To-kill-ya more - February 13, 2009
I have this therapist. She's really something. I'm so depressed I can't get out of bed and sleep through an appointment, and she calls me to see where I am. I don't call her back, she'll come to my house. I do something stupid, she says, "Erin, that's stupid," not "Erin you're stupid." I'm not doing what she needs me to do to make the therapy work, and she says, "Erin, I need you to help me with this," not "Erin I need you to stop being [this, that, and the other cleverly deprecating expletive]" She's very fair, and very good at what she does. She's the shit, frankly.
She keeps saying this thing to me, "Erin, how are you still alive?" And I go, "What do you mean?"
Over the few months we've been working together, I've been thinking about that. What does she mean by that? My life's not been that crazy. Has it?
Some times I think we're born into something, and it can be dysfunctional as hell, and without logic or reason, and because it is all we know, we consider it the epicenter of normalcy. We do what we have to do, initially, to survive inside of it, and that becomes a pattern of behavior that's, to put it frankly, fuckin' insane. Then we're operating out of insanity, and so that's just what we do. It's all we know. Insanity.
Here's what I do: move. Fast, impulsive, get-the-fuck-out, barreling. I barrel through life. I used to hear that from my mother a lot, "Erin, quit barreling through the living room." I have this gargantuan pelvis and a dearth of grace, and I barrel, this way and that, careening through rooms, across sidewalks, smacking my hipbones off tables, fences, poles, etc. with great abandon. If the flesh between my skin and hips hadn't been robbed off all feeling during a doozy of a fall sometime in '92, it would ache nonstop. I just blasted my right hip into a chair at the coffee shop. Everybody looked up, and there I was, bent over a chair with my hand under a half-capsized paper cup, drops of milky coffee running down my forearm. Hi everyone. I'm Erin. I barrel.
And it's not just movement. It's driving. It's running. It's drinking. It's the physical moving about the country; I just moved into my fifteenth apartment.
So what's wrong with that (?), I think. Is it something more than free-spiritedness? Surely its not.
But yeah, it is. It's wrong. It's wild, uncontrolled living. It's slow suicide. When I think of the things I've survived--alcohol poisonings, drunken falls, sober falls, starvation, crashes on bikes, crashes in cars, drug abuse, violent relationships with sociopaths and multiple suicide attempts--I wonder how it is that I've gotten this far in life--not physically, like my therapist does--but spiritually? How am I possibly intact? What kind of person seduces death like this and honest-to-God, truly, deeply BELIEVES they're just "free spirited?" How little attention have I been paying to reality?
These thoughts didn't come to me out of therapy. You would think they would, but they didn't.
It snowed in the desert last week, irrationally (I'm telling you, this place is kooky). The pines and yuccas and cacti iced over, and the pink vagina became even pinker with its coating of snow; a pastel pink, you could say. The pink of baby shower wrapping paper.
I came home to a Tarantula at my door. He was sitting on the "L" portion of my "Welcome" mat, and there was a dusting of snow on his back. He seemed to be trying to warm himself by hanging out on the other side of the sliding glass door that leads into my current, fifteenth kitchen. "Hi there, buddy," I said, like I say to any animal I see because I love animals.
He looked cold, and that made me sad. I didn't want him to be cold, and so, without first thinking of the consequences, I put my palm out and scuttled him onto it with my other hand. A giant, poisonous spider. I held him there in my palms, warming him up and cooing at him as if he were a kitten, until I kind of came-to and the reality of the situation--there is a giant, poisonous spider in your palms--became rather difficult to ignore.
I put him down again. He was fine. Didn't throw him or anything, but who does this? Who sees a giant, poisonous spider on their doorstep and says, "Oh, he must be cold; I'll pick him up?"
That's not right, and it never has been.
