Cirque du Malaise

So far, turning 40 has been epically bleak. I’m not going to lie. For those of you who haven’t yet reached this milestone of despair, brace yourselves. It’s been nothing like turning 30, when I felt really, really old but also super relieved to not be in my suicidal twenties anymore. My twenties had been all about reading Sylvia Plath and Anais Nin and journaling about how nobody understands me while popping pills and going through the occasional cutting phase. My thirties, in contrast, were about yoga and Buddhism and self-care and reinvention. Unfortunately, that whole trend seemed to peak about ¾ of the way through the decade, and the last few years have been a rapid decline back into my cold hard atheist roots and occasional rebellious cigarette smoking.

So what lies ahead for the 40s? I suspect I’ll spend a big chunk of it freaking out about my looming 50^th birthday. Fuck the what. For now, I just keep repeating the phrase “I’m forty” to myself over and over, to see if it sticks.

(A friend of mine tried to cheer me up by attempting to convince me that the phrase “Life begins at forty” is a thing.  It’s not.)

I used to think that Hope For a Better Future was the one thing worth living for. You know, that future when I would have a family, kids, a front porch, etcetera? But I’ve changed my mind. The one thing worth living for, it now seems, is humor. Things that are funny. Like my friends (especially Vanessa) and Oatmeal comics and Shelby Fero on Twitter and this new Ricky Gervais show Extras. I live for other things too. The special connection I share with my feral cat, Budapest. My rich inner life.  Whipped cream.

That’s all for now. I’ll let you know if it gets any better.

Sauerkraut is really good, too. My friends made this for me. It's fucking delicious.

I have a cardiac arrhythmia. It’s a genetic thing and, according to my doctor, I shouldn’t be terrified. It’s simply a “disturbance in rhythm” that makes my heart STOP.  And then catchupreallyfast… about a hundred times a day. It feels like a hummingbird caught in my chest, but if I take a deep breath, it goes away. It doesn’t happen when I’m stressed, or when I’ve had too much coffee, or if I overexert myself. In fact, I usually notice it when I am totally calm. Like, lying in bed reading. Or watching the latest episode of Wilfred.

It has something to do with electric signals in the body. I don’t know. But this arrhythmia makes me anxious. (Everything makes me anxious, so this is not surprising.)

I’ve always particularly hated the awareness of my own heartbeat. Listening to my own pulse makes me queasy. I can’t yog because it makes my heart pound, and I hate that. As far as my heartbeat is concerned, no news is good news. So, this is a particularly nerve-wracking disorder I have.

The other day I had a session with my shamanic healer, Cynthia Mellon. She gave me a somatic practice: to take a moment every day — at least a few times — to connect with my heart. Like, put my hand on it, breathe, and feel it.

She had no idea how challenging and also poignant of an exercise this would be for me. I’ve never told her about my arrhythmia or my phobia of my own heartbeat.

But she knows how twitchy I get when I am out of my rhythm in LIFE. So, in a weird way, it all ties together.

I’m turning 40 quite soon. How do I feel about this?

Let me illustrate by telling you about a nightmare I’ve been having: I’m driving a giant truck speeding down a freeway; the brakes don’t work; I can’t slow down; there is a big-rig on fire spinning out of control and about to jackknife into me; oh, and I’m going backwards.

That pretty much sums it up. Thanks, brain.

This morning I had a meeting with a longtime friend client, Cynthia Simon. She said, “How are you?” and I said, “I’m freaking out about turning 40.” Cynthia — who is a beautiful, stunning, radiant post-40 woman herself, laughed and said, “You’re doing fucking great.” I appreciated that — mostly because of the swearing. But, I’m not actually doing that great. I’m doing pretty terribly, if you want the honest truth. I’m kind of losing my mind about it.

I just so happen to be reading By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham, a novel about two self-involved yuppie New Yorkers in their early 40s who constantly refer to themselves as “middle aged.” Really? Middle aged? I asked a few friends of mine this weekend — women about my age or slightly older — whether they think we are in fact “middle aged.” They all basically agreed that we are (as did Wikipedia, fucker). I nodded as if I could handle this information on a cerebral level, but inside, I was quaking with terror and rage at this concept.

