by Jenny Lawson
“Can they see my feet?” I wonder as I freeze and hold my breath, waiting for whoever is at the door to leave. “Maybe they’ll think I’m a mannequin,” I whisper to myself.
I slowly bring my feet up to my chair seat, my knees at my chin. Quietly and in slow motion to avoid catching their attention. Watching their feet to see if they respond to mine, if they’ve noticed me.
Then I sit there, perched in a fetal position, and feel ridiculous, physically hiding from the world. The cats look at me strangely. I’m being judged by cats. Mostly because they wonder where my lap has gone since it’s their favorite chair.
The worst thing is when the person outside waits and rings again. Someone who rings once is just doing his job, but someone who rings twice is a madman. The real psychopaths will keep waiting and sometimes even call our home phone as I sit there, paralyzed, thinking, “The call is coming from outside the house.”
I never answer.
Eventually the person leaves and I’m left to wonder who they were. These are dark times. It could have been a serial killer. Or a member of the local church. Someone to tell me a bill was late. A magician with a wagon of magic. A utility worker to warn me of a gas leak.
Or perhaps it’s just a person who wonders who I am. Who was that girl who lifted her feet almost out of sight to hide from a perfect stranger for no conceivable reason at all? Who would do that?
Honestly, sometimes I wonder myself.
* * *
It’s hard to explain anxiety disorders to people. The things that scare others don’t scare me. I’m fine with snakes, and clowns, and needles. I can sit in morgues or hang out with the dead. I can look down from dizzying heights or hunt for ghosts in abandoned asylums.
Most people are afraid of speaking in public, but I am fine onstage and I can comfortably speak in front of a thousand people. The scary thing is not being onstage … the terror and dread is in the millions of potential problems getting to that stage. What if I get lost? What if someone recognizes me? What if no one does? Where do I hide until it’s time to go on? What if when I’m hiding people see the real me … the terrified me who is boring and strange and has frightened, panicked animal eyes until she’s onstage and knows she’s in the right place and has no other choice but to speak? Then the terror melts away for a few minutes because at least for those moments I don’t have to make decisions or wonder what my face is doing. I can relax because for that brief time I have no other choice but to breathe and move forward.
Some people are afraid of flying, and I am too, but not in the way you think. I’m afraid of getting stuck, and lost, and paralyzed every single step of the way from my house to the plane. The only time my fear abates is when I’m actually in my seat and the plane takes off. It’s not until that moment that I have no other choices or mistakes to make and so I can relax for a few minutes while the people who are afraid of flying in a normal, understandable way suddenly tense up and clench their armrests in panic. I look at them with pity and wish I could explain to them that their fear is irrational. That we’ll be fine and that even if we aren’t it’ll be over soon and there’s nothing we can do about it. I consider telling them that, but then I worry they’ll keep talking to me and I can’t have that because I need the hour before we land to be quiet so I have time to study and memorize the terminal maps of the airport we’ll be landing in, and triple-check that my notes about every step of the travel are right, and worry about the unknown place we’ll land and the myriad of spots I could become lost. The normal scared-of-flying people will exit the plane with obvious relief and I can’t help but feel envious, both that their irrational fear is one normal people understand, and also that it’s one that ends as they leave the plane. My fear is just ratcheting up again and it will last until the moment I’m back in my own home and can melt.
Your body isn’t made to deal with that much fear for that long, so when I travel a lot I get sick, physically and mentally. I explain to people that it’s my autoimmune disease and people understand but my autoimmune issues are just one part of the puzzle. It’s also the terror of leaving my safe space at home where I’ve built up a smooth veneer of protection, which cracks so quickly. It wears away each minute until I’m finally exposed and raw and can’t move from exhaustion.
It’s a conflicting bundle of emotions. When I travel on book tours I meet the most amazing people. Some who love the humor. Some who love the dark. Some who stare at me with my own terrified eyes and whisper that this is the first time they’ve left their house in weeks. Those are my favorite people … The ones who, like me, are scared but come out anyway, alone, and find themselves making friends with other people in line who are just like them. It’s what happens every week in the comment section of my blog, but it’s so much more lovely to see it in real life.
During my first book tour I didn’t know how draining and terrifying it would be. A week and a half into one of the tours I sort of lost it. It wasn’t a complete breakdown. (That would come later when I got home and couldn’t move for weeks.) This was simply overstimulation and terror and having no routine to calm me. When things got really bad Victor and Hailey would fly to wherever I was that day and we’d hide in the hotel room and watch TV and snuggle. It was exactly what I needed. Better than the massages I was too afraid to book, or the parties I couldn’t make myself go to, or the vacations I turned down.
It’s hard to write about this without giving the wrong impression, and I worry about that. I love that a special tribe of people understands and enjoys my writing and I am incredibly lucky to have found them. I love walking into a signing and finding out that the bookstore is out of seats and that the book vendors are shocked by the turnout of hundreds of strange and wonderful misfits who are standing and smiling and wearing red ball gowns and holding metal chickens. I love that such a strange little book was a bestseller because of the amazing groundswell of underground readers who supported the book, and who got the attention of others who found the book or blog and found their place in our strange community.
