Killed the Cat

I can't get into the shower fast enough.

I'm covered in a sticky film of dried sweat, sunscreen, dust, probably splattered bugs, and a sheen of bicycle grease over the top of everything.

I haven't sidestepped and fallen into the Bog of Eternal Stench. I've gone on a lovely Sunday morning bike ride with a friend followed by a quick lesson in basic bike maintenance, followed by basking in the sunshine, followed by nearly three hours driving back to the North Country, and as I said, I can't get into the shower fast enough.

The splattered bugs, sunscreen, grit, and perspiration sluice off relatively easily, and the noise I make when I take down my hair and start to shampoo it is, well, indecent. The bike grease, however, is proving a bit more difficult without a large bottle of Lava soap. It's when I reach down to scrub at a particularly persistent bit of grime when my world comes crashing down.

There's a huge, hard lump in my calf that's never been there before.

Immediately the hysterical, anxious part of my brain (that's been reasonably quiet as of late) sounds the klaxons and OHMYGODIHAVELEGCANCER. Or OHMYGODIHAVEACYSTANDAMGOINGTONEEDSURGERY. 

Or. Or. Or.

I'm suddenly contorting in ways that would make an acrobat proud, trying to get a decent look at my leg. Panic is, by now, a familiar thing to me, but it's still unsettling when your breath gets raspy and you have a hard time swallowing. I'm trying to suck in enough oxygen to keep upright while simultaneously running my fingers over the knot in my calf when it occurs to me. This isn't cancer. Of course it's not cancer. It's not a cyst either.

"Kelly, you crazy bitch." I mutter to myself, successfully scraping the grease from a newly toned muscle in my calf.

***

"I'm afraid of . . . losing myself."

I cringe at the expression. As if therapy wasn't bad enough, I never, never manage to get through a session without resorting to cliches. 

My shrink has the most perfect skeptical eyebrows in the world. She pauses, setting her pen down next to her. "Really?"

I hate therapy. I hate it. I hate having to articulate my emotions out loud to someone and have them scrutinized. I hate the guilt that comes along with having to go the therapy and knowing that the guilt is just a construction and that the majority of Americans have anxiety and seeking treatment was a brave thing. 

Mainly I hate that therapy makes me feel inarticulate. It makes me feel stupid. 

I sigh, grit my teeth, and tell myself It's part of the process. "I get passionately, intensely, a little obsessively interested in things. I can't tell you what I'll be interested in down the road."

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but what have you been interested in in the past?"

"God. Why we exist. How stars are formed. Quantum mechanics. Sea turtle migration. The guidelines the Romance Writers of America set down for good romance novels. Lincoln." 

"So, what, exactly, are you afraid of losing?"

"Curiosity."

"So you've been suffering from panic attacks for your entire life, and from the way you describe them, they're pretty intense ones. I mean, leg cancer, the kind you thought you had, isn't a thing. You're a smart woman. You know that. Now imagine a life without them. A life where you never have trouble swallowing or breathing or have your heart race because you're scared of something that's irrational. Also imagine that in order to do so you only, say, watch one lecture on quantum mechanics instead of " she checks her notes "seventeen. Is it worth it?"

I make myself look her dead in the eyes when I answer.

"No."

***

I bookended my weekends in similar ways. Namely, by getting so involved in a project that I forgot to eat or drink anything. 

Friday, I spent  literally the entire day having only consumed a pot of tea and two pieces of toast after getting deeply involved in A Discovery of Witches--to digress, there's a(nother) post coming about vampire literature and dominance/submission in relationships-- Sunday I made an equally poor choice by going on a long bike ride, eating some scrambled eggs and then becoming so absorbed in learning to fix my bike, cleaning my house, listening to The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes that I forgot to eat anything aside from my breakfast scrambled eggs and didn't drink anything aside from a glass of lemonade in the afternoon. At 8:30pm, I looked up from my obsessive bathtub-scrubbing to realize ohshitI'mstarvingandparched.

This is not an unusual state of affairs. I've never been particularly good at taking care of myself, but I'm never as bad as when I'm reading a book that interests me, learning a new skill, chasing down a new thought. On those days (which happen a few times a month) I am so involved in my own head and my own thoughts that I neglect just about everything I'm supposed to get done during the course of the day from eating something to going to the gym to taking the garbage out.

***

Have I mentioned that I hate therapy? 

I mean, therapy is good. It forces me to talk about my feelings instead of just repressing them. It's helped me get better to point where I only go now and again for a mental health touch-up, some detail work to buff out the rough edges, but I hate therapy. 

I hate how therapy requires that I look at all of my personality, Not just the bits and pieces I like, the parts I feel like I can list proudly to friends and family, but all of the parts of my personality. The times when I don't leave my house for days because I'm so involved in a project. 

Part of me is inclined to let myself off easily, to claim artistic temperment+OCD and write it off. "This," I want to say "is part of who I am. And you can like it or lump it, but realize that being a friend of mine means that sometimes I will blow off your party to finish a project. That I will turn up at your house famished because I've been reading for two days straight and didn't remember to eat. That haven't done laundry in three weeks and am only doing it now because I'm entirely out of underwear and the reason I didn't do it is because I'm trying to launch a new blog."