In my mind, “middle aged” applies to people who have gray hair (that they don’t, ahem, color), retirement plans, and grandchildren. “Middle aged” does not under any circumstances apply to people who have barely figured their shit out, are single, live paycheck to paycheck, and still remember the sordid moments of their bohemian childhood quite vividly. Yes, my grandmother was technically just a few years older than me when she became a grandmother, but things were different then.

Incidentally, I had a lovely session with another of the intuitive Cynthias in my life —Cynthia Mellon — and she informed me that I have what’s called “renunciant karma.” She explained that in other times and cultures they might have called this “nun karma.” Remember when we were teenagers and endured tragic breakups with our boyfriends and then exclaimed in a tone of abject despair: “That’s it! I’m just going to be a nun!” Ironically, I actually am, apparently, going to be a nun. You win again, 13-year-old Joslyn.

Still, the middle aged thing is not sitting comfortably in my mind.

What does this all mean? I wish I had a nice tidy answer for you. But at the moment, all I have is this recent shoe purchase to tide me over:

Would a middle aged person wear THESE?

I only fell down 4 or 5 times when I tried to wear these today. I’m gonna push through. A homeless dude at the Whole asked me why I was wearing them. I said, for practice. He said, for practice for what? And I said, to be good at it. And he said, kindly, that he would teach me how to play the bass guitar if I need to be good at something.

That really happened.

As usual this morning I slept until 930, spent a half hour staring off into space while sipping tea, and then started to think about actually maybe working around mid-morning, with a slow and gentle easing-in to actually checking my email, for starters. This is my daily ritual and the whole process typically takes at least a few hours. This is why I don't ever calendar in anything productive before noon. (Note to my two friends who are constantly and relentlessly trying to get me to go on morning hikes with them; you know who you are.)

This particular morning, just as I was about to dive in to maybe kind of doing something soon, I got a Skype-chat message from my friend Don. (FYI there is no end to the myriad and creative ways you can get in touch with me in writing. The phone? Not so much.)

The Bunny Photo © andyfreeberg.com

Don had a cold (possibly the same TB-like bug I suffered from last week) and wanted to know if I would take his symphony tickets for tonight off his hands. Oh yes! I am not one to not jump on free symphony tickets. I love classical music and love an excuse to wear The Bunny even more. The Bunny is a white rabbit-fur vest I was given by someone, at some point, that is incredibly NOT P.C. but super soft and yummy and kind of awesome. In a terrible way. Note: I do not condone wearing fur. But I do wear The Bunny on occasion. Just one of the many ways I contain multitudes, y’all.

The one catch? I had to drive up and over the hill to Muir Beach to pick up the symphony tickets at Don’s house.

A normal person could probably zip out and take care of this tiny little errand and be back at work shortly and then pat themselves on the back for having such an awesome laidback freelancing lifestyle that they can do spontaneous things in the middle of the day. Not me.

Muir beach is about a 10-minute scenic drive up Highway One that proceeded to take me about 2 1/2 hours. I went by way of The Whole so that I could grab some soup for Don, and I happened to run into my good friend Michelle who I hadn’t seen in ages. We sat on a bench and filled each other in for a while. It was great to see her.

When I left The Whole I started to drive up the mountain, but soon enough I nearly hit two dogs running around maniacally in the road. I pulled over, got honked at a bunch (California drivers are unerringly righteous), and finally succeeded in steering these two clueless, spastic, and super smelly terriers back to their rightful owners, who were all, “What? We didn’t even notice they got out!” (Sidenote, not a dog person, and always think it’s weird when people “don't notice” that their huge, pungent, loud, obnoxious dogs are not in the yard. It makes me vaguely suspicious that they are secretly “forgetting” to secure the gate so the dogs will “accidentally” run away.)

After that, I followed a tourist up and over the hill at an excruciatingly slow crawl until I finally got to Don’s. Tickets in hand, I decided to take the more direct route back to my house, forgetting that there is construction going on in a feeble and ongoing attempt prevent the entire highway from sliding down into Green Gulch Zen Center. I stared at this for about 20 minutes:

I got back to my house around 12:30. Still plenty of time to salvage my workday.

