I come from a long line of dramatically anxious people. Most of them drank to cope. I don’t, God knows why.
For a long time, I believed that I was simply not cut out for cohabitating with a longterm partner and that a surge of nameless rage was bound to burn in my chest and set my throat on fire in random response to Ian’s thoughts because I’m a terrible person to live with. I didn’t like myself a whole lot when I believed this, so it’s a relief to know that the actual reason is that my brain is ripping at itself, and processing a lot of information outside of my own thought process takes a level of effort, in these moments, that Ian will never know or understand. He’s a very patient person, and I now understand that this is a natural byproduct of having a brain you can trust.
I didn’t come here to talk about him, though, not directly. I’m here because what I should be doing right now is solifying my lodging for the trip back home that officially takes place in less than a month. Today is the perfect day to do it: Christmas is over, Hanukkuh is over, and I’ve literally-expunged a whole lot of buried trauma in wild and disgusting fashion two days ago, as some of you know. And yet, I sit down to find out where my travelling companion and I can stay for a reasonable price near where we want to be and I go into total freeze mode, as though something awful is about to happen. I can’t think in any useful way, but I can write this, for something. You’re all very relaxing people, is why. I’m asking myself now how many people hired travel agents historically because of similarly disabling anxiety rather than being “too busy” to book themselves, as I had long assumed they all were. It’s raining outside in the most uninviting possible way and inside is where all the tea is, so it’s not like I’m distracted by gazing out the window wishing I had somewhere else to be. I am exactly where I want to be. Ideally, that fact would calm me down.
But anxiety knows nothing of our ideal realities, or even the reality unfolding right now. It’s freaking out about something that has not happened, generally will not happen, in many cases could not happen, and meanwhile there’s a list of tasks that need to happen and my brain’s like “can’t help you out with those right now!” I haven’t smoked pot since I was 22 when I made an arbituary pact with myself that I couldn’t smoke pot after my father died because that would be escaping the realities of my grief. I haven’t escaped those in quite some time and I live in a state where it’s practically illegal not to be some level of stoned at most times, yet something is keeping me from waltzing into a dispensiary the way I could so easily do. These things are:
1.) Entitlement. When I did smoke pot I didn’t pay for it and there’s a stubborn part of me that really doesn’t want to start now.
2.) Fear. As a person with deep and abiding issues with escapism, I could see myself becoming psychologically addicted in a major, major way, and I really don’t want to risk that.
3.) Details. I’ve been to a dispensiary once, when I fulfilled a friendship-duty to take one of my oldest friends when she was visiting us from New Orleans. The strains! The purposes! The layers! I find all that anxiety-inducing, everything you’re expected to know you need/want, like you’re going in for an expensive haircut. In the old days it went like this:
Friendly Iowan who notices me stomping around in rage: Hey, um…you kinda look like you could use some pot. Here, you want some?
me: Yes, thank you.
How can you go shopping when you know in your heart and your soul and your anxiety-frayed mind that smoking pot is supposed to be like that? A communal practice, a celebration of intedependance, not fucking commerce like a Macy’s. Oh, I do have to tell you, though, that my hilarious friend, gripped by a sudden paranoia before her flight back home, insisted that we stop at the 7-11 so that she could by a pack of Gummy Bears to pour her edible gummies out into, just in case she gets caught in the middle of some heist-thriller and everyone at the airport forgets California law (at least this is what I think she was imagining.)
I should get back to trying to make plans, probably. And I don’t mean plans to go acquire some presumably high-calibur merchandise from this fine establishment in the Castro, though technically, there’s nothing stopping me.
When you think about it, however — very little is actually stopping any of us from doing anything.