In summation, deal with it.

Despite all of my therapeutic self-examination this was the way I approached my (marginally) healthier obsessions until recently, while I was having a conversation with a friend who said (simply, mildly, devastatingly) "I don't like you when you're like that. It's like seeing you panic about the stove or the iron, but worse, because you don't get it yet."

In summation, you are obsessive about completing projects, about being the best. You are addicted to perfection. 

It's, ah, really something to have someone tell you (simply, mildly, devastatingly) that the qualities you value most in yourself, your ambition, your concentration, your mental prowess, may be nothing more than yet another coping mechanism. 

They may just be one more way of checking to make sure the stove is on.

Pontificate

A few months ago, driving on glare ice in St. Paul, I was rear-ended.

Being the kind of person I am, I took my car in for an estimate on repairs today. 

The guy who gave me the estimate was nice enough. He took a bunch of pictures, he told me about the process, and we went back inside. When he opened up his computer, I immediately saw that his desktop was a giant image of a Cross interposed across some lyrics from a God Rock song.

I excused myself to use the restroom. 

While I was washing my hands at the sink, I happened to look into the mirror. Hanging on the back of the door was another poster, emblazoned with a neon cross and I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me. 

When I got back into the office, I accepted the estimate, smiling through gritted teeth and silently vowing to take my business elsewhere.

***

I am an angry, bitter ex-Catholic. 

I am not a sad or nostalgic ex-Catholic. Yes, there are times when I long for the community being a theologian and a member of the church provided me. But for the most part I am a furious ex-Catholic. 

I didn't realize how angry I am until quite recently. I know how that reads and I'm positive most people knew how angry I am, but I didn't realize it. The truth is, my life as an ex-Catholic and my real life, the life I live on a day to day basis, intersect very little. When a sanctimonious, celibate old man in New York essentially calls me a whore because I choose to use birth control, I have a slight flare-up, but for the most part, I keep those parts of my life pretty separate. It helps that I live in a relatively liberal city and that I have very few friends who could even remotely be called devout. Since graduate school I've been spending more time with those friends for whom religion plays no part in their lives. 

There are a lot of reasons I spend more time with them. One is because they're objectively wonderful people I lost track of for a little while. Another is, selfishly, that it's just easier not to have to resist shouting "hocus-pocus!" at someone when they're telling you that you'll never not be Catholic because the sacrament of baptism left an indelible mark on your soul, so you might as well stop bitching at get back to church. 

So, what with not going to Catholic Churches and having very few Catholic friends, I find that most weeks I can get along ignoring the Catholic Church's existence rather well. 

Until recently. 

Until Benedict XVI stepped down. Until the cardinals elected Francis. Until even my reliably agnostic and atheist friends exclaimed habemus papam and waited breathlessly for the announcement from Rome. 

That's when I realized that I'm not just an ex-Catholic, but that I am a furious, will-never-even-contemplate-returning-to-the-Catholic-Church ex-Catholic. Because every time I saw someone, Catholic or no, losing their shit over the fact that a pope washed the feet of a woman on Holy Thursday or that a pope returned to his hotel room to pay his bill, I was so angry I couldn't speak. I felt like screaming "Have the previous pontiffs been so bad that when this one, I don't know, acts in the same fashion Christ may have you don't say "about time" and instead waste pages of your newspapers praising him? Have you completely lost your minds and religious imaginations?" 

It was the kind of anger that you feel in your guts. The kind that makes your jaw tighten and your blood pressure spike. It was the kind of anger that made me realize "Oh. This isn't about this pope or these people, but about me." 

Rather, it's about me and this Church. It's about 28 years of hearing that women who used contraceptives were subverting God's will. It's about theologians I love--men and women who are prophets in every sense of the word--being sanctioned and excommunicated for daring to write and speak theology they felt to be the Truth. It was about hearing you are a child of God, but will never be a leader of this church because you are a woman for my entire life. It's about having Catholics tell me that I need to just get over the fact that priests sexually abused children and bishops and archbishops conspired to cover it up. It's about the message that God loves you but the men who run this church never will. 

It's about how all of this anger and resentment slowly built up on top of a foundation that was becoming increasingly wobbly. How I could never convince myself entirely about Jesus Christ as savior. How I was meeting, for the first time really, smart people who poked holes in my already insecure faith and made me ask questions it couldn't answer. And how it felt when things came tumbling down. 

It's about me and this Church. 

***

When I marched out of the auto repair shop today, I realized my indignation wasn't directed at the nice guy with the unfortunate desktop who had done my repair estimate. When I'm honest with myself, I know it isn't even directed at my friends who are continually trying to convince me that I'm still Catholic, or even at this new pope. It's about me and this Church and 28 years of disappointment, anger, resentment, and doubt. And my devout friends and the guy are the auto shop are on the receiving end of rage they did little to deserve.

In the end, though, I don't think I'll take my car back to there for repairs the same way I don't foresee a whole hell of a lot of theological arguments in my near future. Not because I'm still furious with the guy at the shop or my Christian friends, but because I am happier and more at peace in the world I inhabit now. The world were I can go to the loo or out for a drink without having someone try to tell me the Good News.

And I hate neon.