Obsessive

"Tell me about graduate school. That must have been stressful." My therapist and I have been talking a lot lately about when my OCD symptoms really went into overdrive. I can remember the moment when I realized something might be seriously wrong. I was living in a small town ten or fifteen minutes from where I went to graduate school. I had just pulled into the parking lot to attend class and the thought popped into my mind "Did you turn the stove off after you made tea this morning?"

"Yes." I told myself. "Yes. I checked it twice. I checked it because I knew this would happen."

"But are you sure?" The voice says. 

I check the time. Going back home and checking the burners is going to make me late, but I turn on the car and fly home anyway. The stove is of course, off, but I pull the heating elements out of the stovetop, set them on the sidewalk outside, take a picture of them on the sidewalk, and hurry back to class.

"Kelly?"

I snap out of the memory and answer the question. "Well, yeah, I guess you could say it was stressful. I was working full time, going to school full time, pulling straight As, doing an internship, and editing a magazine."

"You know that's not the normal approach to graduate school, right? Did you see any symptoms aside from the stove and checking to make sure the door was locked?"

"I was trying to train for a half marathon all three years I was in graduate school. I could never do the long runs because I was so tired. Like, get my thyroid checked tired."

"I'm sorry, you were what?"

"Training for a half marathon. I ran one right before I started graduate school and, I don't know, it seemed like a reasonable way to deal with all the stress."

My therapist laughs so hard she starts crying. 

***

Most of the smart women I know have anxiety disorders. 

Sitting here thinking about that sentence, I realized I could name seven bright, capable women who struggle with anxiety disorders. And by bright, I mean could intellectually eviscerate you if you gave them half a chance. And they'd all get a big kick out of doing it. But they all also suffer from anxiety unlike (and I'm generalizing here) anything I've seen in my male friends. Perhaps men don't show their anxiety in the same ways as women and I'm missing it. Perhaps society has made it entirely unacceptable for them to admit to anyone that they have anxiety. Or perhaps this is really something that's endemic to smart, thoughtful women. I don't know. 

What I do know is that, at some point, I've had a conversation with every single one of these women about the pressure to be successful, about the faces we present to the world and who we are in our private lives. We've talked about the cognitive dissonance between those two and the utter schizophrenia that occurs when you're trying to be, well, perfect in every aspect of your life. You're the lady who's in charge of your career, your sex life, your romantic life, your family, your credit score, etc ad nauseam. And God forbid you admit that you have credit card debt or that you skipped the gym or that you eat emotionally or that you worry about being the crazy cat lady. 

I can't help but feel like feminism has really let me down in this way. Older feminists have told me time and again that if you just work hard enough, if you learn to put your emotions aside for a little while, if you get the right degrees and the right partner you'll be able to have it all: kids, a nice house in the city, a loving, supportive partner in your life, a career that you find satisfying and will quickly rise to the top, and you'll be able to help the next generation of women do even more. I don't have any of these things. I'm not even close to having any of them. I have days when I'm lonely or sad or sexually frustrated or wondering if I'll ever demand the type of respect in my field that I crave and if that wasn't bad enough there's no space where I can admit to those things. Because admitting to them means letting down the home team. It means risking the disapproval of women I admire greatly and having them think that I'm just not working hard enough.  

***

Part of the reason that all of this is on my mind today is because I came across a picture while I was flipping through my cell phone, trying to decide which ones I would like to have printed. There are some great ones. One of me and Krista in the kitchen. One of my family out to lunch. One of me geeking out over my Next Generation Pez dispensers. A few pictures from NOLA, and a few of the first snowfall here in the North Country. A darling picture of my mother and me last weekend.

And then there's the picture that made me start to cry.

A dumb picture, right? No aesthetic value, no one in it, absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever. Except for the date.

November 21, 2012.

This is the last time I had to take a picture of the stove before I could leave the house. It was over three months ago.


