Connective Cube

I cringe at the memory of the drill.

A huge part about experiencing depression, for me at least, is bouts of self-neglect. Sometimes this manifests in becoming very externally driven, but without all the right tools to not totally push people away.

Meeting people reminds me to take care of myself. Brush my teeth. Shower. Other people go through this to. It is a mantra, a string the spiritual belief web. I used to go deep with people.

Now, I find that my adult self could get into more trouble than it is worth to sling my quirks on the chopping block.

The guardedness is a cycle, one that breaks with time. I am now okay with that now, as it really and truly is none of my business what people think of me, especially if that guard stays up and I am not giving it my all.

Of course, it is my business if I am hurting anyone.

***

There was this one time I imagined this girl hated me in high school. A runner with a technical mind. She avoided me. I only really spoke to people who approached me and poked me out of my tent. I didn’t have an issue with her, but I hated her because I thought she hated me.

One day, one of her friends sat next to me after class. This was someone I played competitive tennis with at 13 and softball at 11 and 12. Mom drama made me keep my distance from this person.

The friend asked me why I hated the runner so much, and didn’t make an effort to be her friend, since she was new and all.

It took many years to realize that people regard my guardedness as a sign of dislike. It took even longer to stop attributing other people’s shyness and anxiety into a binary headache.

***

anyway.

Speaking of brushing my teeth, I admit I didn’t do that all too well in my younger years. Even at a young age, I neglected self-care in order to work more, do more, sleep more, mope more, act more, jump more.

This turned into drink more, work more, walk more, go out more, crash and not want to talk to anyone once I got somewhere in my early and mid-20s. There were many sweater teeth crashes in a drunken stupor.

Drinking shirks the guard, if temporarily. I pay for it now, with many fake molars in the back that still crush too much chocolate and hot bread.

One of my quarter life crises was finally going to the dentist while I had insurance at a full-time job. This was before that mandate went in that anyone under the age of 26 could stay on their parents insurance. I was 26 at the time.

The previous year, I attempted to go to the dental school to get some deep fillings. At a dental school, you pay a nominal fee to get a lot of dental work done by dental students needing to fill their practice requirements.

I was attempting to go to The Peace Corps too. At least, that is what I told employers. Working in schools in Brooklyn and Queens made me realize there was plenty of work to do here. But that, and the immense amount of work I would need on my teeth and my lack of insurance situation at the time working three part-time jobs made me realize going to help people far away was an expense, a benevolence I could not afford.

______

I think there is a general melancholy now, an intense fear of knowing what happens, historically, when people fight back at the emergence of a potentially facist regime.

(My spellchecker in WordPress doesn’t recognize facist as a word. It’s alternates include racist and facets).

For those of us prone to introspection and depression, I say let us challenge ourselves to be out there, to not abuse substances, and to forgive ourselves when the guard is stuck. It will unstick at some point.

Performance and vulnerability perhaps go hand in hand, especially without a script. Enter improv. This opening up to people in a group setting elicits fears of a whole group of people sitting away from me, with their backs turned, finding awful things to say about me. Okay, that is not really happening in the present, but the outsider schtik was comfortable and easy. If I don’t try, then no one can hate me!

In most group interactions, I want to curl in a pompazon chair and bury myself under a fleece blanket. Put some water on it, and you have a wet blanket once I go out, sweat from moving around and place my chair in the center of a setting, a room, or a gathering. Group interactions inspired a deep desire within me to hide out in single stall bathrooms, and sit next to a toilet my best friend.

Bathing in my own solipsism and living in my chair for 50 years is not particularly an option, and eventually, I would need to attempt to connect with people again. Also, all that wetness gets cold, or sticky, or moldy.

After all:

Well, shyness is an embodiment of anxiety for some. Others are quiet, and prefer to not speak until they are ready. I was more of the variety who had 10,000 things to say, but the feedback of the past reverberates in my head. The motto ‘Trust No One’ binds to ‘Don’t Speak Until Spoken To.’

