Waiting for the maids, maybe, planning on not freaking out, planning on clearly explaining my cleaning needs, planning on staying and keeping comfortable and not paranoid. My good friend Goldie from the dog park told me she didn’t really notice anything until suicidal depression spells. My mother stood bottomless under her t-shirt in front of the open freezer door at night. The sweating, the softening, the dumbening, the stink of pre-decomp- my many physical changes distinguish themselves in their demand to be noticed. Less (helpfully) visible is my upticking paranoia.
I’m always dismayed by cheap comparisons of paranoia to fright show fear. OCD is not cleaning counters and malignant paranoia is not easily startled.
To be clear, I am not malignant by nature but malignant by virtue of my father’s lessons, who himself was, in fact, malignant. Is that a distinction without a difference? The work of my life to date is saying no. I am innately capable of recognizing the peaceful and rapid end of a paranoid state as within my best interest. I can think my way through the steps of de-arousal, and I can feel the vale of relief such compassion brings me.
It is succumbing to this natural tendency that I am conditioned against.
Unlearning, again, is a cheap comparison. I just have to go through all of the steps. The good ones and the bad ones. Every beat of the ballet. Every single time I get paranoid. Every single time I believe dread beyond all else. And that’s okay. Actually. It has been okay.
So far.
Sort of.
The last many years in Maine. Alone, in poverty, unable to permit malignant thinking because I could not afford it Another set of hardwires-the rich may be bad, money evades capture, don’t tell on yourself, don’t get caught. I relied upon my woman’s body to work hard and well to do my job and care for my pets and keep us all safe and alive. The woman’s body is not an insubstantial instrument.
Capricious conduct leads to poor outcomes. Shallow apprehension wastes good models.
Stay deep. Keep tight.
When I had nothing, the potential of my woman’s body was everything that I had, and everything I had to take care of.
That meant reckoning the weight and wrinkles and wetness and cramps and clots and crime scene blood, the bruises and breaks from thinning bones, the loss of direction (sense of, what little I had) and the bouts of growing helpless fury.
It meant looking at men’s magazines for muscle building and preservation, nutrition and pharmacology schedules for foods high in the stuff women lose to age, comediennes I knew were old like Joan Rivers.
It meant remembering a lot of times throughout the day some shred of menipause troof about belly fat aprons, golf ball skin, Doc Brown gigawatt grays, Ron Swanson peach pelts, and Slim Jim labia.
It meant a parade of unbidden sloagans. Hang In There, Baby! Save The TaTas! Wine O Clock! If Momma Ain’t Happy Ain’t Nobody Happy! I’m Retaining Water For Princess Kate! When it comes to de-barbing the horror show of this rusting mortal coil, I bear arms.
But the paranoia comes up behind my back. It comes up in swells and soaks down the shore before I turn around, and as it rushes back out it digs me in to my ankles and I’m staring at the plethora of different sized holes unseen sand crabs blow in the wake of the wave plus the riptide desperate as lynching every time and this ever ready everywhere roar nothing like the dozens hundreds millions in the sand underwater underneath me nearly drowned nearly buried there is no way out for them do they even know why are they even here they can never escape the ocean it’s a trap it’s all a trap I am strangling I am drowning everything is all around me what it sounds does not match what I see I am stuck I am drug I am in danger YOU ARE MY ENEMY. WHERE ARE YOU ENEMY. I WILL KILL YOU ENEMY. YOU WILL NOT GET ME ENEMY.
Mid-life-mid-bod thickening is, by definition, easy to see. Plenty knit shrugs. Plenty chevron caftans. Plenty swims, Pilates. Plenty peaceful shields.
Against the meniparanoia, so far, and alas, have I none.
Update: maids arrived before 5pm and provided a three figure estimate for a monthly deep clean. We will fight the dust come Friday.