I have spent twenty-eight years of my life trying to be an A student, trying to thrive in my career and school and be confident and an excellent mentor for the women who are younger than I am. I've spent twenty-eight years of my life repressing any thought of tiredness, of wanting to take a break, of feeling that just maybe I'm taking on too much. And I've succeeded at all of these things. I've mentored the women who are younger than I am. I've talked about how fulfilling my career is and how I'm satisfied with my life exactly as it is. I've talked candidly about relationships and partners and my expectations therein.

What I have learned from earlier generations of feminists, what they would never admit and would probably criticize me for saying, is that hard work isn't going to get me everything I want. In fact, it's unlikely that I'll be the next Hilary Clinton or Marie Curie and it's sure as shit not because I'm not willing to work for it. I've also learned that women of my generation of feminists need a place where we can be ourselves, where we can talk about anxiety and depression and how fucking hard we're working to change the world and how few results we see. We need space where we can talk about everything we're trying to juggle and admit that our credit scores aren't what we want them to be or we've secretly research sperm banks because we want to have kids by the time we're 35, partner or no.

I've spent twenty-eight years of my life living with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. Did feminism make me anxious, obsessive, depressed? No, of course not. But it didn't make it any easier for me to admit that I was these things. The pressure to be the next Elizabeth Warren or Gloria Steinem kept me from admitting that there were some wires crossed in my head for many, many years. I tried to cure myself with religion, with facts, with self-diagnosis and eating better and working out and meditation. And none of it ever seemed to work. The hard lesson that I've taken away from twenty-eight years of earlier generations of feminism influencing the way I live my life is that like it or not, I can't be the woman who works full time, volunteers for PPH and Emily's List, runs forty miles a week, eats organic, raw, entirely prepared by hand meals, who has a satisfying sex life and partner and children. I can't.

Or, I can, but in order to be that woman I also have to be the woman who gets up fifteen times a night to check to stove, who takes pictures of it before she leaves the house, who can't use the hair-dryer or the iron without worrying all day that she's left them on.

For years I would have said that trade-off isn't that bad. I could handle the OCD symptoms in exchange for having it all. Now that I've earned my 90 day mental health chip, I realize how wrong-headed of a trade-off that is.

Cool

I'm seated in the Guthrie on a Wednesday night, about to be up way past my bedtime and risking severe sleepiness on the long drive home.The play starts and before I know it, I'm swept up, watching her and holding my breath as she utters some of my favorite lines from any play. 

The raven himself is hoarse/that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/under my battlements. Come, you spirits/that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full /of direst cruelty! 

You're not supposed to like Lady Macbeth. You're not supposed to find her in any way appealing or sympathize with her in meaningful way. She's a foil for Macbeth, an illustration of what goes awry when a woman takes ambition into her head.

I can't help it. Despite the fact that she's a complete and utter sociopath I adore her. I feel for her. I want her to make it through the play alive. I have more sympathy for her than I ever had for Juliette or Ophelia or Lady Anne. I was always annoyed by those women in my high school English classes and being an opinionated, brainy, snotty high school student I made sure that my English teachers knew how spineless I found them. In one paper I wondered "Does Shakespeare hate women? Because his lady characters suck."

My grade on that paper wasn't great.

***

I read the novel Gone Girl in five hours. 

Snuggled up in my armchair in January, I ripped through the entire novel in the course of an evening. It was exactly the right book for that month. Not terribly emotionally taxing, thrilling, with enough twists and turns to keep even me guessing. But what made me love the novel, what pushed it from "this book is great" to "I'm completely fucking obsessed with this book and I will not stop until everyone in my life has read it" was the that there are no heroes in the book. 

Let me say that again, it's a mystery without a Single. Solitary. Hero. 

Combined with its myriad unreliable narrators, and the brilliant Amy, the novel is probably one of my all time, top ten favorite books. Honestly, I can't say enough good things about it. Except that I think that it might be the kind of book that connects with, well, ladies. And I don't say that because the main and most sympathetic character is a woman. I say it because there are two or so pages around the 220 page mark that  cold-cocked me. 

