I’ve had a lot of “worst days” in my life. Some of them were clearly terrible horrible days:
- The birthday my dad strangled me
- The day I tried to go to high school but was hospitalized instead
- The day they locked me in isolation
- The day I tried to die but was arrested instead
- The day I help my first set of commitment papers
- The day I tried to go back to the hospital voluntarily but was arrested instead
- A couple days later when the PHP I’d been attending for 1.5 years kicked me out over the phone for the above incident
On all these days, the defining characteristic was the sense that reality had completely broken down. Suddenly, all light and air was bent, as if through a lens. Anything off to the side was clouded in a blur but those things immediately in front of me seemed crystal clear. This Terrible Thing was happening and I could perceive every last detail of it in painful detail. I remember the way those rooms looked. The cracks on the ceiling of the first hospital’s admitting room. The size of the piece of birthday cake in front of me. The feel of the black, metal pay phone in the hallway of the hospital. The way sound reverberated off the Plexiglas window of the Side Room.
Sometimes this fracture of the fabric of space was helpful – a reminder that this shit wasn’t going to work anymore. There was something I was doing that I needed to Knock OFF. Get away from my parents. Get away from these hospitals, these policemen. These were not moments where I should linger.
Other times, it just felt as if I were living through a traumatic brain injury – a concussive blast in slow motion that was gradually creating tiny shears throughout my grey matter that would never heal. Afterwards, nothing would ever quite be the same - like an indelible mental limp.
I had one of those days a couple weeks ago. Nothing dramatic like a hospitalization or an arrest, just a horrible, horrible day where literally every possible thing that could go wrong did. All throughout, I tried to remember non-dramatic terrible days like this that I'd survived to tell about before:
- The day snow chains ripped out the ABS on my sports car just before my skis were stolen
- The handful of horrible, terrible, cry-all-night fights we’ve ever had as a couple
- They day we were thrown out of a B&B and went wandering across the muddy Scottish countryside, looking for a place that didn’t exist
- The day I met a professor who was having the kind of architecture career I wanted and realized I wasn’t nearly strong enough to do that
On all those days I still felt the same brain-splitting panic, the same cognitive overload during each of them. The feeling that
This. Is. A. Crisis.
And You. You are not capable of handling such things.
What happened a couple of weeks ago? It’s barely worth mentioning. I got up early to drive my husband to the airport through a snowstorm so I started the day exhausted. I drove to work a couple hours later through a subsequent ice storm to arrive at work a scared, angry mess. I returned home at 9:30 to discover that we had what I thought was a propane leak (terrifying) but turned out to be an empty tank (infuriating). For three hours I ran around the yard in the dark and freezing rain, calling anyone I could think of who could help, digging feet of ice and snow off of every surface, worrying that I was about to blow all of our worldly possessions and myself and the cat, sky high. I felt alone and terrified and confused.
- How could all this be happening and why had the fates conspired against little old me?
- How did I wind up so alone?
- Why did time and space seem so flexible and tangible all of a sudden?
- Why did everything seem so muffled and how long had I been shoveling?
And by the end when the heat was back on and my head was throbbing and sleep and food seemed like irrelevant novelties, I sat with that familiar old feeling: I don’t know how many more days like this can I face.
