I stared at my Klonopin bottle this morning when I was brushing my teeth and thought, Maybe I should toss that in my purse. I didn’t, but that moment of pause was the biggest piece of foreshadowing for the day.
Today should have been a trip to Connemara, but it failed. We (Juddy and I) made it as far as Galway, which in itself was not a bad thing: I visited my favourite salon and got some beauty treatment done for the hot weather I’m expecting when I touch down in Pittsburgh next week (can’t show myself in public with hairy legs, obviously), and I got to show Juddy one of the best spots for breakfast food, Pura Vida.
Beyond that it was a nightmare. For some reason the city — the static, the noise, the bustle, the queues — freaked me out and put me on edge so badly, that, when coupled with my sudden horror at realising my expenses for my final week were higher than I thought, sent me into a full-blown anxiety attack.
It was all I could do to keep the hyperventilating at bay. Juddy stopped at a hardware store and I stayed in the truck with my eyes closed, taking calming breaths. I don’t know what it is about the city. I used to love it, especially when it comes to a comparatively small city like Galway. Just enough people to make me happy; just enough interesting shops and good food smells and street performers to put me in a genuinely positive state of mind. Today, it yielded the complete opposite.
I’ve been in the country too long, I think. I hate to say that, since “too” implies an excess; it makes one think that what I’m getting too much of will slowly kill me, or affect me negatively in some way, and somehow I fail to see how the countryside could give me anything but good. Were it not for my mountain of school debt and the fact that I want, one day, to see my parents again, I might be persuaded to find a waitress or farm job and stay here forever.
My mind has gone quiet here, except for when I think of the city and all its problems. All the static; oh my God! The close proximity of so many people with all of their hopes and anxieties and irritation and to-do lists; it seeps into my space and sets off my mind and it starts to rotate faster and faster until I want to scream.
I wanted to scream in the truck, as I sat waiting for my friend to roll his fag and light it before starting up the car. A Polish child was banging toy cymbals and carrying on in the backseat of the car parked next to us, and its mother was giving out to it; I could pluck out the meanings of several words but was mostly set off by the cross tones, her frustration and her child’s insolence.
And the city has other things, too: traffic, construction noises, car horns, in general, the sudden, blaring, mechanised noises mixed in with the shouting of adults who know better and children who don’t. In the city you queue up for everything and everyone is just impatient and distracted. In the city I have my mobile phone and I am obsessed with Instagram, Facebook, and text messages; I must always have my finger on the trigger — I’m sorry, I meant pulse — and so, queued up at the pharmacy or the grocery store I scroll madly with one thumb and crane my neck and jut my stomach in that horrible pose that inevitably happens when hanging a shopping basket from one hand and leaning in closely to an LCD screen in your free, cupped palm.
There’s more self-loathing in the city, I think. I never check my make-up here. I put it on, sure; I’ll never deny that the cows and dogs and swallows see my made-up eyes more than humans do, six out of seven days of the week to be sure. But I never check it. I never once shove my hand into my purse and whip out my compact. I focus on one thought at a time here, or okay, maybe two, but never ten. Never twelve or thirteen.
At the end of a yoga practice you retreat into shivasana, the corpse pose. You relax your limbs, un-clench your fingers, loosen your jaw, and let your eyeballs sink into your skull. The point is to seal a practice, and to absorb it. Every instructor I’ve ever had tells the room to absorb that day’s practice and take it with all of us, out into the stressful and terrifying world. And when I roll onto my side, regaining my sense of body, I cling so desperately to my practice that I could cry, praying with fervor that somehow, this time, I can just carry it with me for the rest of time and never let it go.
Inevitably, in a day’s time, with a frustrating customer at work, on the phone with my mum, when I drop a raw egg onto my kitchen floor, hell, even when I bolt out of the studio and someone in front of me is just walking too goddamn slow, poof! Off it goes — the experience flutters away and I’m left defeated, watching the balloon bob in the air and fly up, higher and higher, until it’s out of sight.
Absorb your practice. I can absorb everyone else’s moods, feelings, and emotions. Why can’t I hold onto something innately and wholly good for once?
I found myself fatigued by the time we got to my flat. I had bought a box of assorted Lindt chocolates and we ate half of the box together with zero concern for our figures. (Not that Juddy ever cares; it’s really me that I’m talking about; me and my brash and appalling sugar-fast-cheating.) Anxiety does that though; it wears you out so that you can barely move to make a positive change. I considered napping. I checked my e-mail. I found a project that needed revising, so I worked on that and re-submitted it a few hours later. Gradually, I was able to convince myself to work out, so I looked up an abdominal workout online with a difficulty level of three, and I kicked the shit out of my core, because I was so terribly naughty with the European chocolate.
As I write this, I’ve paused to stand up and throw the rest of the box into the freezer. No more indulging until Sunday. It’s common knowledge that God forgives calories on His Day.
As I near the end of my night — it’s definitely an early bedtime kind of night — I am too tired to come up with solutions for my city anxiety. How will I cope in my own city when I return to the chaos of major human population? If I was going home to New York I would be slitting my wrists in the shower stall by now. I’ve become completely susceptible to the world.
The one shining beacon at the end of my dark tunnel of pending unemployment in Olga’s Real Life: I don’t have to talk to anyone. I can hole up in my flat and work on art projects. I can sing. I can run. Or I can be perfectly still.
Tomorrow I’ll devise a survival plan/coping mechanism/to-do list. Tonight, I make a cup of lavender white tea and finish my May issue of Vogue. Tonight I feel sorry for myself. Tomorrow I’ll try to fix it.
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