Pineapple

It's the night before my loved one goes in for a cancer biopsy. I am functioning at my absolute lowest level, which is to say hardly functioning at all. I'm drinking tea, playing Tetris, and trying to avoid talking to anyone when my phone rings. It's my best friend of fourteen years and I know why she's calling. She's worried about how I'm dealing. I don't particularly want to talk, but answer to let her know I'm, you know, not crawling into a bottle of bourbon. We chat for a bit and when I get ready to say goodbye, she says "Hang on, I still have something to say to you."

She offers me a free plane ticket to New Orleans. For three days from now.

I turn her down.

I intimated in one of my earlier posts that the past couple months have been chaotic at best. In the interest of full disclosure, I will now say that November-December have been the worst fucking months of my life.

Someone I love has cancer and I am literally just waiting to find out of it's the horrible, contemplate-life-without-them kind of scary or the more easily treatable but still unwelcome kind of scary. I've never been as busy at work as I am right now. I can't get my own mental health shit under control and have had panic attacks on an average of two per day for the past three weeks. I haven't had a full night's sleep since late October. Due to all of the stress and madness going on right now, I can't seem to get physically well. I haven't seen my mom since August and I miss her so much that it's hard to breathe.

Also, have I mentioned that it won't stop snowing in Minnesota?

In a recent email to a friend I described myself using Jane Austen's characters. "In my mind, I'm Elizabeth Bennett. In real life, I'm probably more of a Fanny Price."

Fanny Price, for those of you who aren't Janeites, is the main character of Mansfield Park. She's reserved and deeply, painfully shy. She also happens to be an incredible listener (we introverts tend to be) and as a result the people in her life pour their guts out to her.

Like Fanny, I spend a lot of time listening. I try to avoid giving advice because I never feel like I'm getting the entire story. Additionally, I ate a cookie for breakfast this morning. I have no business giving advice about jobs or weddings or relationships to anyone. So I spend a lot of time listening and making empathetic noises. Chiming in when someone makes an utterly irrational claim and trying to steer them back on the path. It's a nice arrangement. The vast majority of my friends are external processors and are people with a lot of, um, emotions. They get someone to vent to and I get to feel like I'm actually being helpful.

Being the quiet, reasonable, available one has its drawbacks. I seem to find myself as the go-between for breakups more often than I would like. There are people in my life who are so emotional that I find myself absolutely, completely unable to sympathize with them in any meaningful way. As a result, I've become an obsessive call-screener.

To digress, I recognize that my own personal brand of repression and avoidance isn't the best case scenario. However. I don't really do crying unless someone has died or your marriage is heading towards divorce or your dissertation advisory committee has just torpedoed you or you've just watched David Tennant's final episode of Doctor Who.

The final and at present most difficult drawback is that when people are used to confiding in you it can be challenging to create your own emotional space. As I've been struggling to sort out my own emotions surrounding this cancer diagnosis, people are still confiding in me and it's not that I think what they're dealing with, be it a breakup or a fender bender, isn't important. It's that I have zero emotional energy to invest in anyone else right now. It's frustrating because I never developed the ability to say "I don't have time for you right now." I had sort of hoped that saying "I'm waiting to hear if someone close to me is going to have to go in chemo and radiation therapy" would do the trick, but we can all be a little self-involved at times. For God's sake, I write a blog. In first person. I know what it's like to be self-obsessed.

The worst part of all of this is that my reactions to other people have been so skewed. I am viciously angry when someone I've confided it about the details of this illness and the person suffering from it asks me how I'm doing, but when someone else asks to to proofread a graduate school paper or help them write a grant, things that objectively take more time and energy, I'm fine. It isn't rational. None of these emotions are rational. This illness this person is suffering from isn't rational.

When my best friend called with her Oprah moment my immediate, instinctive response was rational. I have a ton of work to do, I'm unlikely to be good company, I can't take Monday off at the last moment, I already made plans with other people for the weekend, Christmas is in just over a week and I have a million and six things to do before I can take off for the holidays, I should be spending hotel money on Christmas presents, etc. I made a rational decision not to take her up on her offer of a free plane ticket.

Shortly before Michelle called I had a long conversation with a very good friend, someone who is, if anything, taking up negative emotional space in my life right now. What I mean is despite living hundreds of miles away, she's helping me deal with all my shit in amazing, supportive ways. She is a very level-headed girl and knows how wrapped up I can get in my own head. She understands how I need facts to deal with anxiety and how I want the world to make sense forever and always. She also saw a loved one through their cancer diagnosis, treatments, and recovery, so she's got a good handle on what I'm feeling. As we were talking I broached the fact that I'm Fanny Price and that I listen to everyone else's problems without talking about my own. And I rambled on for a long time about all of this shitty emotional stuff that's going on and how ill-equipped I feel to deal with it.

When I finally wound down she said something that cut through all of the fear and anger and apprehension I was feeling.

You're now in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple. Rationality can't touch this.  

After I hung up on Michelle I saw my chat box with her flashing in the corner of the screen. I mulled over the second part of that phrase "Rationality can't touch this." She's right, of course. Over the past two months I've started to live in a universe were rationality and rational responses to things are, well, they're still options, but maybe not the best options.

It takes about eighteen minutes of struggling with my inner control freak before I can pick up the phone again.

"I'm an idiot," are the first words out of my mouth.
"I'll see you on Friday. The weather in New Orleans is supposed to be in the low 70s."

If I have to live in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple, where I'm losing control over my emotions and blowing up at people when they try to confide in me, where illness and death and uncertainty are constantly on my mind, I might as well also accept that I'm living in a universe where I'm willing to jump on a plane with my best friend at the drop of a hat.