Cheaper Than Therapy

I have another post I was going to put up, but then I started verbally vomiting on screen and had the whole internal debate about letting you in on my crazy or not. But in the end I forgot what I was debating and accidentally hit “publish” instead of refreshing the screen on Maru the cat videos.

It happens.

Anyway, although people who check the stove two times before leaving or straighten a crooked picture often claim to have OCD—something I am not dismissing, mind you—most really have no idea about the mental marathon that others (ahem, me) run every day.

These things are why when I  try and write something funny about a bird shitting on my glass door, for example, my thoughts skip like a broken record and I’m too distracted to write anything other than a few tweets and a Post-It note with helpful things like, “write a to-do list.”

This happens when life happens, when a major or seemingly minor thing leaves me feeling out of control.

I think I’m focusing on something and then jarringly realize that my thoughts have shifted back to counting in my head over and over. Then a minute later I try and focus again, but then my mind reminds me, “Shit. Where the hell were you?” and then it’s back to obsessing about my serious things and kind of about the fact that I have nothing in me to write a real post, which is basically the most insignificant thing I should worry about.

It’s instinctive. It’s survival. It’s my default.

While I know these bizarre things I do for self-preservation are technically making my life more complicated, it’s a “comfortable” complicated. I pretend I can deal with that better than I can deal with reality without them. So I reassure myself that I can do “X” or “Y” and everything will be okay, that if I do everything the way I’ve always done it, discomfort from all those external things can be (temporarily) avoided.

I can survive.

But when something crimps that routine—even just having to do something for one hour out of my week that interrupts that constant—I often default into panic mode. I might appear calm and collected, but inside I’m either grasping at control with my rituals to keep myself afloat or wishing someone would come in and wave a magic wand, telling me exactly what I should be doing and how to do it, relieving me of the burden of thinking.

Because if this post proves anything, it’s that I don’t always make the smartest decisions. Well, this post and that time I cut my own hair.

Where was I? Oh yes. Sometimes more than anything all I want is someone to tell me to do nothing at all, to give me permission to take a break from my life and myself and recover and heal before the next punch is thrown.

However,  that’s not reality.

Reality is a lot of crappy things that happen without your permission mixed in with those small pleasures that make your heart happy and give you the strength to put on your big girl panties and deal with it the best way that you know how.

So sometimes I internalize everything and take all the weight on myself.

And sometimes I don’t make the healthiest choices or write the funniest posts or say the most helpful things—to myself and to others.

But that is reality, and at the end of the day—even when I’m laying in bed trying to stop the freaking automatic tape that won’t quit running through my head—all I can do is vow to try again tomorrow.

And if all else fails, watch more of Maru and finish my post about bird poop. 

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