I didn’t need to leave for the symphony until 5:30. Five hours.

Problem is, I had to start my whole “settling in” routine all over again. As the minutes ticked by and I found myself once again starting into space, dicking around on email, making myself another pot of tea, making myself lunch, letting my neurotic cat Luka in and out every 3.5 seconds, and responding like Pavlov’s dog to every single text message (and oh yes, writing this blog post), I began to get increasingly panicky about getting anything done today.

1:30. Blood pressure starting to really rise. Still not working.

2:30. Getting highly panicky. Have at least 4 hours of mandatory client work to finish today. Start obsessing over reorganizing my calendar to fit it into my weekend instead.

3:00. So completely panicky at this point that I’m nibbling on a xanax to calm down.

3:30. Tired. Really tired. Maybe a little too much nibbling.

4:00. Angry nap.

5:00. I have to leave in a half hour.

5:30. Let’s just write that one off as a “personal day”?

This, kids, is why I work evenings and weekends.

I am from a long lineage of hearty pioneer sorts. My mother’s side of the family came over in the Mayflower days and helped settled rugged New England. My parents are both do-it-yourselfers who built their house by hand when I was a baby. We all lived in a tent in the yard, through the New England winter, until the cement truck came and poured the foundation.

My mom—who was basically a single parent—has always been the type of person who doesn’t just garden; she composts. She doesn’t just know how to unclog the toilet; she knows how to troubleshoot a septic tank issue. She can sew, cook, plumb, carpent, mend, patch, fix, and basically do anything one would ever need to do living in a rustic woodsy house in mountainous New England. She’s also the type of kickass woman who can change her own flat tire and drive her own snowplow.

I’m pretty sure I’m adopted.

Here’s what I cannot do: re-light my suburban hot water heater pilot when a windstorm blows it out.

Here’s what I can do, though: Stomp around for a little while having a minor tantrum about it, call my stand-in boyfriend Leslie crying, beg her to come help me, stand by helplessly as she figures out how to re-light the damn thing, and then document the entire epic tragedy in pictures and write a story about it.

Yes, I am well aware that I could figure out how to re-light my own hot water heater “if I really wanted to.” I don’t. I’m just not that girl. However, I am the girl who makes friends with that girl. That counts for something, right?

D.I.Y. — Re-Lighting the Pilot on Your Water Heater

Starring Leslie Munday

Step 1: Muck around in crawl space behind house on hands and knees,
being careful to avoid decomposing vole.

Step 2: Tell nosy cat to mind its own business (and please stop killing voles).

Step 3: Be sure to wear cute headlamp. Hawt.

Step 4: After successfully lighting pilot like a total badass, be sure to complain for a while about rock that was digging into your knee.

Step 5: No seriously, complain some more. P.S. nice Fryes.

And that's how it's done, bitches! Who needs a man? Fist bump.

I hate confrontation.

To even my closest friends that statement sounds ridiculous, because I tend to magnetically attract it. Many times I’ve heard this: “You say you don’t like drama, but you obviously do, or you wouldn’t have it in your life.” I’m not sure if I buy into this sort of oversimplified spiro-psychology. I don’t manifest drama. I do, however, have a personality trait that overrides my phobia of confrontation: I am not a people pleaser. I’m a straight-shooting East Coast Yankee.

On a recent flight through from Atlanta to San Francisco, I had an experience where my failure to be a people pleaser resulted in five hours of torture sitting next to an overwrought Southern Belle.

I am always very careful to book aisle seats on flights because I can get panicky about flying and have been known to actually faint on planes. On this particular flight, I had booked an aisle seat weeks in advance, but when I got to the airport, it had magically transformed into a middle seat. Thanks to the airlines’ devious new policies of making you pay extra at any cost, I was coerced into “upgrading” to the aisle seat I had already confirmed. $15 and a desperate sprint across the Atlanta airport later, I got on my plane.

The moment I touched down at my seat, the sweet-voiced Southern belle in the middle seat next to me asked, “Excuse me, would you mind switching seats with my husband?” Exasperated and with a feeling of doom, I said, “Where is your husband sitting?” She pointed to the middle seat behind us. To which my response was, quite simply, “No.”