Apparently, people brand this combination unapproachable. And why not? The chair seems more comfortable, anyway. Especially if I dab lemongrass lotion all over my hands. It smells good here too! I don’t need anyone if my nostrils excite with cellular action! I am my own diffuser!

I can’t say the people I love in my life particularly liked that, so I would leave the chair for them. Only them.

I decided one day that I need to get over my fear of group interaction when I moved to Baltimore. After all, I am going to live here for some time, and it isn’t feasible to walk into every group interaction assuming that I am just too much of a smelly pus scab to even bother with. And in ten years, scabs that are too big become scars.

Do I need to keep picking my own scabs? When can I just ignore the scabs, the bruises, yesterday, and just focus on interacting with people in front of me? New people do not know about yesterday, or five years ago, or my childhood.

Speaking in front of a group, attending an event alone, or dancing in the midst of a crowd? No problem! Actually speaking to someone after the fact without my heart racing? Chair, please, and wrap an entire roll of twine around me inside the fleece blanket.

This all plays out in improv classes. Now, I am into my third class. To say unequivocally that ‘I love improv, it has changed my life and cured my social anxiety’ would be quite the stretch.

The first time for anything is often easy for me in a group. I pick up new ways of doing things quickly, and I initially blend into the crowd. The 20+ person 101 class had cool people in it, looking to break out of their shells. We all cracked, emerged from wet blankets, and some people dreamed of becoming improv stars, or performing in a troupe.

It was easy enough to take the second class. The unique challenge was being the only woman in the room. As if I already had fears about being different and laughed at perhaps did happen, as I was awkward as hell around vocal, bombastic men. I realized I could listen to what people do, but the blend of trust no one let no one in started taking its toll. I rarely went out after, and if I did, it was with the one or two people I trusted in the class. A little under half the class dropped out, and the half that stayed painstakingly worked through awkward scenes.

I also realized my memory can fail, I can forget certain scenes happened, and then remember with an alarming alacrity that I just deeply offended that person and confirmed my worst nightmare for them.

Ugh! I took a break. Now I am in my third class, and opening up to the new group has been a trepidatious, yet rewarding experience so far. The harder part about this class is a lot of the people have already taken classes together. Which means I have to rely on the quality of performance to open up to people. When I feel like I perform badly, I mentally slink away from opening up to people. I also do this thing where I could pay closer attention to scenes. So here is my attempt to remember last weeks class.

The scene revolved around the building of a normative relationship. one where you have an introduction, a connection, a conflict, and then a resolution.

1. Scene 1: This took place in a podiatrists waiting room. The couple talks about corns and ingrown toenails. They bond over skateboarding, and they go off into the sunset and skateboard together. One has sweaty hands, and they both discover they have sweaty hands. They are overall very sweet to each other throughout, and hold hands often.
2. Scene 2: Fishing boat – Singles vacation. The two in the boat hit it off and eat chicken parmesan by the lake. Then, they catch a fish together! Except dude thinks it is his fish, and they argue weather the fish is shared or not. Mmm, then they cook the fish and take selfies.
3. Scene 3: Baseball game! It starts with a frank conversation about their dawdling boyfriends grabbing food below. They bond as feeling abandoned. Then, the conversation goes to conversations about the amount of Instagram followers. One has 1000s of followers, and the other has none. After a scuffle, the popular Instagrammer agrees to tag the other in a photo.
4. Scene 4: Myyyyy sceeene. My scene partner and I were at a bus stop. He meets people at bus stops, and I am on my way to an interview. I reveal initially that I took two years off from formally working, and he mentioned his role as an office manager. We bond over our love of smoking. He tries to convince me to skip the interview and smoke, and I say no. Then, we resolve that he will come to the interview with me, and we will eat crabcakes (forget the cigarettes) afterwards.
5. Scene 5: Okay, this scene involved three nine year olds in the principals office. One is an artist, the other is a budding business person, and the third is an athlete. They are in the office for drawing a penis, talking back to a teacher, and throwing a ball, respectively. They decide they want to have the business child steal porn magazines. Lots of friendly jabbing.