Men always mean it as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind. I'm a cool girl. [ . . .] Oh, and if you're not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn't want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version--maybe he's a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he's a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed  bespectacled nerd who loves comics.  There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain. 

In my copy of Gone Girl, this passage is is marked, starred, the page is dogeared, despite the fact that the diatribe is uttered by a(nother) complete and total sociopath. A villain of the first order. The rest of the book hasn't been marked.

***

The hardest part about dating isn't what you think it is.

It's not meeting people. It's not constantly lowering your expectations. It's not making small talk with three different guys on three different dates in the same week. It's not worrying about how the dress you're wearing makes you look. It's not wondering if it's impolite to see if the guy picks up the check or running to the bathroom to make sure that you don't have lipstick on your teeth or waiting to see if he calls you. 

Yeah. Legit(ish) concerns, but those aren't the worst part. The worst part is trying to keep yourself from faking the Cool Girl. I'm serious. It sounds dramatic, and it's possible that I'm being dramatic because it's February and I'm having my annual bout of winter madness and the universe keeps sucker punching me and someone recently ripped my goddamn heart out of my chest and did the fucking tarantella on it, but after ten years of dating, I'm convinced I'm right.

Over the summer I went on a date with a perfectly nice guy in the North Country. We were out for coffee, talking about the new Batman movie, the pros and cons of it and he was enthusing over Anne Hathaway (vomit) as Catwoman. I couldn't help it. I honestly could not help myself. I snarkily commented "Yeah. Just once I wish they could give us a Catwoman who wasn't doing backflips in stilettos."

We never had a second date.

The Cool Girl is so fucking easy. She's convenient and uncomplicated and it's tempting to pretend to be her instead of the person I actually am. The occasionally hotheaded, relentlessly ambitious girl with the sometimes inconvenient  loudmouthed feminism. The girl who sometimes gets a black thundercloud over her head for days, is deeply skeptical of children, and holds herself and everyone around her to a level of perfection that's unreasonable. The girl who despite her best efforts, still does not look like Christina Hendricks. The girl who eventually has to disclose to her romantic interests that she has obsessive compulsive disorder and should they someday get to a point where they start considering children they might want to consider adoption because this shit is genetic.

It would be so much easier to stop asking why there are so few kickass female characters in X-Men.

***

You know who was a Cool Girl? Juliette. "Kill my cousin, spirit me off to a wedding after two days, and oh yeah the priest conducting the whole thing is a goddamn idiot with a dumbass plan, and then, Romeo, take my v-card (my only real currency in this world), cock up said dumbass plan and, yeah, I'll kill myself."

Cool Girl.

Or Lady Anne. "Oh, hey, hunchback with a withered arm who killed my husband and my father-in-law whose casket I'm currently following to the cemetery. What's that? Repartee! The knowledge that you did this all for the love of me? Of course I'll marry you despite the fact that I know you're are murdering son of a bitch."

Cool Girl.

Or Ophelia, so sassy and so promising in the first third of the play. "Hamlet, you sent me a cryptic note, killed my father and faked being a crazy person just to find out of if your uncle killed your father. And I have Daddy issues? Oh, sure. You're right. I might as well go crazy and jump in the river."

Cool Girl.

I like Lady M. I like (and sympathize with) her ambition and to a certain extent, her ruthlessness. Her inability to let her boring, complacent husband keep her from realizing her ambitions. I like that when she goes crazy, she has a good reason for going crazy. Unrequited love, *blows raspberry.* Try high treason and homicide. I like the fact that she's not an easy character, that you can't just love her because her actions are so abhorrent, but you (I) can't entirely hate her either because she's a real, complicated character. And, yes, saying that your favorite Shakespearean character is Lady Macbeth and that your favorite passage from recent literature is a giant fuck-off to men with unrealistic expectations and the girls who fake personalities and perpetuate those expectations probably isn't, you know, great on a dating website. And it goes without saying that I'm not promoting either high treason or homicide, especially as a way of starting your career.

