You know the Mayor of Halloween Town in Nightmare Before Christmas, how he has 2 sides of his head and when he freaks out his super freaked out anxious face turns to the front and his voice gets really high like “What the fuck are we gonna do now?!?” That’s sometimes how I feel about me and Laura’s Claws in Your Pause partnership. She’s the calm visionary Mayor, I’m the scary one losing my shit. I’m actually fine with that arrangement, because I think it’s important to model good melting down, and I think that by being the angry bitch I make the other angry people in the room feel like they belong. So that’s who’s blogging today.
For starters, I’m super socially awkward lately. I showed up at a party the other night and I brought my own dinner in tupperware, to eat at the table alongside the other guests. It was a misunderstanding, but still extreme stress-induced behavior. And I made my kid so uncomfortable she ate the tupperware dinner with me. My husband invited me to a potluck with his aikido school last weekend and I sat in a chair smiling a fake smile all night, reminding myself of conversations with my grandmother in the nursing home when she couldn’t hear anymore. I’m hostile to my friends, alienating myself on purpose. To what purpose? Did the *spider tell me to do this ?(*see Spider Spirit Animal blog)
If I am alone there will be less deceit. There will be less faking it. There are important things to figure out, birth, evolve into. There are scales to tip, educational justice, safe children to raise, screen addictions to manage, marriage to keep alive, a terrorist president, civil war, a garden to foster, old age to grow into, teeth that are dying, hair that is falling out. There is so much work to be done, there isn’t time be fake. There is only time to notice the beauty, mark some joy. I find it often in my journal these days, where I can show my fat rolls, my mad face, and no one is scared away.
I practice a new mantra. How are you doing? Mad, sad, afraid. How are you doing? Mad, sad, afraid. How are you doing? Mad, sad, afraid, selfish, ugly, incompetent, an embarrassment to my children. I tell myself to just be it. Inhabit the upside down. It’s so exhausting trying to hold it all together. Just be it, you won’t scare everyone away. It feels good. Way better than stuffing it down and pretending. BOO. Be scary. Tis the season.