Clearly I have an issues with vulnerability and intimacy. Shall I say, I need to learn to open up without silently screaming with my body interactions ‘I don’t trust you’ and ‘Yer right, I am not going to initiate any interaction with you! That is all on you!’

K, a few more classes here. I do need to process all this group interaction somehow, so here I go again, on my own.

Self-diagnosing has a long and popular history that pre-dates having an eMedical doctor on hand to confirm whether ADHD causes OCD tendencies. The tendencies I reference, though, are not ones of extreme cleanliness or repeat routines that pepper popular narratives of OCD. Rather, they are the absence to attach deeply with object. Is this a lack of compulsion, or a desire so deep to create an anti-routine in a world deeply obsessed with time? Is perpetual uncleanliness an auto-unconscious defense to a time obsessed world?

My right foot though, used to cramp slightly when my left foot stepped on a crack in the sidewalk. I had to make sure the left foot also stepped on a crack. Both sides need to stay even, right? I can’t hurt my foot’s feelings.

A constant stream of self-diagnosing keeps me in check, ensures that I don’t post nihilistic rants on every social channel, views that I only believe in part, and in times of extreme darkness. Depression is like that, helping you believe that you are the only one who could ever possibly feel this way. It is easier to feel depressed and to stay away from humanity when your living space becomes a fort of all the objects that are half-finished, organically dead or useless.

Anyway.

Something about writing helps documents racing thoughts, gets me reading material to distract me from my loud mouthed inner critic, keeps me from falling into a complacency of self-obsession. It is also is a refuge from the space around me. Keeping words neat on a flat page beats picking up physical objects and distributing them in space. So long as my computer is open, there is another world out there, waiting to be created.

If you are like an iteration of me, you can relate to the normalcy of a peach pit in the bed, using your fingers to cut through butter rather than using any proper tool and leaving spilled coffee beans on the floor. Maria Yagoda outlines her embodiment of ADHD and her eventual treatment plan with an SSRI drug. Part of her article outlines an encounter with the fire safety patrol officer’s threat to fine her for the off the charts level of filth in the room.

ADHD does not look the same in boys and girls. Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. “They’ve alternately been anxious or depressed for years,” Littman says. “It’s this sense of not being able to hold everything together.”

I was that person who would leave keys in the theater, at the grocery store checkout, or buried under three layers of clothes in my bedroom. The good days were ones when I could find my keys within three minutes. Despite my utter slovenliness, I did have an obsession with being on time, so I would leave up to a half-hour to find my keys. Sometimes this motivated me to leave my keys on the clean edge of my dresser, or in my unlocked car out in the suburbs of Atlanta.

In my college years, I also did not believe in carrying a wallet. After losing my drivers license and debit card three times in six months, I finally purchased a wallet. The cards still floated outside the wallet, collecting link, chocolate and orange peels at the bottom of my bag. IDs are replaceable, and what if I could go around the world, free of showing my ID. That could be possible if I didn’t require a bar at least every other day.

My one saving grace is I avoid shopping and have a miserly bend when it comes to spending money. The thrift store is my  enemy. I watched Hoarders not because I wanted to gawk at people with mental illness. Rather, I was gawking at what could be a real iteration of me. Manage thyself by not repeating the psychosis of the other. Without my very neat partner, I may very well sit on a mattress surrounded by a heap of trash and two cats, only two cats. I could still write.

Could I write well? Now I am not so sure.

The funny thing is, writing surrounded by clutter makes transitions disjointed and awkward. Procrastination comes with spilling a half-filled soda onto your book, the brand new one that already has a thumbprint of chocolate on the cover. Deep meditation into a sentence, into a line of thought gets laced with that annoying, sharp pang pressing on my hip, a coat hanger that somehow made its way onto my bed. Fleeting meditations become the norm. Capturing those meditations require fits and starts, battling the physical with the imaginary world. I now find the starting and stopping exhausting. It is no longer a pleasure to run into my own mess constantly while I tap away at my grimy keyboard with a smudged, dusty screen.