In the end, I don't know what liking these characters and hating Cool Girls means. Probably nothing. Maybe that I'm just angry about getting my heart stomped again and feeling more cynical than usual. Maybe that I'm unwilling to throw ambition and drive to the wayside just to land a signif. Maybe that I have really fucking good taste in villains. Maybe it's late and I'm tired and it's best just to close up shop and go to bed.

First I think I'll have a glass of warm milk. Laced with human kindness.

Different

I've been a little, well, off lately. Part of it is quite simply, mid-winter blues. Eliot called April "the cruelest month" but he's dead wrong. February is the worst month, despite having both Lincoln's birthday and Spring Training. When snow falls on September 22nd, you've already had four months of winter and you're staring down the barrel of another two months, at best. It's still snowing, still cold, and even if they days are getting longer, they're still cloudy and grey for the most part. Even my Happy Light and multivitamins aren't taking the edge off this year. 

Then there's Valentine's Day.

I know, I know. Single, straight, female friend getting all angsty about being single on Valentine's Day, let's all just cross it off our sadness scavenger hunt and move on, all right? Additionally, as an ACHTUNG!, there will be no Public Radio AHA! moment at the end of this post . I'm not going to talk about how I come to love Valentine's Day because I meet some blind person on the street who tells me an incredible story about how their seeing-eye dog taught them that love comes in many forms. This post is also not going to end in the Rom-Com flowers being delivered to me at work from some guy who's been secretly enamored with me for years and is ohmygodtotallymyonetruelove.


I'm not normally the type of woman who gets all wigged out about Valentine's Day. I take some pride in that.  Personally, I'm usually more than a little amused by the fact that a Catholic Feast Day meant to celebrate a man's gruesome martyrdom has now become an opportunity for us to celebrate love and commitment. Call me pagan, but I don't like the vibes surrounding this one. Give me a good old bacchanal any day. Anyway, years ago, between boyfriends I decided to make Valentine's Day a non-holiday, much like I do for New Year's Eve. Since then, it's always been the same. Go to work, come home, make dinner, read or watch something on Netflix. No flowers, no candy, no boyfriends, but no angst either.

I don't know if it was going off birth control or what (by the way thanks, Skin, for assuming that now that we're off it you have to act like we're fourteen again) but my emotions are so out of whack lately that if I wasn't so busy almost crying/eating my weight in Girl Scout Cookies I'd make fun of myself. 

***

Andy and I are on a long walk around Lake Nokomis. We're in the middle of a snowstorm in the Cities, and the day is so ridiculously picturesque I feel like I'm in a Norman Rockwell painting. It's been an odd weekend for me, mainly because I've been, um, confessional beginning with my blog update last week. I spent a significant portion of Friday and Saturday nights with two of my favorite women, unloading all of the feelings I've had over the past week, kvetching about my various boy problems, and trying to expurgate the fact that I've been a stone cold bitch lately (it didn't work.) Regardless, I'm feeling a little more candid than I normally do, and Andy's always been easy to talk to. We're talking about houses, jobs, my love life, and he starts talking about kids. I can't run because we're 2.5 miles into our walk and I'm wearing Sorrel boots. When he pauses I blurt it out Idon'tthinkIwantkids. That confession is quickly followed by Idon'tactuallyreallylikekids.

Being a woman in your late 20s and admitting out loud, in public that you don't actually enjoy children feels a lot like what I imagine it would feel like to admit that you like to eat polar bear cubs. It's an admission I try to avoid making as often as possible because people react one of two ways. Either they look at you like you just kicked a puppy or (somehow more maddening) they insist that you haven't met the right kids yet!

I mean, for God's sake. I've expressed disinterest in any number of things in my life, but no one has ever tried to convince me you haven't met the right grizzly bear. I'm an above-average-intelligence, capable lady. I've met not an insignificant number of children and they're cute and all, but they're just not my cup of tea. 

