Everything is awesome

There are pieces of moments when I know what I am going to write, when I get around to writing. The knowledge is pleasurable, almost as good as getting a thought down in reality. Then I retreat to my retreat, and the magic is gone. Or I am tired, so tired, and writing anything artful feels like too much work.

The thought earlier today (which as I sit down to write seems less like a diamond in the rough and more like a mud sandwich)? My nasty habit, my mostly hidden tendency to pick at and around my cuticles, particularly when I am on a video call with a client. My face is (I hope) the picture of calm and emotional attunement while my fingers fight incessantly amongst themselves, sometimes drawing blood. They are relentless. And as the political situation in this country intensifies and my anxiety richochets out of my fingertips, I have started attacking my nails during quiet moments at home. My hands are a murder scene, a civil war.

I was a nail biter in my teens and early twenties, and at some point just stopped. For a couple of decades on, I reveled in the tap-tap of my fingernails against desks, armrests, sheet glass windows, granite countertops, and side tables made of a variety of materials. My cuticles have never been great beauties, but I was able to leave them unmolested, temptingly ragged though they might have been. It all started with the pandemic and my first online sessions, with the strange removedness of it all, me in my guest room, my clients often in their bedrooms. Flat images on a screen, we were apart yet in this together. The future was uncertain, and we had little faith in the people in charge. So I used what I had at hand, furiously working out my tension on my hands.

As my fingers became more and more tattered, however, I knew I had to make a change. So I have simply stopped attacking my hands. During every online session or FaceTime with a friend, I grab a tin of Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty (usually something I offer to anxious clients) to distract my fingers. Every hangnail may now live out its natural, albeit irritating, life and every fingernail is allowed to exist beyond the quick. Somehow, I continue to resist the pull to pick and have successfully stayed away from my nails and cuticles for over a week. I may even have to trim my fingernails this weekend!

Though most everything around is looking grim, it’s all sunshine and smoothness for these hands of mine. So where does the anxiety go? It’s in the tremor of an eye, in the gasp of sudden wakefulness at 2:30am, in the desire (not generally fulfilled) to have another glass of wine, to blur and deaden my anxious thoughts.

But most of the time, it’s fine. Fine. Fine.

(Semi)permeable

I’ve had to make the choice lately between professional and personal writing, between the boundaried and the lightly bordered, between my own emotions and the semipermeable guise of being a therapist. These two emotional worlds can sometimes meet, even in writing, but there are times when I am compelled to toss aside the measured and meted, when it needs to be about my needs and untidy emotions.

What do you do when your head is full of other peoples’ stories, when life is built around work and family, and all your reading is of a psychological nature? When do the filters become a part of you, and you become a balanced, careful self, incapable of indulgence? So often I glide and elide along the thin surface of my own subconscious, focused on what lies beneath the surface of others.

I sometimes crack open at night. Two nights ago, back on one of those short binges of 3am sleep interruptions, I woke up crying, missing my father and reminded again of the permanence of death, the absolute quality of the absence. But more often than not, I wake up anxious, worried about the boy, about a client, about the crumbling state of the world. These are the things I cannot touch in my waking life, not while keeping the brokenness together, while showing others that to be broken is to be human. There is no other way. Once we accept this, we can take those broken parts and reshape ourselves again and again.

I’m an optimist. I’m a weakling. I am strong beneath the weakness, vulnerable under my self-obscuring cloak. I play a role and I am a role. The mask can become real, but at night it melts into me and I am fifteen again, letting the ache roll out of my chest, as sure of myself as a toddler, a bundle of this way and that way, a rummage of self and other coexisting in contradiction.

There is no selfishness in this sense of self, just me in all my messiness.