Ch-ch-ch-changes

My friend Carly called me the other night and said, “How are you? I’ve been reading your blog, so I can read between the lines, but I want to hear it from you.”

Fair enough.

Still, I talked in circles with her, because I haven’t gotten everything figured out yet. I was hoping to have everything figured out by the next time I posted. But life doesn’t work so neatly, as we all know.

There is a lot of awful stuff going on in my country. Children are being separated from their parents and kept in cages. I literally cannot think of anything worse than that. (Donate to The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services here.)

And yet, here I am, wallowing. They say that you have to take care of yourself before you take care of anyone else, but that doesn’t stop the guilt.

But here it is: I’m still not doing that well. It’s been over three weeks since I moved to Brooklyn. It’s been about a week since I moved out of one apartment into another. Yeah, I did that.

What happened was that I felt like I had to get out of Connecticut because I was being a burden on my parents. I lived with them, I ate food they bought, I let my mom do my laundry. They drove me to and from work and to therapy and to the doctor and to get my medications. They felt the brunt of my anger and sadness and anxiety. And I don’t know, I think I was just making them tired.

I was tired, too. Substituting is a very unforgiving job, and I felt like I received no feedback or creative fulfillment and to be honest, I spent my periods off trying to hurt myself or numb my mind with something like Frasier. 

I thought that New York would be better. My people are here. Some of my happiest times were spent here. I can get around without a car. If I make myself small and pay my rent, I don’t even need to bother or burden the people I live with.

But it’s not like school. In certain ways, I can make my own schedule, so I have been overworking myself. If you remember a previous blog, it’s partially because I need the money. But it’s also maybe another way of hurting myself. No time for creative fulfillment; feet that have to be iced and wrapped and blisters that make it painful to be on my feet all day.

The commutes from Brooklyn are long and I still haven’t bought any groceries because I keep thinking that I deserve to starve myself, and then I overindulge when I can’t take it anymore.

And on top of all of that, I felt rather unsafe in my regular living environment. It wasn’t actually a dangerous situation, but my anxiety overpowered me in that place. I lived with two men over the age of fifty, whose names I didn’t know. There were women in the apartment occasionally, but they sounded like they were social workers or cleaners or supers. I won’t ever know, because I spent much of my time shaking in my bed, with a locked door.

That’s the thing: there were signs everywhere telling people to lock the doors, but whenever I returned home, the two front doors and the apartment door would be unlocked. And I didn’t have access to the mail. And I was scared to use the kitchen so I just drank a ginger ale over the course of my time there. I had to keep earphones in all night because my roommates woke up and played loud music and television at random times. It wasn’t… great.

I thought all I needed to live a chilled life in New York was to have a lock on my own personal door. But I was wrong. Going for days without talking to a human person, and thinking, on my dark days, that it would take weeks for my roommates to notice whether I was gone or dead in my room, was not great for my mental health.

So I moved into a place in the same neighborhood at a higher price point, for which I had to provide my own bed. Spending money on my happiness didn’t seem okay. But I asked, and I asked, and I asked everyone around me if they thought it was a good idea before I did it, and no one told me no.

I snuck into a sublet for a friend of a friend. I don’t know my roommates too well yet, but I know their names, I have their numbers, they are in their twenties, and they seem absolutely lovely. And I’ve gotten my mail. And the doors are locked. And I can sleep at night. There’s even laundry in-house.

I still get nervous to go use the kitchen. I’ve used it once. The microwave. Using the tupperware I bought to stay out of the way. And I still think that I should make myself as small as possible and stay out of everyone’s way. I’ve paid to be here. But I still don’t think I deserve the full amenities.

Not everything was solved by moving. Obviously, Abs.

I guess the compendium of changes in my life and changes in the world around me has become too much, and there’s not much that I feel I can do aside from continue steadily on with my Harry Potter re-read. I’m almost done, but then I’m going to pop in my Pride and Prejudice DVDs. But what do I do after that?

I have tons of notes on things I could be writing. I just don’t feel good enough to write them – not well enough, good enough. And my friends in New York are so busy and successful and in many ways they probably feel like me or have felt like me in the past. But I’m always anxious to text or call.

I just need a routine, I told Carly. I just need a routine.

But maybe I need a little more than that. A good meal, a good cry, a good something. And I’m clearly not giving it to myself.

I haven’t put my oxygen mask on before trying to shove an oxygen mask on the person I’m accompanying. And now neither of us can breathe.