Pretty

My favorite moment in Firefly comes in Heart of Gold.

Don't get me wrong, I think Our Mrs. Reynolds is the best episode, hands down. It's funny, it's smart, it has Christina Hendricks, but my favorite moment in the entire show, the moment I find most relatable, comes during a conversation Kaylee and Wash have.

Kaylee: Everyone's got somebody. Wash, tell me I'm pretty.
Wash: Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion.
Kaylee: 'Cause I'm pretty?
Wash: 'Cause you're pretty.

When I first watched this episode with my roommate Maggie (who introduced me to Firefly) I made her rewind that particular bit of dialogue about five times. It became shorthand for us, the thing I would text here when I was feeling fat or ugly or was on my way to a date and need a confidence booster.

Wash, tell me I'm pretty. 

***

Over the weekend, I had an hour long conversation with a friend about boobs.

I fall into the category of women who are euphemistically called "busty." Busty would be a great word if we still all wore corsets and clothing made to, you know, make the most out of a large chest, but in a world where I can literally spend an entire eight hour day looking for a button down shirt that both buttons up over my chest and doesn't look like I'm wearing a circus tent, I prefer the truth. 

I have enormous boobs. 

***

Back in December, I wrote a post about having beautiful friends and what that does to a woman over time. And it was popular. People liked it and what it said and the way it was written. But, as I do with this blog, when I told a truth, I only told half of it. Here's the rest. 

There is no part of my body I have not thought "Huh I could use (insert cosmetic surgery)" about. 

Teeth Invisaligned? Where can I sign up? Jaw reset so it stop clicking and I actually have a chin? I could do food through a straw for a few weeks. Scars from bike accidents and teenage acne removed? As long as it doesn't leave more scars, yeah, let's go. 

***

While writing this post I have, no fewer than eight times, paused to consider deleting the whole damn thing. Because I'm not trawling for sympathy ohmygodkellyyou'retotallybeautiful. (Ew.) But moreso because I hate admitting that the one thing I'd change about myself is my looks. And it's true. If I had two buttons sitting in front of me, one that would increase my IQ 25% and one that would make me 25% more beautiful, most days I would push the button to make me more beautiful. 

It seems I've already got the attendant shallowness down. 

***

When I was in college, my roommate Krista used to give me advice before I went to parties. 

Just fake it, Kel. 

Fake being comfortable in a large group of people. Fake the ability to talk to strangers. Fake being the chatty, outgoing person that you want to be. Fake confidence and eventually you'll have it. 

It is, as I discovered, pretty standard advice to people going into socially uncomfortable situations or job interviews. Fake confidence for long enough and you'll eventually have it. 

I am really fucking good at faking it. 

I can make offhanded comments Oh, it must be so hard to be around a woman who's bright and beautiful and funny fairly frequently. It seems to work. Or it seems to work in groups. But the second someone pulls out a camera, I instinctively wince and think "I will be untagging this picture on Facebook" or "Oh, God, I need to shift around so no one can see my chins!" Or "Shit, a picture at breakfast? What the hell is the matter with you!? Can't you see I'm not wearing a bra?" On one very memorable occasion, I got into bed with a guy I had been seeing still wearing my bra. Have you ever tried to sleep in an underwire bra? Probably not. You know why? It's really fucking uncomfortable and no woman in her right mind who is dating someone will do it. 

And, somehow, those aren't even my low points. When I'm home alone I only look in the mirror when absolutely necessary. I realized recently that my medicine cabinet is almost always open so that I don't have to look in the mirror until I'm actually ready to do it, until I've . . . I don't know screwed up the courage to do it or something ridiculous. 

Just fake it, Kel.

***

I hate my chest with all of the intensity of a star going super-nova. 

