Pocket Dispatch from the Fire Lane
I am racing out the door to take my three-year-old son to school. Everything is breaking and nothing is quite right. Toys are everywhere. They don’t dot the landscape, they are the landscape. The floor crackles with food and dust. The robot vacuum has a dead battery, as always, because its docking station too is another loose gadget that scoots around the floor instead of having a fixed home of its own. I curse, reinstall the vacuum on it to charge, and return to the kitchen, where the dishes pile up on every surface and the dishwasher is broken.
I had intended to deal with some of these things while my son slept this morning, but he did not sleep. He opened the bathroom door while I was on the toilet to tell me this. “Can today be a short nap?” He hadn’t slept at all. My morning work was canceled and would inevitably replace some or all of my more important afternoon work, if I let it.
Normally I would look forward to clearing my mind with the long walk to and from my son’s school, even with the intensely cold weather. But I’ve had a persistent dull pain in my leg for a week, so walking now makes me miserable. Without the mile-long walk to each school where I drop off and pick up our children, I am left to use our car. Navigating big city traffic at rush hour with two children talking at once is stressful, and driving a walkable distance causes me existential guilt. Then there is the likelihood of losing my parking spot at home.
In these moments, when minor annoyances have pushed me to the end of my rope, my negative emotional arousal causes me to rehearse imaginary arguments. I become impatient and irritable to real people in real life, and to those in my mind. For years this madness would catch me by surprise and accelerate a cycle of negative emotion. But now, with time and experience, medication and therapy, I am able to recognize shouting matches in my inner monologue as simply a symptom of stress. I can observe the symptom from a healthy distance, even as it’s affecting me negatively, and often I can remind myself that I can choose what to think about.
In these moments, my jaw clenching for no reason, I say to myself, “Relax.” I say it out loud, if necessary. Or, “I get to choose how I feel.” This is mostly true, most of the time. “I can go to the office right now and just make art if I want. I can put down this dish and this brush, ignore this mess, and go pick up an instrument.”
I drive my son to school, walk him inside, collect a kiss, then walk back to the car. Next I will drive to the busiest intersection in the center of the busiest part of my neighborhood and pay too much to park the car for an hour. I’ll go inside a cafe to write, even though I have a perfectly good work environment and a better keyboard in my home office. At least in the cafe the dishes are someone else’s problem, and the chaos outside, in full view from my seat at the counter, is a play I could watch forever.
It’s easy, I now realize, to recognize radiating rage as a symptom of mental unwellness. How else can I resent so much about an active, urban existence I have so carefully cultivated? But everyone’s biggest problem is their biggest problem, and it is our divine right to be miserable.