Enter Label: There's no place like home
A doctor’s appointment yesterday at 2:30pm? For someone with, let’s call it, situational anxiety waking up at 5am, that is simply uncleanly, ritually impure. I walk in the park, listen to a podcast on heart rate variability, read this week’s book on the Short History of Jews. I review the note of self compassion that I wrote from my future self in preparation for the doctor appointment.
Dear Rebecca, I’m writing to you from your healed future to let you know first, everything is going to be ok. The step you are taking right now is an excellent step to this process of healing that you are on. There is nothing to be worried about….
Yes, I have to do s*it like this. Call family. Look at some studies around CBT, versus Biofeedback, versus DBT. But its 9:54am the familiar drag on the back of my head and my temples is brewing. What to do?
And then I remember, writing. I can write. I can write about things completely far away from the things that are occurring to me, occurring to today. I can write the words that will envelop me, and warp me as a mother. Which words?
The answer is: Any.
Any words can breathe breath into my shallow chest. Any words can swim around my minds aches, like gentle cleansing minerals, or minnows swarming together then scattering at the site of a larger fish. To write, it’s like speaking from my cheeks, or from my ears, and my neurotic mouth that evokes stress, and seems to have a direct line to every tensing artery, is totally bypassed.
There’s a water bottle on the desk before me. I can write about that because I have noticed it every single day for weeks, and nodded to it. The bottle won’t disappear itself, yet I haven’t thrown it out either. I’m noticing there is a fog of spit residue collected at the top. There are condensation bubbles, if I had to guess maybe 700 bubbles on the side facing me. I used to be pretty good at counting things like that, guessing how many matches fell out of a pack, leaves on a branch, and the like.
That’s a nice memory to draw on, takes me to a place where my mind was completely cool, and day-dreamt, while teachers talked, or on bus rides, or walking under the train tracks of Chicago, or running around my backyard as a child in Massachusetts, which I can remember at the age of 3, entertaining myself with the elm trees and the flowers that were my height, or later when I was 8, just staring at caterpillars, collecting them on my index finger outside my grandmother’s, and dipping my hand as they curled around me, somehow sticking on and moving, but going nowhere.
Out the window, drops down June rain from the gray sky, a sheath, like the finishing touch to an outfit of solitude. And I sit slightly more relaxed, now typing eyes closed, like Ray Charles, and in closing my eyes and closing my mouth, all the things that cause stimulation and stress are removed, and its just my words which need not have any meaning at all, they need not tell a story, they need not even express, they simply need to manifest themselves as love, patience, meandering, soulful, heartfelt, compassionate love. These words have no ill will, they don’t even have enough meaning to have will, they simply are and simply pour from me, not just to assuage but to remove myself from the picture completely, to take me out of here and leave only this felt-like feeling of mist emoting from the minnows of my mind.
I look around the room and all the lights are yellow, and they are absolutely harmless. The walls are yellow too, and come to think of it all the furniture is yellow, and so are the fixtures. This is the office my dad is renting that is doubling as my home away from home through a particularly putrid week, and the shades are green, and the guy who lives here must be European, Italian or something. I’m grateful for this.
The words provide love and affection and escape and rapture and an ability to save me, and medicate me, and enhance my medication, and take me anywhere. They are balloons to fill up and harness the harassment of my autonomic disfunction.
I have this vague memory that I used to do this many many years ago. And I would get in front of my laptop and type furiously. I don’t remember what I wrote back then, some snippets might end up on an Away message, the rest locked up in the oldest versions of Word never to be look at again, but eventually I sort of forgot that it was a tool for me, not as effective seemingly as going out and distracting or something else, or perhaps I just got to a point where most of my anxiety was under control, shepperable, I was in command, I could get on a call and do whatever in my business, and be a hero, and push through no’s and I didn’t need any side piece writing to help me at all.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in times of unparalleled failure (which for her was about 6 years of rejection letters) and then the wild success of Eat Pray Love where she felt equally out of balance on what to do next, she always returned home to writing to center herself. She said:
And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it.
Hey Dorthy, said it too.
And here I am 38 in the deepest crisis of my life and I’m writing not out of vanity, approval, for means of publication, for means of popularity, but a means of survival, to have such a relationship with a thing, with an art, as a friend, as the person within me who is protected and perhaps even thriving.
It’s10:28am, and I have calmed down a bit, only a couple hours ago before mobilizing to the doctors office, notebook in hand, continuing to bury myself in the words, and repeating to myself: There’s no place like home.