Self-Sucker Punch

Just to update you from last week's news about my emotional well-being, I can say that I am managing my anxiety a little better this week. It's not gone, but the spikes feel slightly less spiky. What I can't tell is if this means I'm improving or that the added emotional shock-trauma of being blindsided by an unmanageable wave of worry has leveled off into something I expect, blunting the sting a bit. Yes, I'm such a state that even if I feel better, I'm convinced it's a sign I'm actually secretly doing worse. Maybe I just answered my own question.

Normalizing the abnormal isn't an unreasonable fear, however. This has been a rallying cry for social and legal vigilance since this past January and the Incident On Capitol Hill.

So far I've been going it alone, wading through the peaks and troughs of my journey through compromised perspective. I have the option of seeing a talk-therapy person, one I used in the past through the knotty incidences of separation and divorce, but scheduling and co-pays involve the resources of time and money, neither of which I'm spoiled for at the moment. Besides, I'm a heterosexual American white man in 2017. I'm not going to let anyone tell me what I can and can't handle, even if it's my own body, the thing doing the actual handling. Or, in this case, not-handling.

It would be easier to tell if I was being unreasonably jumpy or overreacting if things would stop happening that lacked the regular limiters on reaction. I mean, right after Hurricane Harvey tried to drown most of southeast Texas, another Atlantic hurricane--Irma, starting with the very next letter--kicked Florida up the ass right after literally depopulating whole sections of the Caribbean. How can I tell if I'm unreasonably freaking out when the reasonable responses to stimuli include freaking out?

Also next week, really in about 10 or 12 days I think, I'm going to be shipping my oldest boy off to college, out of my house forever. Or until the holidays. Or, now that I think about it, he's going to the state school just on the opposite end of the city we currently live in, so maybe just until the following weekend. But the point is, a milestone will have been reached. A threshold crossed. A barrier breached. A curtain drawn. A candle snuffed. A something-else something-ed. This shit is so heavy, even the metaphors are at a loss.

Maybe that's the root of it, the Grand Finale of the first stage of the most profoundly transformative relationship of my life, me and my firstborn child. That'll probably cause a psychic spasm or three. The good news is that if this is what's causing my anxiety, I won't have to worry about it with my other two children. If I've learned anything from being a parent, it's that when you get down to the third child, it's not that you care less; by then you just learn that you're allowed to care less. And so then, yeah, I guess you actually do.