Connective Cube

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.

I once wrote a long paper for graduate school about community garden movements in post-9/11 New York City. Brooklyn, specifically, where I lived at the time. The writing process made me fall out of love with living in New York City. I wanted to live somewhere cheap where I could organize my wobbly executive functioning and attempt to piece together 100 pages of coherent writing.

I left my home of nine years to complete this really long paper that required reading material that I can scarcely recall in detail right now. The book titles, and the general themes, sure. But could I quote a passage? Only if I practiced in my own head in front of a mirror for multiple hours. Staring at myself pretending to be someone else gets boring after awhile, especially when I already have an inborn proclivity to stare at my own image above anything else.

I wish I could quote Lacan right now. In order to do so, I pull up Lacan quotes on a search engine.

“What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one’s cards face up on the table?”

The alternate is face down, my default setting. No one besides me, my thesis advisor who I don’t speak with, and a department administrator who didn’t like my lack of formalism in writing, have read this paper. Most people have no idea I labored for a year of my life reading a stack of 100 books to write this paper. I refer to it often in my own head.

I didn’t write it with an audience in mind. It was a distillation in my own shift of political and personal consciousness, and it weaved through Jack Halberstam and belle hooks as much as highly designed books about the promise of community garden movements.

Is our new form of developing green space in urban environments a new form of colonization? I didn’t ask the question so neatly five years ago.

One of my extreme weaknesses about writing is my intense fear of reading my own writing. I glaze over it, treating revision as fixing items that a more detail oriented person would catch. I am also terrified that someone will secretly think I am a moron and tell other people how stupid I am because I make mistakes. It scares me that what I am writing is by no means original.

My feelings aren’t that extreme anymore. They persist. And everytime I take the Myers-Briggs, I land squarely as an INFP, even when major life shifts occur. This is natural, apparently, for my typology.

It still makes me cringe when people say that mostly abandoned blocks should be razed for greenspace. I think people don’t think too deeply about the history of marriage, a major organizational tool for social relations.

Is Manifest Destiny attempting to inward? In what name?

At this time, I have now lived five months in Baltimore. The last place I lived, in Philadelphia, truly brought out every living anxiety in me. Many like to say Baltimore and Philadelphia are similar cities. They are in terms of the depth of police brutality and the institutionalized segregation, and even in terms of the architecture of some of the row house style housing stock.

Philadelphia feels more like a college town, one that venerates youth and people involved in radical politics that judge quickly. Baltimore? Well, I am learning. I don’t feel like hiding under a rock anymore like I did in Philadelphia.

The long-timers in Philadelphia didn’t like the influx of out of towners coming into the city. Like New York, Philadelphia is a tale of many smaller cities, one where people feel an allegiance to their neighborhoods and ask – and judge a person – based on where he/she lives.  Baltimore is similar too, I guess. I haven’t exactly attempted to dive deeply into the social scene here upon arriving here. The people I do meet don’t ask me ‘what neighborhood do you live in’ right away. That is actually refreshing. I am not my neighborhood. Anyway, someone who judges you based on the neighborhood you live in is boring if they say something along the lines of ‘oh, too bad we can’t hang out.’ That happened more in Philadelphia than any other place I have lived.

The second neighborhood I moved to – West Philadelphia or Cedar Park – had university bike cops from nearby UPenn and Drexel patrolling the immediate area. Punk shows would happen up the road on spaces along Cedar Avenue and 51st Street, mostly white spaces. This was apparently a neighborhood of mostly wannabe punks with liberal arts educations that acted completely unaware of their own hubris living in a backdrop of a swiftly changing environment that erased the black people who lived there for years. All in the name of progress, and renewal. Or if they were aware, they could only talk about it on social media.

I left after six months and moved to a quieter neighborhood, one without any cool cache in Philadelphia, and I felt quite at home. One great organization in that neighborhood is Books Through Bars – support it.

Baltimore is not perfect. I moved here right before Freddie Gray was killed by police, and I have heard some viewpoints that are deeply rooted in ignorance about the larger history of segregation in this town. Many people want to heal though, and people are opening up about the micro and macro aggressions that happen. There are also more deaths and killings. There are far more abandoned properties in Baltimore, and far more mixed crowds in select public spaces. I guess it is better than Philadelphia – I feel like people are trying to open more conversations here. I am eager to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book.

Sometimes I would bike from where I lived on the north side of town into Philadelphia for work. Garbage littered streets would transition quickly to well manicured avenues, and reams of condos crept out to what real estate types would call ‘transitional’ neighborhoods. The streets became smoother as I rode into Center City, and this type of transition isn’t limited to Philadelphia. It is in Baltimore, in Atlanta, and especially in New York City.

I don’t know where this post is going, or what the point is, really. The theme of my life since I moved here is to learn to open up again, learn to trust people again. I don’t know when all of that stopped – I pinpoint it to the advent of the smartphone, when people quit paying attention to things that aren’t fun and easy. Living in Philadelphia just deepened my mistrust, somehow.

I am intense, I like layered conversations, and I am a private person. Maybe I was born that way, yeah, uh-huh? It used to be acceptable to be like this and to not have people accuse me that ‘silence is not a possibility right now’ or ‘silence is complicity’. Well, I think that point of view lacks empathy, and there are people who survive in silence. Instead of silencing them more, how about meeting people where they are, and not expecting people to hold bullhorns or shout the loudest.

What good is someone having an anxiety attack because of the loudness of a bullhorn, or a siren, or the sounds of people screaming over each other?

Philadelphia is an extroverts city. It was hard to survive – and to even be there for communities – and always have to be in a position to articulate my thoughts and feelings on the spot. It was all about who could be the loudest, the coolest, the richest – no wonder people call it the sixth borough of New York. It was the lonliest place I have lived, and I was lucky to have a supportive partner through a lot of the negativity that I felt around me.

Yet the people in Baltimore seem friendlier, and more open to quiet people, those who may not scream their point of view the loudest. I met many critical and negative people in Philadelphia – women shamers, reverse racist claimers, body shamers, ableism all over the map, introvert shamers, and people who usually didn’t have kind words coming out of their mouth. And I balk at calling myself politically correct – sometimes it is best to know where someone stands – but my experience with people in Philadelphia was all about screaming they were politically correct without the empathy that comes from giving true and radical kindness to people who don’t hold the bullhorn.

It is lovely to be far away from all of that, and healing has happened thanks to yoga, partner, a job that allows me to project websites for some solid organizations. Also, disconnecting from Facebook, with all the reminders of parts of my life that I would rather forget, helps. I do miss many people, and hopefully I can reconnect in new ways that doesn’t involve that platform.

Now maybe I can connect with people who have lived in Baltimore for awhile who want to start conversations on a number of levels. I am even open to meeting the loud people, so long as they are willing to listen.