She looked at me in horror. “You won’t switch seats with my husband?”

Again, I said flatly, “No.” I’m not a sugarcoater.

She was flummoxed.

So, even after the person in the  window seat agreed to switch so that she got to sit next to her husband after all (with me—lucky me—next to both of them)  she proceeded to spend the entire flight trying her best to make my life a living hell in her exaggerated, hyper-polite, passive aggressive way. She talked about me in whisper yells to her husband for five straight hours, while I sat there with my headphones on pretending to be oblivious. She asked me to move at least ten times so she could "get up and stretch my legs." She waxed on about how no one has any manners any more and how people traveling alone should be more flexible. And at one point she actually accused me of "buying" her aisle seat out from under her nose in some sort of crazy me-and-the-airlines-against-her conspiracy plot.

For most of this time, I kept my headphones on and stared enthralled at my posse of electronic devices. I basically just did not give her the time of day. If there is one thing I have mastered in this lifetime, it’s the cold and aloof thing. I may have given her an embolism, and for that, I feel slightly bad. But I don’t feel bad about not giving up my seat.

The celebrity yoga teacher I used to slave for had a saying that I’m sure he appropriated from someone else. It’s one of his few trite platitudes that I regularly apply to my own way of coping with the world:

It’s none of my business what you think of me.

I once had a teacher tell me that my extreme neurotic tendencies were due to my incredible imagination. I have long held on to this extremely optimistic interpretation.

Lately I’ve been relying on my imagination to keep my spirits up when things get tough. For instance, when I was feeling panicky about entering into my first ever silent retreat a few weeks ago, I decided to pretend instead that it was the 1800s and I had TB and had to go to a sanitorium for some life-saving R&R. This tragic make-believe story cheered me up immensely and made me feel like a heroine in an Emily Bronte novel.

While I was in the retreat (which actually did feel kind of like a recuperative mission for my mind and body) I variously entertained myself by pretending I was at fat camp (due to the delicious but extremely low-cal meals), an asylum (also not that far off base), and prison camp (that was just for added dramatic flair).

Now that I’m back in action and spending a lot of time onsite on the 22nd floor of an office building downtown—one that I’m positive was built before the invention of the concept of earthquake-proofing—I truly rely on my imagination to keep my spirits up. Today, when I found myself shivering under a green knit shawl while eating spoonfuls of cold, congealed steel-cut oatmeal and being bathed by fluorescent light, I decided to pretend that I was a poor Irish peasant during the potato blight and that the oatmeal was my one and only meal of the day. That thought gave me such comfort. There’s nothing like some good old fashioned romanticized drear to lift flagging spirits.

My imagination has a life of its own. When I’m not paying attention, it can swiftly hijack my thoughts, not to mention the destructive power it has over my meditation practice. I know it’s just trying to help—bless it’s heart—but sometimes I have to gently remind it that it’s not invited to sit down with me on the zafu.

My creative mind is particularly insidious when I’m asleep. I have fucked up dreams. Luckily, during this last silent retreat, I was reminded once again that I am not my mind. So when I wake up from a nightmare, I can more easily shake it off and be like, good one, mind, but I know you don’t control me.

My cats do.

If you ever want to test your self-esteem to its absolutely threshold of resiliency, I highly recommend becoming an Internet writer, particularly on Elephant Journal, which for some reason seems to draw out the worst in unaccountable anonymous commentators. I’ve been called a lot of things by various and many complete strangers over the last few months.

According to the populace over at Ele, I am:

• Selfish
• Childish
• Inauthentic
• Judgmental
• Cowardly
• Egomaniacal
• Extremely self-absorbed
• A terrible pet parent unworthy of having cats
• A criminal for letting my cats go outside (yes, literally, a criminal)
• An unethical meat eater
• A horrible friend lacking in compassion and basic human decency
• A psychopath
• A sociopath
• A “whiny yoga instructor” (I’m not any kind of yoga instructor, actually, but I don’t want to nitpick)

I have several ex-boyfriends who I’m sure would agree with all of the above.