I have very few good reasons for hating it so much. Yeah, a big chest makes buying clothes that fit sort of tricky, but I don't have any back problems. My boobs don't make it difficult to go running or biking or do any of the things that I enjoy doing. I just don't like them because I just don't like them. They're not trying their best. They're not working hard to ensure that we're a package deal. Nope, they're just there, apparently doing their best to undermine all the work my brain and my personality and my intellect are doing.

The thing that frustrates me the most about my boobs, about my body. the thing that makes me (yes, occassionally, so sue me) hate it beyond reason is the fact that the genetic lot I got stuck with is just that: the genetic lot I got stuck with. I'm always going to be five-foot-three-and-three-quarters. My thighs are always going to touch. My hair is always going to look like a madwoman's and I will never, never in my life learn how to flip it seductively. 

I'm comfortable enough with myself intellectually to know that if I don't know something I can always go out and learn it. And, yeah, I'll never understand complex mathematics, but I write well and I can think through arguments, and I have a weird propensity to remember things I've been told in the form of a narrative. I can't raise my IQ, true, but I can fake convincingly enough that I manage to believe it myself. 

Our hour long conversation about boobs isn't really about boobs as much as it's about breast reduction surgery. About the pros and cons of losing two pounds on each side of your chest (believe me, they're mostly pros.) Really, it's about whether or not with a smaller, different, better body part I'll actually be happier.

The answer is, of course, no. My insecurities, my desire to be pretty have very little to do with with my actual component body parts or even the whole that they make up. Just like losing weight, buying new clothes, getting a new hair cut, etc ad nauseam are never going to make me stop saying Wash, tell me I'm pretty.    

Headache

When I arrived home from work today, the very first thing I did was dash around to the front of the house.

Today, you see, is a very special day. 

Today is Ocean at the End of the Lane Day. 

I came relatively late to the Neil Gaiman party. I'd heard of American Gods, and had friends who mentioned that he lived in Minneapolis and would talk about his books constantly, but I never read him. Because no one ever suggested that I should. When I finally got around to reading him, I was hooked within the first twenty pages. I devoured everything I could get my hands on that he had written. His short stories. His novels. The graphic novels made out of his novels. The audiobooks. His young adult fiction. I read everything of his that I could borrow from the library or steal from one of my friends or find the cash to buy out of my tiny monthly book budget. 

I was late to the Neil Gaiman party, but once I arrived I put on my party hat, threw a fistful of glitter in the air, got wasted, and insisted everyone sing Call Your Girlfriend and dance with me. 

Right. Ocean at the End of the Lane. 

When I skittered around to the front porch there was the box, as promised. I barely responded to my neighbors, sitting out front enjoying the sunshine. I snatched up the box, hurried into my house, and very nearly burst into tears. 

Yup. I was very nearly crying over a new book. A book I hadn't even read yet. A book that was still in the packaging. If anyone saw me, they'd wonder if I needed to have my head examined. 

***

It was, inevitably, a comic book that saved my life.

Depression isn't about sadness. It's not the blues. It's not feeling bummed out. Or morose. Or dispirited. Or just plain old unhappiness. In fact, depression, for me, was never about feeling. We laugh (I laughed) at the depiction in Twilight of Bella Swan sitting spaced out in a chair as months rolled by, but I am deeply ashamed to admit that that is exactly how I experienced depression. 

Depression was never about feeling. It was about not feeling. It was about numbness. About day after day of sheer, grinding, nothingness. If I felt anything it was anxiety or worry.  I think I would have taken getting worked up into a lather about something just for the change. But I just . . . couldn't. Instead I went to work, came home, and sat for hours in front of the television, not reading, not thinking, not writing, not doing anything I enjoyed because if I just sat there I could shut off my brain and not think about why I wasn't feeling anything. 

My mental health issues had been building for years. I was always an anxious kid, and my parents would tell me constantly to just stop worrying. As if it was a choice. As it was, I spent most of my life with gradually building anxiety and depression that were never addressed. They built up so slowly that before I realized it, I had tucked my heart away inside of a glass jar. And it was fine in that jar, no one could hurt me as long as it was in there, but I couldn't feel anything and worse--I couldn't remember a time when I had felt something.

