February 24 2005

Diary of a nervous breakdown

I’m falling down inside myself, and I know something has to change.

The change has to be so new and strange to me that it doesn’t have edges that I can hold, I need to just trust that I am walking along the beginning of it. It’s February, this quiet dim time of year, and because it’s my time of year I always get quiet inside in February. Things come to the surface and rearrange themselves and I see myself with a new clarity. This is the time of year when I came into being, 27 years ago this 27th day of February. I stand on the precipice of my golden year, staring blankly into the gilded abyss, confused and moving too quickly into an increasingly successful and unhappy way of being. This thing I preciously call my life, this rapidly beating dark shape I hold in my hands, is changing into something over which I’m losing control. I’m afraid it is slipping away from me, I am slipping away from the image I have of myself, so I am summoning up the powers of a golden February to name and resize it.

I seem to have slipped into some bad habits. I work with my hands in an attempt to combat the destruction of the analog world, but my internal world is hard-wired to the unfortunate habits of the digital age – I am relentlessly

impatient, my to-do list controls my every move, my eyes jump ahead of myself and nothing is ever really seen, just noticed in passing as I rush along. I drive too quickly, I make too many lists, I check my email compulsively, I take shallow breaths. I am completely results-oriented. I tell myself a thousand times a day that the ends are the means, the medium is the message, the personal is political, the journey is the thing – but I can’t quite get myself to ever fully believe it. Crossing off items on the to-do list is the real thing, being on time according to made-up deadlines is the only priority. Keep the inbox cleaned out, the dishes washed. Forget about the things you write to your friends to get their email out of the inbox and into its proper folder, ignore the dinner you just ate on the dishes. Finish the task and move on. Constantly move forward. Have experiences. Note them neatly in journal, scrapbook, and, if applicable, photo album. Sign and date. File. Create systems. Have a plan. My parents never planned, and our lives were terrifyingly formless, filled with overdrawn checking accounts and messy emotions that never took reality into account. (But that is a digression, albeit a telling one that spilled out too quickly.) 

*            *            * 

The thing I like about cooking is that it is a big task made up of small tasks that can be accomplished in neat chunks, and at the end everything is finished and tidy. It is a creative act accomplished in a methodical manner. Wipe off the counter, turn off the light. Go to bed with a clean conscious, because you did a good job today. The only thing that remains is the lingering doubt that the meals could have been better, and this constant fear of failure keeps me motivated enough to begin the grueling process all over the next week.

Before I was a cook I was an academic, and a good one. I won prizes and I got into good grad schools. I was slowly figuring out the entire world, unrolling the great ball of its secrets and distilling the messy truths of existence into clear paragraphs. I analyzed poems and I wrote about great ideas. Everything was big and messy and had many layers of meaning and intricate webs of ideas, and I took precise notes in neatly tabbed narrow-ruled notebooks with fountain pens. I was fond of comparing various sets of ideas to an onion, with layers of compressed meaning. I was fond of making outlines with many descending sets of Roman numerals. I knew that if I concentrated and focused my brain correctly I could unravel and analyze and distill and understand everything, and I figured that at that point my brain would rest. I would be a professor, secure in the knowledge that I had done the work,

and I was at the top – I had figured out what everyone working in office buildings didn’t even care about, and this would codify my status as the superior person I already knew I was (horrible secrets, middle-of-the-night secrets, which it is). I would know all the secrets of language and the human mind, beauty and truth and everything worth knowing. (The interesting thing to me is that I wasn’t a math and science person at all, but I brought that sort of approach to the humanities. I wanted to understand the pain of love in a Shakespearian sonnet and the burning rage of a suicidal Plath poem in the most logical and orderly manner. I believed that the most messy and emotional experiences could be understood and studied in thoroughly linear, calm ways. Similarly, I had blue hair, unshaven armpits, and ripped jeans, but I didn’t get drunk on the weekends, and I never skipped class.  This theme occurs in a slightly different form in my current life.)  As long as I got As and praise from professors, I knew my way in the world. I was a smart girl.

But the political parts of me couldn’t convince the intellectual parts of me that bourgeois intellect matters in a world being softly torn to bits. When I brought the dilemma of my desire to be the next Gandhi through teaching English Lit 101 to my brilliant women’s studies professors, they told me of the long hours and terrible students, the stultifying poverty and distasteful university

system, and I quickly got over my need to know everything. Knowing the pattern behind the cotton wool (as Virginia Woolf put it) doesn’t help you one bit in a Bush administration. I decided to put my body upon the cogs of the machine, albeit in a way I figured would be nourishing (even in the middle of this horrible world, I knew I couldn’t be an activist if I didn’t always love my work), sustaining (I wouldn’t burn out like all the activists I knew), and the embodiment of all I believed in. Since everyone has to eat, and since being a businesswoman seemed to present itself with a unique

 
opportunity to “be the change I wish to see in the world” (in Gandhi’s words), I settled into this vegan chef thing. All my decisions are filtered through the lens of political crisis, and I enjoy that perspective.