I'm grateful for a lot of things about Andy. One of them is his ability to laugh at me and make me feel significantly less crazy. When he asks "Why?" I tell him everything that's been on my mind since my friends started having kids. I'm not the kind of girl to date a guy for a year and decide I want to get married, so by the time I finally do settle down, I'll be in the high-risk pregnancy category. I have, apparently, a family history of anxiety and I don't want to pass that on to my children and I worry about how much crazier I'll get after giving birth. I made the mistake of watching the documentary The Business of Being Born and am now terrified of and grossed out by childbirth. There are so many things I want to do with my life and having a family is going to keep me from doing all of them. Finally, let's be honest. Despite whatever advances women have made, we're still the ones who sacrifice something when we decide to have a family, whether it's our careers, our sanity, or our family life, something has to give. At twenty-eight, it just seems easier not to have a family. And since I'm not crazy about kids . . .

"I don't know if we'll ever ask you to baby-sit."
"Thank God."

***

In my head a keep a running tally of the things I think would make me a good partner. It's the pep-talk I give myself before (and after) dates. I'm a good cook, a very good baker, an exceptional listener, I don't stay angry for long periods of time, I have an endearing laugh and a good sense of humor, am GGG, I'm well-read, and as long as I'm not leaving you a voicemail, I'm articulate. 

In my head I also keep a running tally of the things that worry me about dating someone long-term. I have anxiety, I can be self-involved, I'm devastated by criticism, I'm terrible at meeting new people, I can be a bit dramatic. I also bite my nails, curse like a sailor, use commas superfluously, listen to the same song on repeat for hours, and hate cleaning the bathroom. And let's not even mention the weird shit that goes on in my sleep. 

I've always felt like somewhere there would be someone who'd be willing to put up with all the crazy in exchange for the good things. That's the point of relationships, right? We never get everything we want and we put up with a lot of stuff we dislike, but we do it because the one outweighs the other. But now, when I see this list in my head what jumps out at me is not "exceptional listener" in the positive column or even "cursing like a sailor" in the negative column. It's likely does not want kids, which in my mind's eye is in red. With double underlines. And exclamation points.

It's stupid, I know, but I feel like not wanting children is going to be the one thing that pushes me over from quirky, adorable, still-dateable feminist to don't-touch-her-with-a-ten-foot-pole woman. Trust me, I can see the logical fallacy in this, but here in the Upper Midwest (particularly my family) people get married in their early 20s and have children by 32 at the latest. Any deviation from that norm makes you, to use the Minnesotan term, different. Now with Valentine's Day looming at the end of the week, it's hard not to wonder if  my passion for reproductive rights, my desire to go fifteen rounds over shit that matters with a guy before I can consider dating him, and my weird enthusiasms for cigars and comic books and Joss Whedon already make me different enough. I'm freaked that this kids thing is going to be one too many things different about me. 

Fuck Valentine's Day. 

Let me turn on my Happy Light, finish this Caramel Delite, and then we can see what's next on the scavenger hunt.

Misery

I'm sitting, head on the kitchen table, Dinah Washington on the radio, glass of Bushmills next to my hand when it hits me. I was in almost this exact same position three years ago. Well, sort of. Three years ago I was still reeling from a terrible breakup, the kind that you snap out of a few months later and wonder when you decided to Sinead O'Connor your hair and how you managed to get so fat. Then you look at the Patsy Cline albums, empty takeout containers, and Sam Houston bottles and think to yourself, "Ah yes. Hence the haircut and five pounds."

If Patsy Cline and Sam Houston are my breakup sedatives of choice, Bushmills and Dinah Washington are my form of self-flagellation. They're my symptoms not only of unrequited love (and if you've heard Dinah sing "Misery" you'll understand how appropriate they are) but of the irritation I have with myself when I'm, you know, acting like a melodramatic less aggravating Ophelia.

And I am acting like a melodramatic, only marginally less aggravating Ophelia. But not entirely for the reason you would expect.

The problem, of course, is a guy. Rather, the problem is two guys. The first adds the slightly unexpected twist.

I am by no stretch a modest or a humble person. I regularly subject my friends to pronouncements varying in their ability to grate on one's nerves from "I'm wonderful" to "God sent me into your life to make sure that you're less of a sanctimonious bastard." For the most part they, being relatively more humble and modest, take these comments in stride with few snide remarks to put me in my place.