It was, quite simply, terrifying.

I was deeply, borderline desperately, unwell. But I didn't know it. I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who would contemplate suicide, but suddenly there I was, standing on just the other side of the line separating me from that level of despair.  Now, writing this, for the first time I realize how unwell I was and how fucking good I was at hiding it. Depression was insidious. Its onset was so gradual that I couldn't talk about it, couldn't recognize it for what it was. And I couldn't make it better. And I couldn't imagine a future where I felt anything.

So, the winter of 2011 in the North Country. The lack of sunlight is enough to make anyone a little potty, but added to loneliness, depression, and anxiety, and I was a fucking disaster. And I was very, very good at hiding it. On the outside I was a successful, put-together, well-liked, respected young professional. Inside I was just a mess.

And for whatever reason, I decided that the thing to do during that period of my life was read Neil Gaiman's Sandman. 

What a stupid idea. 

Sandman is many things, like all of Gaiman's writing. It is layered and witty and sad and funny and deeply frightening. It is not a wintertime comic. It is not a comic to read while you're suffering from undiagnosed clinical depression. 

I read it anyway. 

I fell apart. 

I went to pieces during the first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes. During a scene in A Hope in Hell I set the comic down and wept. I cried for longer than I had cried at any one time in years. And when I was finished, when the hiccups I had given myself settled down, I picked it up and kept reading. I finished the whole series in the course of a week, more reading than I had done at any one time during the previous year. 

It sounds silly and dramatic and sophomoric to say that a comic book saved my life. I know that. But I also know that when I read that one specific line in A Hope in Hell and started crying during a completely mad, fantastic, absurd story, that I felt something for the first time in months. I wouldn't have my real Come to Jesus moment about my mental health for another nine months but reading Sandman put microscopic cracks in the jar where I was keeping my heart.

***

The highest compliment that I can give a television show, a book, a movie is "I cried so hard I gave myself a headache." It's the experience I had two years ago, sitting on my bed reading A Hope in Hell and feeling something for the first time in months. 

I finished Ocean at the End of the Lane between when I started writing this blog and now. And it was brilliant. And beautiful. And deeply moving. And completely mad and terrifying and a thousand other things that I've come to expect from Neil Gaiman's writing. And I cried so hard I gave myself a headache. Partially, I expect, because it's that good.

It's also, I expect, because these days many more things are making me cry. And that's a hopeful thing.

Home (Is Wherever I'm with You)

I'm curled up under a pile of fluffy comforters in heavy winter pajamas despite the warmth outdoors (I'm a cold sleeper.) My belly is full of homemade pie and hot tea and I'm being lulled to sleep by the sound of my clothing being tumbled in the dryer.

I've just finished biking 150 miles over the course of two days. When the logistics of taking the bus back to the North Country proved too daunting (soaking clothes, covered in sand, dead cellphone and no ability to call a ride when I got there) I decided "screw it, I'm staying here." Andy and Jacob offer to put me up for the evening and bring me home the next day. It isn't until I'm drifting off to sleep that I realize I didn't wash the clothes. I didn't make dinner or the pie or the tea. I didn't make the bed and I'm not even wearing my own pajamas (see the aforementioned soaked clothing.)

The last thing I say before falling asleep is Goddamn it. They did it again.

***

48 hours earlier I was standing in Jacob and Andy's kitchen when I got the Phone Call. 

If you haven't already gotten one, let me tell you, if you're over the age of 22 you've spent some time thinking about it. How the Phone Call will change your life in a completely horrible way that you can't even begin to anticipate. How the Phone Call will trigger all of your OCD symptoms and undo the work you've done over the past nine months to become a healthy, functioning human being. How after the Phone Call you'd like to drop to the ground and scream and cry, but you can't, because you're in a room full of your friends figuring out logistics for the 150 mile bike ride you're about to do. 

