The Unbearable Weight of Existence
Yesterday I lost my mind. But only for a little while.
I had taken my wonderfully excited and constantly verbal 6 year old to see A Minecraft Movie (I’ll be googling more about the choice of parts of speech for that title) after school. He was excited. I was excited.1 So excited that we rushed up the stairs and out into the light gray day to get to the theater.
I was looking forward to the low-hanging-fruit parenting-win of an afternoon at the movies, but the kiddo did not stop moving and/or talking during all 101 minutes of it, leaving my nerves frayed and my mind functioning on over-drive. My scrambled brain was eager to get home and turn off as we made our way back to the car. We descended the concrete stairs into the garage and turned towards where our car ought to have been.
The spot was empty.
The 6 year old hadn’t stopped talking since we’d left the theater and had not yet registered that I had stopped walking and was staring at an empty parking spot. The talking did not subside, but was replaced by a more frantic tone once he realized the car was missing that caught my brain by the evolutionary nerves and said “THE CHILD NEEDS YOUR HELP”. So I was caught between the surreal, nightmare fuel2 of the possibility that my car had actually been stolen and the DNA programming my cells to focus my attention on the crying child in front of me. My circuits shorted and I barked a command to stop talking as I waved and clicked my key fob around me. No flashing lights. No little beep to call “Marco,” to my “Polo.” My car was simply not there.
My brain paused to reassemble itself from the multiple parts it had melted into while computing and deciding what in the actual fuck to do in this situation and in what order. I noticed a QR code and a 5-digit number on a BRIGHT neon sign, but couldn’t quite make my brain comprehend the meaning of the black bold letters that I would later learn said “Text this number to register your vehicle"(what? why? what?) My poor brain didn’t stand a chance.
With the now-frightened 6 year old in tow, I ascended the stairs once more. My own private Groundhog’s Day. I went to the box office and said to the clerk, “excuse me, there’s a problem with my car.” He gave me a furrowed brow and asked, “what sort of problem?” “It’s missing,” I said. “I think it’s been stolen.”
What followed was a medium-high intensity wave of folks shepherding me and my bewildered, big-eyed 6 year old from one person to the next until we were deposited into an office, sitting across from someone who could help. They even had rainbow colored hair, and immediately offered my kiddo three different fidgets to play with before we started talking.
To make a very long story short, I got a ride around the parking lot and found my car. It was in the exact opposite spot of the garage than I thought it had been. Which means it had been behind me as I tried to find it with the key fob. Which is why I didn’t see it or hear it.
There are any number of ways that I could have avoided the whole ordeal. But none of those options were apparent to me in that moment after the movie, assimilating the data in front of me as I breathed in stale gas fumes under the harsh fluorescent light (I put the “hyper” in “hypersensitivity”!) and tried to keep my kid from getting hit by a car.
Humaning is super hard. That’s my takeaway from yesterday’s clustercuss of mindfuckery. Once we got home and I made sure the kiddo was situated in front of some dinner, I crept down the hallway to my bedroom, laid down on the bed, and covered my head with a pillow. In his concern, Otto, the Giant German Shepherd nudged the pillow off of my face. Which made me laugh. Which made me cry. And then I was crying not just quiet tears, but big, beautiful sobs3 at which point my soulful kiddo appeared. I explained to him I was feeling bad about the car, and about how my brain gets overwhelmed and in the way of me figuring things out sometimes. Then more tears. I felt him lean down and kiss me on the forehead, tell me that I wasn't stupid, and then he said, “ok, I will let you have your privacy if you want it,” and went back to eating dinner and playing Minecraft.
That made it all worthwhile.
Is what I want to say. It’s not quite true. I wish I hadn’t melted down in front of my kid. I wish I hadn’t been harsh, or gotten so many others involved in the drama that I had brought upon myself.
At least that’s what my inner critic has to say. But seriously, that guy is a jerk.
A quick consultation with the intelligent robots that live inside of my phone and I discovered this article by Shelby Crosier of Emory University about the impacts of living under the insanity of the current political climate. In it, the author answers the question, “What are the health effects when someone lives under a state of constant stress or anxiety for a long period of time?”
The answer: it impacts our mental & emotional health, our ability to pay attention and stay focused, and our ability to regulate our emotions.
What a relief! It’s not that I have a faulty brain, it’s that I’ve been paying attention and things aren’t looking great and that takes its toll on the humble homo-sapien brain.
If you’re still with me, maybe you’ve also got that sort of moldy-Swiss cheese feeling in your brain most of the time. And maybe you were also under the false impression that it was your fault. Isn’t it great to know that it’s not!? Talk about a silver lining.4
If you skipped ahead to the TL;DR, then here it is:
If you are having a hard time, you are not alone.
If your brain is full of farts, you are not alone.
If your memory is shot, you are not alone.
If the weight of existence under late-stage capitalism, the death throes of patriarchy, and the stupidity of supremacy has got you down, you are not alone.
I am not alone. That’s another take away from yesterday’s misadventure: there were helpers all around me.
There are helpers all around you. I bet you are one of them, too. Let’s remember that & be kind to ourselves and each other. It’s hard out there right now.
This particular 6 year old had already seen it twice (#parentsofkidsofdivorce - don’t know if that’s a thing, but let’s make it one).
Having my car stolen has been a recurring theme of my dreamscape for the last many months.
I refuse to call it “ugly crying,” no crying is ugly. That’s just Big Brother bullying you for having emotions.
To make me feel even better, later last night I learned that difficulty concentrating and memory problems, or “brain fog,” are symptoms of perimenopause, which affects menstruating bodies between the ages of 35-50. Which is me. Hooray?