Full disclosures and mighty pronouncements of my wonderfulness aside, my ego hits its own bumps. When someone asks me out knowing these things in advance my first response is usually somewhere along the lines of "Are you sure you don't want to think this through? I mean, you know I'm in therapy, right? And that I snort when I laugh? And that I will talk obsessively about Shakespeare or the Cassini mission or how sea turtles have a compass in their heads that records the latitude and longitude of their birth beach so they can make the migration home when they reach sexual maturity? And I sleep with my mouth open. All right. I mean, if you're sure." I'm incapable of making eye-contact with handsome men, much less stringing two syllables together. I don't necessarily understand when someone is flirting with me or when they're just being kind or a good conversationalist. This, I suspect, is why I have a bit of a thing for alpha males, but that's a whole different blog post.

This all, of course, came to a head recently when someone with whom I'm, shall we say, friendly intimated that he'd like to be on more than friendly terms. Like an idiot, I was caught by surprise. Didn't see all of the signs that were glaringly obvious to the rest of the world. Just kept on goofing around and being mildly flirtatious and generally acting like the interpersonal relationship ditz I seem to be. Then there's this thing and I don't know what to do about it.

I'm flummoxed for a couple different reasons. The first because I didn't see it coming down the tracks. The second and perhaps more important is the reality that this guy and I should be perfect together. He's bright. He's well-read. He's good-looking and likes Carl Sagan and Downton Abbey. I always have fun when we're together. I look forward to seeing him in the way I look forward to seeing all my friends.

That's what has me feeling like a prize bitch. I have no reason to not be attracted to this guy. There's no reason not to start dating him. Except there's this feeling. Maybe lack of a feeling is a better way to put it. We're missing something and I can't quite put my finger on it. And without it, whatever the hell it is, things just feel sort of flat. Fulfilling in a general sort of way, but not what I'm looking for out of my next relationship.

*Dramatic orchestral swell*

Enter guy two. (Of course.)

On the surface, he's disgustingly similar to the first gentleman. He's cracks me up. He's well-read. He can use palimpsest in a sentence. The difference is that something about him makes my stomach drop and my heart get palpitate-y. And I have no fucking clue what it is. And of course, in the great karmic payback for screwing over person one with all of my "Oh-thanks-but-I-only-like-you-as-a-friendly-acquaintance" he is for oh-so-many-reasons out of my reach.

There's a Dessa song that I love that she played at her show on Friday night. It hit home for a lot of reasons, but there's a line in it that I adore: I'm not trying to be sainted/I don't need to be good/I'm just trying to stay blameless. When I heard the song and that line on Friday night, I inadvertently put my head in my hands and laughed, which was precisely the wrong emotion for that song, that time.

I'm used to stumbling into my relationships without any premeditation whatsoever. For the first time, I find myself thinking about them, obsessing over them, worrying about them. I've tried so hard to transfer the feelings I have for the second person to the first, afterall, they're so similar that it should be simple, shouldn't it?

Of course it's not. As I'm continuing to get accustomed to this whole "You're a human. You're supposed to feel this way!" thing (which is exhausting and possibly overrated, by the way) I'm realizing that feelings aren't transferable. That attraction won't just go away because you're willing your brain to make it so.

The hardest realization (aside from feelings are stupid, men are stupid, and my brain is stupid) is that there are going to be moments in my life--not just my love life, but my life--where I want to be blameless, but am completely, utterly, finally to blame. And there's not a goddamn thing to be done about it.

Tonight, listening to Dinah and mulling over how there's nothing to for it, a small part of me can't help but wish for the easier days of Patsy Cline and a clearly wronged party. Tonight, the lyrics to "Misery" seem to be cutting both ways.

But I'm fighting a battle that can't be won.
'Cause you're on my mind more than you oughta be.
Thoughts of you should bring joy.
But they only bring misery. 

I get up to make a cup of tea and when I sit down again the song is nearly over. I hit the back button. Sing it again, Dinah.