This is the second Phone Call I've had in the past six months, and thankfully, I don't drop to the ground and scream or burst into sobs. I excuse myself to the bathroom, run the water for a bit and hope they attribute it to the OCD and handwashing, and cry. When I come out, we finish planning logistics, I merely shake my head at Jacob's murmured question, and leave to go bike 150 miles. 

***

When I'm upset, I mean, truly and deeply upset, I throw myself into some Big Project. I've got over a bad relationship in graduate school by acing my comprehensive exams, a feat that required no fewer than thirty hours a week in my study carrel at the library. When I didn't get into a Ph.D. program, I learned academic French and wrote my thesis. Two years prior, I got over a(nother) disastrous relationship by training for a half marathon.

I like Big Projects. 

Thankfully, the weekend after the Phone Call is the MS 150 bike ride. A ride I've been training for over the course of about six months. A ride I've been looking forward to for almost as long. A ride I'm doing with Andy, to whom I've slowly spilled my guts over the course of the 2.5 hour ride to the North Country, someone I have come to love and trust implicitly.

It seems like a good Big Project to be undertaking at this moment. 

 Endurance events are funny things. If you're a headcase like me you run through stages while participating in them. From the initial thrill of ohmygodI'mdoingthis to the HolyShitsnackslookathowfarwe'vegone to the seemingly inevitable hitting the wall whatthefuckamIdoing? to the grim determination to finish Don'tyougetonthatSAGwagonKellyMarieProsen to the final, elated feeling at the conclusion OhmyGodIdidthat! 

Endurance events are funny things. They're even odder when you're doing them alongside another person, because I can almost guarantee that when you finish the event, you'll be closer than you anticipated. As a result, it's good to pick someone with the same basic fitness level as you, who can help pull you through the rough spots and cheer you up and keep you motivated. 

I literally could not have picked better when I asked Andy to do this with me. Sunday was, well, difficult. It was 55 degrees and raining. There was a headwind the whole day. And sometimes, even with a physical activity you love doing. I don't know. The joy just goes out of it and you're stuck either a) quitting and hating yourself forever or b) grimly determined to finish. I'm sure everyone reading will be shocked, shocked! to find out that I usually belong to the latter camp. 

I honestly don't now how, but Andy cajoled and prodded and teased me through those last seventy-five miles. And that day--those two days--were one of the best expressions of grace I've ever experienced. For two days, I didn't think about the Phone Call. I didn't care about the huge, complicated, conflicting emotions I've been having over two different, huge, complicated things that are happening in my personal life right now. I just got on my bike next to this person I love and did this Big Project.

***

If you could see my Spotify playlist you'd see that I've listened to the song Home by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros about three hundred times in the past month. The first 290 times I listened to it, I was trying to get my head around the chorus of the song Home is wherever I'm with you. I couldn't imagine ever being so close to someone that home wasn't Minneapolis/Saint Paul or Collegeville or Milwaukee, but could be wherever I was with them (and yes, I do constantly over analyze the lyrics to pop songs.) 

Listens 290-300+ came after Sunday. When Andy and I finished our ride on Sunday, I was supposed to take the bus back to the North Country. Soaked through to the skin, blistered, chafed by bike shorts, hungry, dirty, and physically and mentally exhausted, I started to think about the Phone Call. 

And I could not get on that fucking bus. Even if the volunteers had been more helpful in communicating the details (their disorganization and the fact that I literally did not have a stitch of  dry clothing were reasons I seized on to take a bus the following day) I could not have gotten on that bus for anything short of my mother magically being at the other end. And whatever my friends saw in my face or heard in my voice, they opened up their homes to me. They let me leave sand all over their bathrooms (biking 75 miles in the rain ensures that you'll have sand everywhere--and I mean everywhere), loaned me pajamas, made me dinner, did my laundry, gave me wine, sat next to me on the couch, made me laugh, gave me pie and tea and then sent me to bed under a giant pile of fluffy comforters. The next day, Jacob drove me home. These people cared for me in ways I could have never articulated but needed absolutely.