 I left the world of words and ideas and self-examination because I am an activist and wanted to be an artisan, but a part of me assumed that the skills I built up over seventeen years of straight As was something I owned and would never diminish or go away. I didn’t understand the whole world and everything in it, but I learned enough and did enough mindful journal-keeping through the years that I felt pretty calm in my own head. Mostly, it was only when the outer world intruded that I felt scared and loose and vaguely unhinged.

In these long days of wearing clogs and washing hands, a bubbling inner world does keep me sane as I work alone for days at a time. I have reserves I can dip into when no one is around to keep me tethered, and I have a carefully constructed ceiling and floor to my various personal pains and fears that keeps them at a manageable level. I have done “inner work” and I like the clean open spaces it has built in me. But lately the contours of this clean inner world are so vague that although I feel my intellectual self humming along vibrantly, and I know it’s always there, whenever I try to

coax it out into spoken words it shrinks and disappoints. My inner world has shrunk to the size of my chef’s knife, slicing cleanly through what has to be done and not asking any questions. It’s just another tool I use to make it through the long night.

The world of working with one’s hands is so reality-based, and my business has become so businesslike, that there is no room inside me for intellectual or existential rigor anymore. There is no expansiveness. I am a closed box. I often cannot call up of the proper words to describe something meaningful and important. I only truly feel my heart beating when it quickens in bed as I worry about the next day. I walk a straight line – it is as if I have thrown myself so completely into one world that even my brain does not dare to deviate. If I go too long without worrying about the business I get panicky and need to look at the to-do list to keep me calm and focused. In order to make it through 4 16-hour days in a row every week, I have become adept at turning all parts of me off except those absolutely needed for survival. Recently I went on a trip for a week. After three days I remembered what being hungry was like – the delicious waitingness of it, the impatience it insists on. The week preceding the trip was spent in such tightly controlled conditions that not only was I never hungry,
even though I was around food constantly my brain no longer registered that food is something needed to get through the day. Stray nibbles made their way into my mouth and in this way I was able to keep working, but I went for days without really eating what would be called a meal. After three days away from home this ability slipped away and I felt myself slipping back into human desires and ways of being, and my old low-blood-sugar-crazy-woman ways returned. It’s an interesting reminder of what the human body is capable of doing when it knows it’s needed elsewhere, but it scares me.

My middle-term to-do list has these items on it: get in shape. Make tempeh. Fix sewing machine. Upgrade solar panels on house. Look into wind turbine? Make good vegan cheese.

 I have been slogging my way through these items, not because I particularly want to do any of them, but because they are On The List, and now two things occur to me: 1) maybe I would feel the passion I felt for these goals when I put them on the list return if I took them off the list (but my brain no longer knows how to remember things that aren’t written down, so long has it been pampered with slips of scrap and pens stuck into every available surface), and 2) maybe changing my life would be as easy as adding one more item to the list:

build back up your inner intellectual life. Allow yourself a little internal messiness.

 I don’t know how to let go of the tight control I enforce upon myself. I work for myself, by myself. I dislike the world, and this is supposed to be my reward: work hard and create your own world. It’s supposed to be perfect. Lately my business has been going so well, I’m paying off bits of debt and buying myself small presents once in a while (a spaetzle maker, a pink picture frame). I don’t wake up in the middle of the night gasping thinking of my checking account and non-feminist dependency anymore. Instead, I lay in bed for hours, thinking dully that I am wasting the best years of my life.

My braless breasts will be upright for a little while longer, but the rest of me is sour and old, jaded and too responsible. I never go to bed with dishes in the sink. I never neglect to fold my clothes. I don’t get drunk because I can never forget how annoying the morning is, and if I waste a day my whole week is thrown off. When my friends call, I dutifully go right to the sink and do a little cleaning or some unpleasant task I know being on the phone will make bearable. Nothing is wasted. I am perfectly practical. I am in love, but my relationship is managed and scheduled. We are happy and grateful when we are together, and we work hard on our careers in the lean times.