It’s hard to understand anyone’s being depressed or anxious when they’ve been given a gift it seems anyone would kill for. At best it seems ungrateful. At worst it seems disgraceful. But still, it happens. Some of the moments that (from a normal person’s perspective) seem like they should’ve been the greatest moments of my life were actually sometimes the worst moments. No one ever tells you that. Probably because it sounds crazy. But that doesn’t make it any less true.
I wish someone had told me this simple but confusing truth: Even when everything’s going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can’t always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.
The really scary thing is that sometimes that makes it worse. You’re supposed to be sad when things are shitty, but if you’re sad when you have everything you’re ever supposed to want? That’s utterly terrifying. Why am I curled in a ball in my hotel room bed, too self-conscious to enjoy life? Feeling like a failure and a fraud while a party in my honor rages on? How can I feel so awful and sick and guilty and sweaty with panic when things are so perfect?
If everything is perfect and I’m miserable, then is this as good as it gets?
And the answer is no.
It gets better.
You get better.
You learn to appreciate the fact that what drives you is very different from what you’re told should make you happy. You learn that it’s okay to prefer your personal idea of heaven (live-tweeting zombie movies from under a blanket of kittens) rather than someone else’s idea that fame/fortune/parties are the pinnacle we should all reach for. And there’s something surprisingly freeing about that.
* * *
It is an amazing gift to be able to recognize that the things that make you the happiest are so much easier to grasp than you thought. There is such freedom in being able to celebrate and appreciate the unique moments that recharge you and give you peace and joy. S
ure, some people want red carpets and paparazzi. Turns out I just want banana Popsicles dipped in Malibu rum. It doesn’t mean I’m a failure at appreciating the good things in life. It means I’m successful in recognizing what the good things in life are for me. This makes sense because at the end of your life no one ever says shit like, “Thank God I got to ride an elephant.” Instead they say, “I wish I’d spent more time with loved ones.” So if you spent an hour playing the-floor-is-made-of-lava with your kid then you’re better off than the girl who traveled all the way to Sri Lanka. Plus, you didn’t get cholera. Probably. Depends, I guess.
This doesn’t mean I don’t make myself go to conferences and tours and vacations, because I do. I know that I’d become a hermit if I didn’t push myself outside so I try to say yes enough to experience wonderful things and meet amazing people without overwhelming myself. I’m just very picky about what I do because I know I don’t have enough spoons to do it all.
Do you know about the spoons? Because you should.
The Spoon Theory was created by a friend of mine, Christine Miserandino, to explain the limits you have when you live with chronic illness. Most healthy people have a seemingly infinite number of spoons at their disposal, each one representing the energy needed to do a task. You get up in the morning. That’s a spoon. You take a shower. That’s a spoon. You work, and play, and clean, and love, and hate, and that’s lots of damn spoons … but if you are young and healthy you still have spoons left over as you fall asleep and wait for the new supply of spoons to be delivered in the morning.
But if you are sick or in pain, your exhaustion changes you and the number of spoons you have. Autoimmune disease or chronic pain like I have with my arthritis cuts down on your spoons. Depression or anxiety takes away even more. Maybe you only have six spoons to use that day. Sometimes you have even fewer. And you look at the things you need to do and realize that you don’t have enough spoons to do them all. If you clean the house you won’t have any spoons left to exercise. You can visit a friend but you won’t have enough spoons to drive yourself back home. You can accomplish everything a normal person does for hours but then you hit a wall and fall into bed thinking, “I wish I could stop breathing for an hour because it’s exhausting, all this inhaling and exhaling.” And then your husband sees you lying on the bed and raises his eyebrow seductively and you say, “No. I can’t have sex with you today because there aren’t enough spoons,” and he looks at you strangely because that sounds kinky, and not in a good way. And you know you should explain the Spoon Theory so he won’t get mad but you don’t have the energy to explain properly because you used your last spoon of the morning picking up his dry cleaning so instead you just defensively yell: “I SPENT ALL MY SPOONS ON YOUR LAUNDRY,” and he says, “What the … You can’t pay for dry cleaning with spoons. What is wrong with you?”
Now you’re mad because this is his fault too but you’re too tired to fight out loud and so you have the argument in your mind, but it doesn’t go well because you’re too tired to defend yourself even in your head, and the critical internal voices take over and you’re too tired not to believe them. Then you get more depressed and the next day you wake up with even fewer spoons and so you try to make spoons out of caffeine and willpower but that never really works. The only thing that does work is realizing that your lack of spoons is not your fault, and to remind yourself of that fact over and over as you compare your fucked-up life to everyone else’s just-as-fucked-up-but-not-as-noticeably-to-outsiders lives.
Really, the only people you should be comparing yourself to would be people who make you feel better by comparison. For instance, people who are in comas, because those people have no spoons at all and you don’t see anyone judging them. Personally, I always compare myself to Galileo because everyone knows he’s fantastic, but he has no spoons at all because he’s dead. So technically I’m better than Galileo because all I’ve done is take a shower and already I’ve accomplished more than him today. If we were having a competition I’d have beaten him in daily accomplishments every damn day of my life. But I’m not gloating because Galileo can’t control his current spoon supply any more than I can, and if Galileo couldn’t figure out how to keep his dwindling spoon supply I think it’s pretty unfair of me to judge myself for mine.