I'm not the kind of person who will ever be completely easy having one person take care of me. For as much as I want that kind of relationship, I don't know if I'll ever be able to be entirely at home in one. However, as part of a group of people, who share the endurance events and adult Phone Calls and Big Projects with one another?

Home is wherever I'm with ya'll. 

Take (Care of) Me

I'm halfway between hyper-ventilating and crying when Jacob pulls out his AAA card.

I'm in the Twin Cities for the weekend and I've lost my keys.

This is not an unusual set of circumstances. I lose my keys whenever I'm not in my own home, where they get put in the exact same spot every time I walk in the door to prevent this kind of madness.

This time, though, my keys are lost. I've torn apart the entire house, shaken out my clothes, called everywhere I've been in the past 24 hours, and they are nowhere.

If you ever want to see me have a complete, total, absurd meltdown catch me when I've lost something important. I almost instantly spiral into a self-hating anxiety pit. I berate myself for being so absent-minded, so thoughtless, so OhmyfuckingGodterribleatadulthood. So I'm in the process of all of that and it's compounded by the fact that I'm staying with my friends who have their lives together and I'm supposed to go out on a very early bike ride but my bike is locked in the car, and it's Memorial Day weekend, and I don't have a spare key, and I don't have the money to get my car rekeyed, and OHMYGOD.

Jacob pulls out his AAA card and tells me how it works. He drives me to my car, gets me a beer, pulls out my bike after the lock has been popped, loads it into his car, talks me through how getting a replacement key works, and takes me home. When we get back to his house, I'm not sure which feeling is more pronounced--relief or shame.

Who am I kidding? It's shame. And it's not because I've lost my keys.

***

I've been having a series of conversations with a different Jacob lately. No, that's not quite right. Over the past year or so we've been having what feels like a meta-conversation on relationships, feminism, and introversion with an occasional excursus into sci-fi and baseball and writing. It's nice to have someone to whom you can write 500 words about how the new Trek movie is rubbish and they not only read it but respond.

He's been trying for months now to up my geek cred and get me to watch DS9. I've been resistant claiming, you know, work, exercise, WHO. I just haven't had the attention span for a new television show. And let's be honest, no one will ever top Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard for me.

It's this last confession that sparks one of our more interesting conversations. I admit to adoring Picard (Patrick Stewart giving lines from Hamlet! ON A SPACESHIP. *swoon*) and make a joke about how I love the character Jayne Cobb from Firefly almost equally.

First, if you haven't already seen Firefly, shame on you. (Cowboys in space!) Second, Jake did a pretty good job of summing up the weirdness of my thing for this character: "I love how a Shakespeare quoting morally upright leader and a hilarious, jarhead mercenary with big muscles have the same effect on you."

***

I don't find the cognitive dissonance between these two types near as amusing as Jake does, mainly because I've lived it it for my entire life. It's a little weird, yes, but I don't feel much need to explain my attraction to either. (Warning, painting with a broad brush ahead.) The broad-shouldered, beardy, deep-voiced, lumberjacky types have always been easier for me to read. They're the kind of men I grew up around. They're the type of guy who can fix my car, chop the wood in the backyard, get things out of high places for me. I'll admit it. I've bought into the cultural signifiers of a man's virility (#feminismfail) to a certain extent. 

It's the Picard thing that most people don't get. And when I say "Picard thing" I don't mean "Patrick Stewart thing." That's a whole different set of completely inappropriate feelings (No. I most certainly did not grow up with an emotionally distant father and now seek the approval of older men. Shut up.) I mean that I have a thing for brainy (cerebral), reserved, distant men. Sure, I think brainy is self-explanatory (it is the new sexy, afterall) but it's the reservation, the aloofness, that ah, really, turns my crank shall we say.

