I B HEET
Ah, back to the right spot. Time for yet another edition of True Lies and Other Confessions with your hostess with the mostest…
I don’t ask you how you all are enough. It’s a rather solipsistic community we have here. A paradoxically solipsistic community, but I’d like to imagine that we are just that inclusive. I do have a confession to make. It’s not really a confession and more of a proclamation.
I’ve been reading today.
Don’t fall down dead in shock. I’ve been reading today and it’s made me realize both why I need to and probably why I’ve spent a long time avoiding reading in general. I got Agorafabulous in the mail and it is fabulous and funny and much like the Bell Jar in that I see a lot of myself in the book. I see both less fabulosity and less actual phobia and freak-outs, but I do this thing where when I read I start to find connections between myself and what I’m reading. I start to internalize and I start to think that, naturally, what happened to Sara Benincasa is the way things happened with me or the way things would happen to me. I’m somewhat phobic of finishing the book because I know the internal dialogue will unspool and I’ll start spazzing and wasting time letting every mildly obsessive thought stew and curdle and suddenly I have taken on the crazy-cakes mantle out of concession, out of solidarity, out of invented friendship with an author I’ve never met and probably never will.
But I’ve made the decision that reading about someone dealing with severe panic attacks and agoraphobia is a lot better than avoiding reading about someone dealing under the misguided notion that while I have none of these problems, learning about them will naturally, infect me with them. Because I do have these problems. More or less. I deal with them. I’m not on medication. Maybe I should be. Maybe not. I feel like the enemy is really just my inexperience. My ignorance can, at times, be very blissful and my life has proceeded in the way it’s proceeded because I have a strong mental buoyancy even in bad periods. I have a lot of joy and a lot of reasons to be joyful and it seems to me that while I gone through the gauntlets that others have, it hasn’t, deeply, negatively affected me.
But I have had experiences not unlike those she’s written about. I had a summer where I remember crouching in the back of the truck, shaking, crying, certain that my mother was going to crash the car. I still have difficulty driving to places out of the ordinary. Everyone knows about my winter driving phobia. I still feel, strongly, that I’m unworthy of attention. Still wildly crave it. I have these big issues.
But I’m starting to not see them as this hidden, impossible crack inside of me that I have to keep hidden to get along socially, to survive. That I can struggle against myself. That I can tell everyone that I’m a big old mess, but I still want you to come over. I still want to be friends. I still want to write and observe and do things with my life. I don’t want, overall, not wholly and entirely, to stay inside and away from you. I don’t want to resign myself to never meeting you. I don’t want to settle in with the anxiety.
So, here I be. We’re cleaning house tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out how to work on that internally, too.
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