I’ve learned to use my spoons wisely. To say no. To push myself, but not too hard. To try to enjoy the amazingness of life while teetering at the edge of terror and fatigue.
This weekend was the perfect example of that. I was asked to speak at a conference and I said yes, but just getting from my house to the hotel in San Francisco was exhausting so I was too tired to go to the conference, or to eat, or to even get a cab. I locked housekeeping out because I needed to feel like my hotel room was a protected place, that no other emotions, which I might have to battle with, were mingling with mine.
That sounds mad, but it’s true. I can feel other people’s emotions. Their life force, maybe? Something. It’s uncomfortable but in a way that’s hard to define. Like a sweater you can’t appreciate because it’s itchy from an allergic reaction you can’t explain. I take pills to dull my overactive senses and it makes me able to love the sweaters, and people, and life. But then the pills wear off and I’m terrified again and I want to run away and scream and have someone rescue me, but the only one who can rescue me is me, which is hopeless because I am unreliable and paralyzed and my stomach lurches and then I know I’m going to be physically ill … a physical manifestation of my brain that equates to my body ridding itself of everything it can. I used to think it was fight or flight. On my worst days I think it’s my body’s way of mutinying … of deserting me in any way it possibly can.
The hotel I was booked in was in the bad part of the Tenderloin district, seedy and fascinating and scary and depressing and exciting. It was also filled with homeless people, who seemed to be huddled in groups on every street. I’d managed to successfully avoid seeing anyone but there was no room service so if I wanted to eat I’d have to walk down the street. The problem was that I couldn’t get more than a few steps without being blocked by a man or woman who was either severely mentally ill or very high or both. I’d walk a few feet and see a shirtless man sitting in a doorway screaming, “GIMME A DOLLAR” to people as he grabbed at their feet and spat at them. Then I’d turn and go the other way and see a furious woman screaming angrily at someone who wasn’t there. It happened on every street and I kept turning back until I had no other street to walk down and so I just walked back to my room to eat the peanut butter crackers I’d brought with me.
It’s not that I’m afraid of homeless people any more than non-homeless people. I’m afraid of something much more complicated. I look at them and think, “Is that my future?” Because that’s what I’d become if I got stuck and was forced to be around people without a break. Screaming and terrorized and stuck huddled in a doorway each day. Lost. Never moving. No options. It’s how I feel now, except that I’m blessed to be stuck in a room with clean sheets and a bottle of pills that I carry with me that I hope will give me the numb courage I’ll eventually need to call a cab and go to the airport and do a myriad of things normal people don’t think about, but that I obsess about over and over until I’ve taken that taxi and gotten lost in the airport one hundred times in my mind before I actually have to do it for real.
I panic that I’ll get stuck. I stand at the door of my hotel room and look out at the real world and I’m terrified that I’ll just stop. That I won’t be able to leave. Or to call a cab. Or to get on the plane. That I’ll be stuck, forever, like those people in the streets.
I’m lucky because I have options. I have medications and therapeutic tools and breathing techniques. I have friends and family I can call to come rescue me if things get too bad. And I have the Internet. That sounds weird, but Twitter is a lot like having a large, invisible gang of equally messed-up people who will hide with you in bathrooms and make you laugh under the pillow fort you’ve built in a lonely hot
el room. Many of them suffer from the same fears, which keep them similarly isolated, but we’ve found a way to be alone together.
There’s something wonderful about experiencing life with friendly strangers and stranger-friends who all fit in your pocket. They celebrate your successes. They send you videos of hedgehogs in bathtubs when you are down. They tell you that you are not alone. And suddenly? You aren’t. They turn horrific experiences into ones you can laugh about with your friends, these odd strangers who walk with you, keeping you company late at night during a panic attack. Or when you’re awkwardly sitting alone at a table in a public place and accidentally mortify yourself, which is—coincidentally—exactly what happened to me that weekend at the conference.
Since the hotel I was staying in didn’t offer room service I’d been surviving on the peanut butter crackers I’d brought with me. But on the final day I decided I needed real food before I had to do my speech, so I decided to brave the world and go to the restaurant attached to my hotel. What followed was a humiliating series of events, which would have left me devastated had I not been able to laugh about them with Twitter. (And that’s the awesome thing about introverts. They’re often on their phones or computers so it’s like you’re with friends even when you’re alone.)
In a nutshell, I tried to take a subtle selfie of how awkwardly alone I was in the dark restaurant but I forgot my flash was on and then when I tweeted the picture my phone made a loud wolf-whistle. In my rush to leave, I tripped on the edge of their fancy koi pond and stepped on a fish. The fish was fine but my right shoe was a mess so I tried to use the ceiling fan in my room to dry my shoe but it was taking too long and I couldn’t go speak with a shoe that was making squelching noises so I stuck my shoe onto the fan blade because I thought inertia would force the water out. It seemed to be working until I turned the fan up too high and my shoe shot off the blade and hit me in the face. It was like I was being kicked in the head with my own stupidity.