I'm not comfortable unless things in my life are challenging at best and really fucking difficult at worst. In graduate school I worked full time and pulled straight As. In undergraduate, I took a course overload every single semester. In my adult, personal relationships, I'm the exact same way. I need to be challenged, to have someone who will push back or at least prove something of a tough nut to crack or I feel like I'm cheating somehow. And dating someone who's brilliant, distant, who plays his cards close to his chest is frustrating, infuriating, and completely, maddeningly seductive. Because when you do finally break through, you feel like Wonder Woman and a safecracker and Scarlett Johansson all at once. It's a rush and it's only intensified when you realize that the feelings you've elicited are so rarely bestowed, so precious and intense (and if you're really fucking lucky) passionate and then you realize that you're equals. Good Lord, a girl might be tempted to scream Yahtzee. 

***

The reason I'm feeling so ashamed as Jacob drives me home isn't because I've lost my keys. I mean, sure, I'm frustrated and pissed, but what's really upsetting is that I let him--for all intents and purposes--take care of the situation. And more than simply letting him take care of the situation, I enjoyed letting him take care of it. I enjoyed being able to hand over a problem to someone else, of saying, essentially I can't deal with this. Take care of it. Take care of me. And not only did I hand that power over to someone else and enjoy it, but I handed it over to a guy and enjoyed it. 

But the most horrifying thing, the hardest thing for me to admit, even quietly and to myself, was how badly I want this. I want someone to take care of me. I want someone to balance my checkbook. I want someone to fix things around the house, make sure the car is running correctly, chop the wood in the backyard, corner me in the kitchen and take care of me. I want it so badly that I can barely find the words to describe it, and I hate myself for wanting it. For all of my talk about feminism and equal partnership and wocca wocca wocca, I want to be taken care of. 

And that's the thing about the Jayne Cobbs and the Captain Jean-Luc Picards of the world. Despite being complete opposites on the spectrum of education and emotional detachment and, well, musculature, they've both always (secretly) struck me as the kind of guy who could take care of you.

That may be why it's been such a long time since I've kissed one of 'em on the mouth. 

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.  

Workout

There's a point during every single one of my workouts that I'm convinced I'm going to puke. Sometimes, especially when I'm running, I will run into the ditch and get the dry heaves.

Before you get worried about the fact that I'm pushing myself too hard or that I'm secretly a bulimic (although, you know, a round one at that) let me hasten to assure you that this has happened to me my entire life. Running the mile in gym class in grade school would make me almost puke. When I was getting ready for the Bjorklund half marathon and was at the best shape of my life I would always feel like I wanted to hurl at the eight mile mark. Always. It happens when I'm on the bike at the gym or when I'm biking on trails. If I raise my heartrate at all, I will inevitably feel like I'm going to yak.

The sensation, blessedly, only lasts a moment or two and is probably psychosomatic. In a moment of true confession, I actually kind of enjoy it.

***

There are days when it feels like there are three people living inside my head. 

There first one is the Kelly I like. She's the Kelly who responds appropriately to things, is wickedly motivated, who has a sharp tongue, a sharper wit, and is interested in everything from space to quantum mechanics to environmental law. 

The second one is a Kelly I can tolerate (barely.) She's nervous and unsettled. She's convinced constantly that she's about to get sacked, that because someone close to her has been diagnosed with high cholesterol she has high cholesterol. She's afraid of most things, from heights and enclosed spaces to strangers and germs. But she's still capable of making a joke and calming down. I mean, eventually. 

The third one is a Kelly I would gladly evict if I could. She's OCD Kelly. She wakes up with a song in her head every single morning. She takes anxiety to a whole new level and just because someone close to her has high cholesterol she has high cholesterol and is going to die right this minute. She can't stop thinking about any number of things, none of them fun: the calories in her muffin, how much weight she's gained in the past 24 hours, whether or not her birth control is giving her a blood clot, if the stove is off, how the entire world is completely and totally fucked. 

