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In Most Mental Illness The Capacity To Relax Is As Much Impaired As The Integrity Of A Bone Destroyed By A Fracture.**
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For a woman with agoraphobia, I did really well today. I’d planned on going to the library and getting a book, and then my mother called and said she needed drugs and money, so I added CVS and the bank to my list. Oh, and bread, and half-and-half. That added the grocery.
When she called I was watching WETV, some Danielle Steele thing, and I already knew what was going to happen. (At the happy couple’s wedding, a Spitfire flew over the wedding party. That means the groom was going to die in the upcoming war.) That part was OK. The part I was having trouble with was the bride stumbling upon a deserted French chateau, and her falling in love with it and wanting to fix it up. Not that I mind people fixing up old houses, but it was exhausting me just thinking about imaginary people fixing up an imaginary house. So I went over to my mother’s to get the check.
I told my mother that I think the definition of depression is having so little emotional energy, you can’t even watch imaginary people do renovations on an imaginary house, and she laughed and agreed and said she feels the same way. The whole idea of wanting to do something so labor-intensive seems insane.
And then we agreed that the reason it’s so hard to clean house is the decision-making that’s involved. "Should this thing be kept or gotten rid of? If kept, where should it go? If gotten rid of, does that mean thrown away, donated, recycled—? I need to lie down now."
This is why I’m good at washing dishes and clothes. They’re very specific tasks. I know how to wash a plate, how to put it in the drainer to dry, how to put it away when it is dry. I know where it goes. And I can tell when the job is complete. (Though I will say that a great deal of the time, that last step, the putting away step, doesn’t get done with either clothes or dishes. I live out of the drainer and the laundry basket, as did my mother before me, and her mother before her.)
But general stuff eludes me. It can take me days to tidy up my desk at work. I’ll be doing just fine, then suddenly the part of my brain that knows what to do with things will overload and I’ll have to quit. If I can’t quit, I’ll go into panic mode and just sit there, moving things around, hoping no one notices that I’m not actually doing anything. Or I’ll start to cry. And how do you explain to your boss that the part of your brain that does what she’s asking you to do has locked up and can’t be accessed at the moment?
There are reasons I’m a mess, and some of them are laziness, self-indulgence, and a certain apathy about how things look. But those aren’t the only reasons. There’s really something in my head that doesn’t seem to work right where cleaning is concerned.
Anyway, today I rode my bike several miles, some of them uphill. I got all the things I was supposed to get, ran all the errands I was supposed to run. I was productive, and I was out of the house, and most of the time, I wasn't thinking about how badly I wanted to get back home.
I started writing this on June 10, 2008, and never finished or posted it (as far as I can tell). My house is still as messy, and now I have a cat who doesn't help matters at all. (She's raiding my shadow boxes for toys.) My agoraphobia is worse, mostly due to my house being broken into once, and Patrick's now three times. (The last time was yesterday.) I've come to realize that the decision-making problem extends to shopping, so I talk to myself in a low, gentle tone and try to relax myself, but there are so many mistakes to be made! And with food it's all mistakes, or mistakes waiting to happen, it's stuff that isn't good for me, or stuff that is good for me but will probably go bad before I eat it. I shop with the twin ideas that I'll still be the same person as when I bought it, and that I'll be somebody better and with more focus and energy, someone who will know what to do with a pomegranate or a bunch of radishes. Shopping is always aspiring to be someone else, or at least myself only better, and I nearly always let myself down.
The good part is, I know that now. I can work on it, or work around it.
*I like the word stricken. I like to think that I've been stricken with agoraphobia, if I have to have it at all. There's at least some poetry to it.
**Abraham Myerson
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For a woman with agoraphobia, I did really well today. I’d planned on going to the library and getting a book, and then my mother called and said she needed drugs and money, so I added CVS and the bank to my list. Oh, and bread, and half-and-half. That added the grocery.
When she called I was watching WETV, some Danielle Steele thing, and I already knew what was going to happen. (At the happy couple’s wedding, a Spitfire flew over the wedding party. That means the groom was going to die in the upcoming war.) That part was OK. The part I was having trouble with was the bride stumbling upon a deserted French chateau, and her falling in love with it and wanting to fix it up. Not that I mind people fixing up old houses, but it was exhausting me just thinking about imaginary people fixing up an imaginary house. So I went over to my mother’s to get the check.
I told my mother that I think the definition of depression is having so little emotional energy, you can’t even watch imaginary people do renovations on an imaginary house, and she laughed and agreed and said she feels the same way. The whole idea of wanting to do something so labor-intensive seems insane.
And then we agreed that the reason it’s so hard to clean house is the decision-making that’s involved. "Should this thing be kept or gotten rid of? If kept, where should it go? If gotten rid of, does that mean thrown away, donated, recycled—? I need to lie down now."
This is why I’m good at washing dishes and clothes. They’re very specific tasks. I know how to wash a plate, how to put it in the drainer to dry, how to put it away when it is dry. I know where it goes. And I can tell when the job is complete. (Though I will say that a great deal of the time, that last step, the putting away step, doesn’t get done with either clothes or dishes. I live out of the drainer and the laundry basket, as did my mother before me, and her mother before her.)
But general stuff eludes me. It can take me days to tidy up my desk at work. I’ll be doing just fine, then suddenly the part of my brain that knows what to do with things will overload and I’ll have to quit. If I can’t quit, I’ll go into panic mode and just sit there, moving things around, hoping no one notices that I’m not actually doing anything. Or I’ll start to cry. And how do you explain to your boss that the part of your brain that does what she’s asking you to do has locked up and can’t be accessed at the moment?
There are reasons I’m a mess, and some of them are laziness, self-indulgence, and a certain apathy about how things look. But those aren’t the only reasons. There’s really something in my head that doesn’t seem to work right where cleaning is concerned.
Anyway, today I rode my bike several miles, some of them uphill. I got all the things I was supposed to get, ran all the errands I was supposed to run. I was productive, and I was out of the house, and most of the time, I wasn't thinking about how badly I wanted to get back home.
I started writing this on June 10, 2008, and never finished or posted it (as far as I can tell). My house is still as messy, and now I have a cat who doesn't help matters at all. (She's raiding my shadow boxes for toys.) My agoraphobia is worse, mostly due to my house being broken into once, and Patrick's now three times. (The last time was yesterday.) I've come to realize that the decision-making problem extends to shopping, so I talk to myself in a low, gentle tone and try to relax myself, but there are so many mistakes to be made! And with food it's all mistakes, or mistakes waiting to happen, it's stuff that isn't good for me, or stuff that is good for me but will probably go bad before I eat it. I shop with the twin ideas that I'll still be the same person as when I bought it, and that I'll be somebody better and with more focus and energy, someone who will know what to do with a pomegranate or a bunch of radishes. Shopping is always aspiring to be someone else, or at least myself only better, and I nearly always let myself down.
The good part is, I know that now. I can work on it, or work around it.
*I like the word stricken. I like to think that I've been stricken with agoraphobia, if I have to have it at all. There's at least some poetry to it.
**Abraham Myerson