Dogs and Cats Living Together

Certainly, there's plenty to be anxious about. It's 2017 and the world has decided that nothing is left that makes sense below the level of pant-shitting crisis. Sure, there are ways to understand events in a manner devoid of panic or earth-bending calamity, but the new epistemology is rising, shaped in a crucible that burns away the limiting impurities of sense and sensibility and replaces them with, well, mostly just more burning. Pretty soon there won't be anything left to experience or even really look at that won't hurt your eyes just a little bit.

There are people for whom the cumulative crisis is an obvious lie, where the seeming causal chain is no chain at all, just an unrelated handful of steel links that might be touching each other, but are in no way connected. They just happen to be collected together, in a burlap bag tied around our feet as we cling to the edge of a freeway overpass above the river that used to be an interstate. Yeah, OK, things are grim. But that's no reason to go indulging in false narratives and conspiracy theories. It's possible to have a series of ailments and no collective syndrome. It's possible to have lashing rain and tearing wind without a low-pressure vortex of nothing drawing it all together into anything so coherent as a storm.

I find these people and their smug calm absolutely unbearable. While yes, it's true that every generation of humans is convinced they have it worse than every previous generation, up to and including the absolute certainty that we are the Special Ones chosen to experience the end times, it's also true that eventually, one day, a generation of humans with this exact solipsistic, myopic view of history and their inability to conceive of a universe where humanity exists without them, will accidentally be right. To be clear, I am NOT SAYING THIS IS US. I'm just also being careful to not NOT say it's us.

It's probably not coincidental that I've chosen this particular period of time to become actually, clinically anxious. It's a curious thing to experience an actual emotional disorder. I have a ton of experience with it second hand as literally every adult woman I know is on medication for depression. I obviously hold on to the caveat that perhaps they have not all been depressed and this is simply a capitalist-patriarchy handshake cultural inevitability of pathologizing normal female human behavior and then monetizing the treatment, but I should point out that I have seen cases where intervention was no-shit life-or-death stakes. A medical loss of perspective is frightening.

I've been lucky that I'm not prone to depression, not even a little. But I definitely can get The Other Thing and I'm about a month into it this time. The great news for everyone around me is that I have no idea how long it will last and the way it manifests makes it difficult to self-diagnose the triggering event in the first place.

But it's really possible that the triggering event isn't all that important. Like I suggested, once the monster is awakened, every news cycle anymore is nothing but high-grade monster food. So here's me with my stomach knots, my preoccupation, my sleeplessness, my restlessness, my fidgeting irritability... yes, I'm as much fun to be around as I make it sound.

It helps to think about the fact that I've been here before and there are long stretches in between where I'm as level as anyone; a steady, reliable font of unsolicited nuggets of perspective for anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact.

So I'm leaving other people alone for now. One of the tragic/happy side-effects of anxiety is that all you can really talk about during an episode is yourself and how anxious you are about stuff. Like this entire blog post, for example. I got through the whole thing and didn't once mention the new British royal baby coming. I told you, perspective is the first thing to go.

I'll try to do better next time.