Reporting live from Existential Crisis
No vacancy at Hotel de Harold
Dear Grams,
I think you’re right. I am having some kind of existential crisis, maybe mixed with an anxiety disorder – who knows. It’s more than regular worrying, it’s like an animal that sits on my chest until I wake up, usually around 2 or 3 AM.
By then, I’m already late to the party. My mind has been revving for hours with a panic about what I’m doing, or not doing. What if I’m passing every road I’m meant to go down? For Christ’s sake, I don’t even have a nightly skin routine yet, and somehow that seems to be an important marker of adulthood.
As my heart races against the weight of wasted years and it feels as though my bed is threatening to tilt me over to fall into nothingness.
All the while, I’m acutely aware that my time is running out, and at this point, what does it all amount to?
Rationally, I know that I have to find some way to manage this feeling, but it’s hard when I feel like it’s waiting to hit when I’m most vulnerable. I just don’t know what to do next, and because I don’t have a direction, the options are overwhelming.
Anyway, not that I’ve planned to run away from it all, but you don’t need a roommate or housekeeper, do you? I swear I don’t mind sharing the guest room with Harold’s ashes.
Much love –
Hey hun,
Yikes! To be honest it sounds like you have enough going on for a whole conference to dissect. I wish I could speak from a similar experience and give you practical advice. But, the reality is that our lives, and the struggles that we’ve faced, have been so very different.
Now, we both know that plenty of my co-grumps would roll their eyes at you and say that us oldies were too busy working and raising ungrateful children to feel any which way about it. I’m sorry to say that the consensus is that people your age are generally too soft and unmotivated to share our worth ethic and discipline. Don’t take it too personally. Trust me, our grandparents thought the same thing about us; this self-satisfied preening is a perk of old age, along with Medicare and early bird hours.
But, I remember a different truth. When I was around your age, I saw the shocked and vacant expressions of my fellow mothers staring out the window while their baby screamed, while the meatloaf burned, while standing in line at the deli counter. I’ve even seen that face in my own mirror. It’s during these moments when you think, “What have I done?” I vividly remember waking one morning to the agonizing thought that although I had given my children life, I had also doomed them to die.
The walls start to feel like they’re closing in and yet you could never leave. It’s not like I didn’t love my children, but I felt as though I was dissolving into the background. But women were supposed to be the most self-regulating appliance in the kitchen, so we went through it alone. Has that changed at all?
You know, when I was just a tiny thing, my family lived in a busy neighborhood that was filled with a bunch of other recently immigrated families. If your mother was sick, someone came around with soup. Or, if you needed to run errands or just sit alone for ten minutes, there was usually someone willing to add your child to the flock they were already tending.
People were happy to help, from being a shoulder to cry on to helping fix a fence, to making up ghost stories to keep kids in line. If you were in need, there was usually a kind soul around, except Odd Bob – even as a child I knew to stay the hell away from that guy. It was give and take, though; you had to be an active member of this little ecosystem to benefit from its inner workings.
But by the time I became a mother, the neighborhood we lived in was different. I had some friends around the block, sure, but not the allies of previous generations. Everyone on the street became preoccupied with keeping up appearances, getting the kids on the right track, and holding auditions for the best “mother’s little helper.”
Everything was encapsulated within your four walls and the aspiration went from being the house everyone gathered at to being the best house on the street. It’s not like we consciously decided to shrink into ourselves, but there seemed to be a collective shift to focus on the more material things. Probably because it was making someone rich at the time, which eventually became who we wanted to emulate.
But no matter how much money trickles in, the sense of control it gives you always ends up to be nothing more than an illusion. The thinking goes that the more you make, the more your life should fall into neat and organized rows, like the numbers in your checkbook. I mean, if you’ve worked hard, don’t you deserve it?
Of course, you and I know that no matter the funds, there’s so much we can’t control, like the circumstances into which we’re born or the terms under which we’ll die. We can’t control if it’ll rain today, if people will like us, if you’ll be laid off, or if you’ll inherit the perfect legs-to-tits ratio to be a model.
You can wake up early, you can scrimp and save, you can fake your death and try to collect the insurance money, but you can only work with the cards you’re given. Yet people tend to think it’s entirely your own fault if you fall into hard times, so they go mad from gripping too hard to the thought that they alone can shape their destiny.
Or, they’ll go all in on something like religion, believing complete obedience and crusading will save them. You remember my mother and her trusty rosary? That woman had a cultish belief that every bad turn was God punishing her for a false step or a loud fart. If there was anyone who needed a Valium, it was her.
I’m no doctor, but when I read your email, it sounds like you’re living in a ghost town, not a neighbor within a hundred miles. Alone under the pressure, you’re holding on tightly, too tightly. Your mind, heart, and body are growing stiff from the exertion.
When I was a girl, newlyweds moved into the street, but the husband died within the year — a horrible work accident. Nobody saw the wife for a while, until some of the other women let themselves into her house and picked her out of bed.
They sat her up at the kitchen table (and opened a few windows because boy-oh-boy, grief stinks) and said, today you will get out of bed and eat something. Tomorrow, you’ll go for a walk and sit under the tree. Everyday, you’ll take another step and eventually your sadness will have to make room for sunshine, good food, friends, and the rest of your life.
So, to you I say, just take a step everyday. Feel the air around you and the ground underneath. Take comfort in the fact that you’re grounded here and forces greater than yourself will not let you drift away. Accept that you’re just a fleck in the universe and the current will bring you somewhere eventually. Find a neighbor. Focus on the practice. Over time, it will surely amount to something. It’s slow, it’s tedious, and yet, the time will pass anyway, whether you do it or not.
I know you’re not entirely serious about staying in the guest room, but I’m not going to let you to come here just to hide. Keep moving and dark times like this will pass. You’ll figure it out. Just know that if you ever need someone to pick you up, no matter where I am, I will always, always be there.
Love,
Grams