I follow a bunch of spiritual and mental-health accounts on social media, which is perfect if you want to learn self-care from memes. I honestly love how people are out there evolving, and then they turn some life-changing event into a three-second animated GIF. You used to have to go stand outside a temple in the rain for two weeks if you wanted to prove your spiritual yearning, and then maybe they’d let inside to learn the secrets of some short-tempered master who kept you awake by hitting you with a stick. Now you can learn the same secrets while you’re scrolling on your phone on the toilet.
For example, recently I saw this thing, which I thought offered a nice little psychological reframing trick. You tell your mind that what you’re feeling as anxiety is actually excitement. So I tried it! And it made me feel better. I’ve been so nervous about moving out of this apartment, but telling myself that I’m excited really helped.
But then I had to go twist it to fit around every little thing in my life that makes me sad or uncomfortable.
I’m not worried that my son’s cough means he has Covid; I’m excited that he thinks it’s just a cold
I’m not depressed that my novel was rejected because the main character was “too unlikeable”; I’m excited to finally throw the goddamn thing in the trash.
Am I doing it right? No. Am I mocking myself because I know no other way? Exactly. Because I’m still anxious.
WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU ANXIOUS ABOUT?
Packing
Looking at all my stuff and realizing it’s garbage
Paying people to carry my garbage to another house
Unpacking my garbage and crying because everything I own was either rescued from the street or is old and squeaky and scratched and falling apart, but I hang onto it out of fear like some sort of tragic war orphan
Moving in with Brian, even though he is someone whose love and companionship I treasure far more than my stupid furniture. (Has he seen my furniture? He has. Will he gently pry it from my hands and give it away on Craigslist for me? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
I’m not anxious, I’m excited!
I ran this whole anxious/excited exercise by my therapist. (She always seems so delighted by the things I find online, which makes me feel like I have a special internet summoning power. I don’t, it’s just the natural outcome of spending three hours a day on my phone.) I asked her what she thought about trying to fool your own mind like that, and she did a little see-saw head thing, like maybe yes/maybe no. Yes, anxiety and excitement activate the same part of the brain, and the feelings are definitely related. But, she cautioned, anxiety has a purpose. It can help protect us; it’s useful if it doesn’t spin out of control. So: yes, remind yourself of what you have to look forward to, but—unfortunately, I don’t know what she said after that, I WAS TOO EXCITED TO TAKE HER ADVICE.
I love the apartment we’re leaving, that’s part of the problem. Even though it’s old and extremely funky and roasts us in the summer and freezes us in the winter. The homeowner lives on the main floor, so we live in one of two apartments upstairs: the front one faces the street and the back one faces the yard. The thing is, Jack and I lived in the back apartment for the first nine years of our marriage. Also, we were married in the backyard, and Jackson was born in that apartment’s bathroom. And our cats Stink, Kitty, and Tarzan are buried by out the Chinese lantern bushes.
So two years ago when Jackson and I needed to find a place that would take two bruised people with three pets, Linda let us move into the front apartment, and this is where we’ve spent the last 19 months gluing our lives back together. We spent our first post-Jack Christmas downstairs with neighbors and friends and kids we hadn’t seen in years, and throughout the whole of the pandemic, even when we shut our doors to protect ourselves from Covid, just knowing all these folks were nearby, being able to hear their TVs and the clank of them washing dishes, made me feel safe.
I am trying but I’m not sure I can fully express how much this old house that I own no part of means to me.
I am considering getting a tattoo of it, or maybe of the street sign I can see from my window up there in the middle. I realize that it’s just a way for me to try to hold onto how it feels here, because coming back to this house felt like coming home. I don’t want to leave that, but I have changed our lives in such a way that we need to go. I’m excited! But I need to figure out how to hold onto this feeling of being home. Can I carry it with us? How will we find it again?
