The Band Aid Was Wearing Thin And So Was I

The breakdown was coming whether I wanted her to or not.

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Remember how last week I wrote a smug twenty-six-hundred-word piece waxing poetic about how I was no longer going to let society’s bullshit standards of where a woman should be in her late thirties penetrate my ~evolved~ orbit? How garnering an sense of authentic self is the greatest currency of all—so while I might not own a home or a car or anything besides a hot pink velveteen couch and a few porcelain Staffordshire dogs—who cares? 

I know who I am—thus everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

After I published the piece, I was on a self-aggrandizing post-writing high. I believed my own rhetoric so fiercely—I was certain my ideology could not be challenged even when faced with adversity. 

“It’s finally stuck, Luka,” I crooned to my dog mid-week as we mosied down Sunset Blvd. Luka looked at me unimpressed. He’s heard this jig before. “Whatever,” I murmured, “you’ll see.” We mosied toward home listening to Taylor Swift sing, “I love you, it’s ruining my life/I touch you, for only a fortnight.” 

People don’t realize that while writing can help you confront reality—it also leaves you completely in control of the narrative. So if you want something to be true you can write it to be true. I wanted *so* badly to believe I had shaken off the last remnants of the culture’s dumb ideas as to where I *should* be in my life vs. where I *actually* am—so I took to the page to convince myself I had. It’s not that I was lying in last week’s column—I wasn’t.

In that moment I fully believed I’d come out the other side. 

But just like we can kid ourselves into thinking the pores on our faces are non-existent by staring into filtered mirrors, we can also kid ourselves in our work by flexing our creative muscles. My word-smithery helped me pretend I’d drank my own Kool-Aid.

Which in turn temporarily anesthetized me from the pain of the real truth: deep down most days I’m still haunted by the belief that I’m a fucking failure.

If I didn’t deep down believe that I’m a fucking failure I wouldn’t have to write a long-winded essay convincing you (and me) otherwise. 

The next morning, even when life decided to throw some big, unexpected curveballs my way—curveballs that directly challenged all the progress I swore had occurred—the band-aid of my bullshit still worked beautifully.

“I’m FINE, this will NOT get to me,” I promised Luka, as I flat-ironed my hair for an event. Luka looked at me worriedly this time, his big brown eyes stretched open wide. “I said, MOMMY is FINE” I snapped into the bathroom mirror. Luka didn’t respond. He quietly pitter-patted into the kitchen to hump his lover, a stuffed sheep with peach-colored antlers. 

By day three the band-aid was starting to wear thin. But you better believe she wasn’t having it.

“Stay, the fuck on,” I gritted my teeth and pressed the weak fabric into my skin, “prove to me you’re not a band-aid, you’re my real skin, and there is no deep ugly wound you’re covering up—OKAY?”

Luka sighed and padded into the bedroom to gnaw on a Hello Kitty plush toy that had fallen onto the floor. I put my hands on my hips and stared at him. “Can you not throw it in my face that I’m in my late thirties and own not one but several Hello Kitty plush toys? Come on, Luke! I’m doing my best with the tools I have.” My voice was so shrill the paint on the walls began to chip.

By day five I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. You know when you’re so close to cracking, so you decide to double down on HOW FINE you are—except your performance of faux positivity is no longer convincing—on the contrary, it makes everyone concerned for you. Your grin is just a little too wide, your eyes hold court to a manic glint and your jaw is clenched so tight you look like you’ve just blown rails even though you haven’t—you just subconsciously know that if you release that jaw for half a second you’ll fall into a heap on the floor weeping for your mother. Yeah, that was me by day five.

“Everything happens for a reason,” I sing-songed to Luka before twirling out the front door, clicking it closed before I had the chance to take in his facial expression. Nothing is more honest than a dog and I needed delusion to get me through the night.  “Bye, Luka, be good,” I chirped from behind the safety of the artificially lit hall. 

The band-aid was hanging on by a thread and so was I. 

The next day I woke up and the band-aid was off. But I couldn’t worry about that because it was Sunday, you see and I just couldn’t stomach another Sad Sunday so I had no choice but to call in the big guns: wine and weed. I slurped back Sauvignon in the sunshine and let the feel-good chemicals coax me into temporary “okay-ness,” until I popped an edible into my mouth and fell into a deep nine-hour slumber.  

Cut to day seven. Oh, day seven! The best and worst thing about getting older is that drinking to numb doesn’t work anymore. The next day I’m physically unable to buy band-aids so I’m forced to confront the damn wound whether I want to or not.