I live a creative life, but that creativity is just as planned and organized as everything else. “Be a creative person” is a constant item on the to-do list that lives in my brain, so there is as little joy in it as there is in the rest of my life. I wear mismatched outfits that are always picked out the night before. When I go out, my unwashed wild girl hair is unwashed and tousled right on schedule. I drink whisky because it’s economical – one makers on the rocks can last all night, with a pleasant buzz for far less than the several beers it would take to achieve the same result. I spend time decorating my house in surprising artistic ways, not because I truly enjoy the process, but because I am the kind of person who lives in a surprising, artistic house. I cut my hair by flipping it over my head and randomly hacking away at it with scissors, but this is because I am a creative person, and creative people do creative things to their hair. Seeming disorganization doesn’t bother me if it is in keeping with a rule (whenever I feel I am too obsessive about rules, I remember that I never make the bed, and this seems to calm me down, although a part of me knows that this is the exception to the rule that I am obsessive that proves that I am truly obsessive).

I am the most passionately political person I know, but my politics have all been figured out long ago. Nothing is new, only the names of the crooks change and things

slowly sink into an ever-deepening state of crisis. I have my strategies for living a political life, for doing good on a daily basis, and they have been incorporated into the tightly managed fabric of everything so long ago that my attempts for positive change no longer bring me any pleasure or feeling of accomplishment. Of course, I constantly have new plans and exciting ideas on the horizon (remember: keep moving forward), but I fear that in time these will become just another regimented task.

 I start to think that maybe I just need some time off. But when my tightly wound world is taken away from me, the floor falls away and I do not know who I am. I just took time off. Last week. On my recent trip out of the kitchen, venturing so far away that I had to get on an airplane and eat food not made with my own hands, I noticed that my body greatly enjoyed not standing up for 16 hours a day, but my mind was jittery and nervous. I made to-do lists of the tiniest tasks, continually straightened up my hotel room, and kept reorganizing the envelope of retro stationary brought along to record pithy carefree observations to friends. My days were technically free, but instead of wandering around pleasantly, I made a chart that would help organize my client base, I worried over the week of cooking coming up, planning and scheduling how much time each dish would take.
 One might think that the solution is to just let everything go a little bit, to pry my hands away from the tight grip they have on my throat. But the truth is that I literally cannot stop or else there won’t be enough time in the day to make my life work properly. The truth is that the chart has greatly helped, and extra planning always makes the days a little better. I do not do excess work.  I do not work for the sake of work. I work out of pure terror, worrying that one week the food will be terrible and I will lose all my clients and I will go back to working at juice bars and borrowing from Jacob.  I work because I am proud of the life I have wrenched from the bones of this world – a life that refuses to ignore the consequences of my actions, a life that has thought of everything, a life that is p.c. down to the smallest detail. I live this way so I can sleep at night without guilt, but the living is so painful that my mind is never at ease enough to sleep. 

*            *            *

Of course, there are things I can do. I am working on getting another person to help me cook. I have a short term long term plan to build a bigger kitchen that will make life easier. Everything goes in phases, and this is a particularly hard one, and it will pass. So what I need to work on is the inner world. There seem to be two issues. One is that there is no space inside me for anything

dreamy or spacious, and one is that I am gripping life so tightly that at any minute I am going to snap it in half.

The poem that keeps swimming into my head in the hazy time after the alarm clock goes off and before the panic sets in is the last one Sylvia Plath wrote. It has been living in that space in my head since February 11, when a fan of the band I was traveling with on my vacation gave them a copy of Plath’s collected poems. Sitting on a tour bus hurtling across the desert of my childhood, feeling completely unraveled on many levels, I realized February 11 was the day she killed herself, and turned to the last poem she wrote, “Edge.” It begins:

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga.

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over.

 It’s fairly obvious why this poem keeps haunting me – its lesson is that perfection is only possible in death, and the dramatic real-life application of this principle

by Plath is a pointed warning. Plath was obsessed with the terror of everyday tasks that could never be completed because they kept returning – what’s the use of washing and folding laundry if it is only going to get dirty again? That’s life in the bell jar that she never escaped. I don’t feel that way, but I worry that’s the next downward step after this clenching panic can no longer be sustained. Plath has followed me since I was 12, reentering my life whenever I seem to run slightly off track, so I accept this poem as my omen heralding a change.

As I said at the beginning of this too-long essay, I know that the change has to be so new and strange to me that I don’t know how to hold it, otherwise it will be treated exactly like everything else in my life – held too tightly in sweaty palms. But I’m at a complete loss as to how to bring it about.

I think one part of it has to start with moving more slowly. I need to remember how to see, breathe, and look at the world, not tear through it without lifting my head. There has to be a way to work quickly and productively with ease and calm.

I feel like Margaret in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when she laments that

everyone tells her what happens when you get your period, but no one tells you how it feels, in italicized preteen angst. I can almost always bring out and articulate the horribleness making me crazy, but the thing I really need, a solution, never comes as easily. So, I’ll do what I always do and hope that the articulation of pain will somehow clear a shallow and tentative spot in my heart, and a solution will be able to settle into that hopeful small place.

February 2005