That Kelly is Such. A. Cunt. 

Life with anxiety, life with obsessive compulsive disorder, means that during every single fucking day of my life, these three inner monologues are chattering away and I have no control over which one is going to be the loudest on a particular day. I never know what's going to trigger OCD Kelly to start checking the stove or the front door, or what's going to let normal Kelly let rip with a really good joke or what's going to cause GAD Kelly to chew her nails and worry about nothing for six hours straight. The past six months have been learning coping mechanisms to dial down the volume on Kellys two and three and turn up the volume on Kelly one. They range from going to see friends to meditating to making sure I'm eating right. And I practice them with varying degrees of success based on what's going on at work, how much sleep and sunlight I've had, whether or not I remembered to take my vitamins in the morning. 

For the record, when I was diagnosed with OCD, I never thought that the solutions to my anxiety would be so, well, plebeian. Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sunshine. See your friends. Find a community. This, I suppose, serves me right for actively participating in a culture that romanticizes or ignores mental illnesses.

The truth is that even in the six months that I've been actively taking care of myself, going to therapy and doing everything my therapist tells me, I've learned to make the Kelly voices in my head a little more bearable. I've managed to instill a modicum of control in my life. I'm slowly feeling a little better, a little saner. 

I just wish I could make all three voices stop chattering. 

***

I have a love/hate relationship with exercise. I mean, doesn't everyone? Despite the fact that we know it's good for us to get up and move our bodies after sitting all day long and despite the fact that we know that we'll feel better, less stressed, happier even after a bad workout, we skip 'em. Sit on the couch with a bag of potato chips and wallow. Go out and have a few beers. Do anything except head to the gym. 

If you're one of those people who manages to effortlessly adhere to an exercise program, well, screw you.

Today I hit the "Oh shit, I'm about to hurl!" moment in my workout somewhere around 30 minutes, or halfway through my session on the stationary bike. When it kicked in, I found myself smiling grimly. I have incorrect reactions to a lot of things in life, laughing when I should be weeping, getting angry when I should be celebrating , but for whatever reason, this smile in the face of gastrointestinal distress was really jarring. I'm a masochist, I thought to myself, but even this is going a little far. I shook off the rumination and continued concentrating on my mileage and rpms. Thirty minutes later when I hopped off the bike and starting stretching my quads and started thinking about what to make for dinner and whether or not I had any clean clothes to wear to work the answer slapped me upside the head. The reason I smile when I start feeling sickish while working out is because that is literally the first time during any workout that I start thinking about something instead of rpms, mph, or total distance. And it intrudes so briefly that it's gone before I have time to acknowledge it. 

Put another way, during a workout all three of the Kellys have finally shut the fuck up. They're drinking tea or taking a break to talk about sexism in comic books or getting drunk or doing something aside from making me crazy. In the hour or hour and a half everything inside of my head is quiet. 

I want, desperately, for the big things in my life--finding my life partner, attaining enlightenment, understanding quantum mechanics, finally punching OCD out to happen in specific ways. I want them to be huge, novel-esque moments in my life. Meeting my one true love when we both pass our Buffy season five DVDs to Joss Whedon to get signed. Attaining Enlightenment while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail at dawn. Outsmarting OCD by becoming a neuroscientist. 

I was wrong when I said there were three Kellys in my head. There are four, and the fourth is such a pretentious bitch. 

The truth is that biking or running do for me what meditation or prayer or $120/hour sessions with my therapist haven't been able to--they kick all of those Kellys out of my head and teach me what it's like to actually live in the moment, to thinking of nothing but the next mile to run, the next hill to climb, the next person to pass. 

Plebeian? Absolutely. But fuck it. I'm going to go have a celebratory drink with the four other people in my head.