By which I mean, I woke up and intrinsically knew that the breakdown was coming whether I wanted her to or not. 

By four p.m. I found myself in fetal position on my hot pink velveteen couch teetering between bouts of guttural sobbing and a slew of the vintage panic attacks I suffered from in my early twenties—you know? The kind where your arm goes tingly and your face goes numb and your symptoms become eerily stroke-like?  When my heart wasn’t off to the races and my eyeballs weren’t two feverishly rushing waterfalls I was paralyzed. A prisoner of my own caging thoughts. 

You’ve royally fucked up. You’ve got nothing to show for yourself. You would be a joke but no one even knows who you are. You’re a broke piece of shit. You own nothing! Not even your clothes. You RENT THE RUNWAY you dumb bitch. It’s happened. You’re officially a no-good loser who will never have kids and will die ALONE. 

Listen. 

I understood, intellectually, that the entirety of my thought reel wasn’t necessarily true. After all, I’d quote prolifically dismissed them days prior. But these thoughts were in the body now and both my body and brain were too exhausted to fight them. Plus, I could tell that these terrible thoughts were untameable. Wild stallions that had been cooped up in captivity for far too long, and now that they were free, they were feral. Full of pent-up energy, needing to buck around and gallop through the emotional meadow. So I let them. 

And guess what? 

Eventually, the thoughts got tired. 

They fell asleep. 

As did I. 

The next morning I woke up as fresh as a daisy! 

Just kidding. 

The next morning I woke up with a “feelings hangover.” 

You know when you finally let yourself bawl over all the traumas and heartbreaks and disappointments you’ve been repressing? And they all manifest in the form of one giant tidal wave of a breakdown that you don’t even try to control because even you—Queen of Toxic Positivity—know you can’t control a tidal wave of a breakdown. So you’re left with no choice but to let the deadly pull of Mother Nature do what it will with you? 

And the next day you wake up and even though you haven’t had a drop of Sauvignon, your mouth is so dry you feel like cotton balls have been stuffed inside of it, and your eyes feel like peroxide has been poured inside of them, your face is so puffy you can move it around like pizza dough—and you’re tired? Like tired deep down in your bone marrow? That was me on day eight. It was a strange day. I felt like I was slogging through a London fog. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. It was cozy in a blurry way. An overcast, drizzly day of the body and soul, so to speak.

Cut to today, day nine. I woke up with deep, guttural pangs of grief. But as I globbed mascara onto my eyelashes and smeared lipstick over my mouth—the pangs softened. By three p.m. they were gone. As I began writing this, exactly one hour ago, they resurfaced, briefly—but not in an alarming way. In a way that let me know what I experienced, this emotional exorcism, was indeed, real and justified. 

Because here’s what I’ve learned young kittens: if the purge is too quick and too easy, it’s often not a ~deep~ purge. When the purge is unearthing the feelings that cut the deepest—the ghosts of those feelings linger for a hot minute. And then those ghosts start sending little messages to a surplus of even more repressed emotions that have been in hiding inside of you, telling them it’s safe for them to come out. One sob about one thing triggers another sob about another thing and before you know it you’re crying over shit that happened so long ago you forgot it happened. 

That’s where I am now and I’ve accepted I’ll be here for a while. And while it’s not comfortable to feel this raw—especially living in a new unfamiliar city—if I’m real with myself I wasn’t comfortable beforehand, either.

A band-aid might cover up a cut or a wound for a few days—but even if you go to the store and buy another one and another one and another one—it doesn’t protect you from the deep-rooted pain that lives beneath the surface of the skin. Moving through the world carrying around so much stuck grief in my body was like walking around with splinters in my feet—which is definitely not comfortable and definitely not how I want to live.

Maybe I convinced myself I wasn’t feeling the splinters, but every time I took a step I felt their wicked little pricks. And after a while, those wicked little pricks felt normal. It’s amazing what we can get used to.

But luckily two pliers in the form of a nervous breakdown came my way and got to work removing the splinters. As they’re pulled through my skin, it not only hurts like hell, it looks pretty damn gruesome too. 

But I also know, from experience, that the temporary agony of removing a splinter from your foot, is precisely what will set you free. I’m not out of the woods but I do feel the lightness of having removed something toxic and foreign from my body.

“How many times are you going to relearn this lesson?” Luka asked me, as I began to wrap up this piece. 

“Didn’t you know healing isn’t linear?” I lectured, looking up from my laptop.

“I’m glad I’m a dog,” he barked, wagging his tail, and falling into a blissful slumber.

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