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. 

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.