I could do all that.” Then I paused, and said, “Wait a minute. Of course I could.”

“Yeah, she can make anything,” Brendan said.

I can make anything. Give me an idea, some supplies, and maybe a diagram and instructions if it’s new to me, and I can do it. When the apocalypse comes, I’ll make some bows and arrows and slingshots and rig up a device to get fresh water. So, I’m not worried. I’ll be fine as long as the pharmacies stay open.

bluishorange

Category Archives: depression/anxiety

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