But yup, I have to confess, it hurts my feelings on occasion. It’s true, dear readings of Elephant, I have feelings. Which I guess rules me out as a sociopath/psychopath. Borderline personality disorder, maybe?

Still, in my darkest moments of writerly self-loathing, I can’t help but think of this timeless poem by Mary Oliver:

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save.

I went for a walk to the beach with my friend Melissa recently and we had a blast discussing our litany of irrational fears. To be fair, I think all fears are basically rational, as long as they could potentially happen, but some are more rational than others (it's an Animal Farm kind of thing).

There are obviously some things that are worth worrying about, like being almost 40, single, childless, and at the same time revolted at the thought of being in a relationship ever again. Also, not being able to pay my rent. You can't tell me that's not worth worrying about.

But some of the things that keep me up at night are pretty dumb, not to mention incredibly self-absorbed, like:

• Trying to remember the last time I got my teeth cleaned and panicking about whether my gums are receding (they are) and whether it's going to eventually cause all my teeth to turn black and fall out and whether I will be able to stomach eating everything pureed for the rest of my life.

• That I will die without ever having learned a foreign language fluently, and that I no longer possess the cerebral ability to learn a foreign language at all, because of all the pot I smoked in college.

I've always been a worryer, as evidenced by this early photo of 1-year old me, pondering the inexorable challenges that lie ahead.

• That I have a tapeworm.

• That I'll slowly go blind until I am trapped in my own body, unable to write, read, or cope, left to wile away my days in isolated misery.

• That anyone cool will find out that I actually watch that dumb show Glee and have even seen some of the episodes twice. Thanks a lot, Hulu, for stealing my soul.

• Wondering how I can make money off of hating the yoga scene in the Bay Area and whether or not I will eventually be assassinated.

• Wondering whether my neighbors think I'm a nutjob looneybag because I'm forever dragging dead animals out onto the porch with a hysterical look on my face and then apologizing out loud to said dead animals and begging them not to debit my karma since it's really not my fault my cats are born hunters with a taste for blood.

In regard to the latter, I have come up with a small solution to at least some of the carnage. I found a place in San Rafael that takes in injured wild animals. It's called Wildcare. The people there are amazing and they will rehabilitate, say, a baby quail that's been bitten in the neck by my cat, Budapest, and then release it back into the wild. If you ever come across an animal in need, please call them. This world is a terrible enough place without letting an animal die for no reason.

Talking on the phone gives me panic attacks. Luckily for me, I don't get cell phone reception at my house, and since I work from home and am basically a shut-in, that works out nicely.

Oddly enough, I do get text messages at my house. Apparently God wants me to type out all of my communication (which is obviously fine by me). Unfortunately, my friends and clients aren't always on board with God.

I get a lot of flack about the phone thing. Some say, "It's so much easier just to pick up the phone than to try to type out a message." Hmm. Easier for YOU maybe. I can type faster than I can think. On the other hand—and maybe this is a holdover from the days of my childhood spent endlessly dialing a rotary phone—I don't particularly find phone conversations to be quick.

First of all, you always have to do the formalities thing on the phone. That bugs.

And I never know when it's my turn to talk. Maybe it's PTSD from whatshisface (my last boyfriend) who would threaten to have me excommunicated every time he perceived himself as being interrupted by me, but I am always anxious about interjecting my words into the conversation.

I tried an experiment for a while where every time I talked to someone on the phone, I would wait patiently for my turn to talk. I would not interrupt anyone, under any circumstances, ever. But what I found, with some people, was that they were so uncomfortable with silence in a conversation that they would simply keep talking until interrupted, keeping us in this endless loop of being on the phone basically forever while they repeated things over and over again and came up with all sorts of imaginative filler statements.

And then I started to feel like I wasn't being patient and mindful, but in fact I was being cruel by letting this poor person spin out to depths of anxiety that could easily have been placated by my compassionate interjection.

Also, when you throw in the whole Right Speech factor, it's much easier to pause and think about the skillful way to say things in an email versus over the phone.

Maybe it's the misanthropic writer in me, but if I could have all of my interpersonal communication take place electronically I would be pretty happy.