My Mental Breakdown Over Nothing.

I manufacture things. I really think that’s the best word for it. I manufacture circumstances and experiences. A gentler person might say curate, might highlight my tendency as a gift to be able to recognize my power over my circumstances. But, to be totally candid I’ve spent most of my life doing everything in my power to control, create and execute on how I think a forecasted chain of events ought to play out. 

I say this with all of the love in the world for my parents, but as the only child of two very divorced people – I grew up quickly. I grew up pretty much exclusively surrounded by adults, and most of those adults were balancing a life with a tough origin story usually dulled by the use of drugs or alcohol. In sobriety, often those emotional scars and issues still remain. So, I learned to control. I learned the parameters it was safe to be with in and how I ought to manage my emotional expression to ensure I didn’t create ripples around me to impact those closest. 

Over the years, this manifested as demanding perfection on essentially all fronts. I learned how to read and run a room, I understood how to create and spend relationship capital and how to present myself to any given audience I found myself in front of (back to the gentler person who might find this type of behavior a valuable tool). For me I found myself becoming a bit too much of a chameleon and often times feeling less and less like myself.

This recognition became fuel for the internal work I’ve pushed myself through over the last handful of years and basically within a week I felt it all start to crumble. Here’s where my mental breakdown over nothing comes in.

It started with a decision to spend a month back in Southern California so I could see my family during the pandemic, we found a house, packed the car to the gills with puppy supplies, golf clubs, office equipment and clothes. We shared with our teams the plan to work remotely (or more remotely) for the month. We prepared to brave the Route 66 road trip across 5 days with snacks and la Croix’s and then a couple of days before departure, my purse was snatched as I sat eating lunch. I rushed to see which DMV I could sneak into for a replacement ID to no avail before our departure. Coincidentally, this was also a couple of days before I was due to return my leased vehicle. Our purse snatcher also managed to take one of my key fobs along with the wallet.

As I’m sure you’re aware by now, I’m a rule follower by nature. Shocker, I know. I was starting to feel that familiar itch of something being off when we were about to drive across the country and I didn’t have and ID, and that I needed to now return an incomplete leased vehicle. I’ll take this opportunity to readdress the fact that neither of these things are really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but you know, rule follower, perfectionist, out of my control, these things really get to me. Remember, it’s a mental break down about nothing.

This year has presented our global population with unrelenting chronic stress. We’re facing a pandemic which continues to open and close our economies, unemployment, civic unrest, media channels designed to attract viewers rather than communicate a narrative rooted in reality, and the cherry on top is devastating natural disasters associated with climate change rattling the planet.

 In response, the human brain is carrying additional weight of decision exhaustion during a pandemic where we all must reevaluate how we interact socially in literally every aspect of interactions. We historically would be able to rely on our schemas of how certain experiences work, we can make assumptions on what to expect and take comfort in the consistency. I hope you’re hearing my love for control in these words. We’re all exhausted and from my experience with people over the last 30 years, exhaustion doesn’t really make us behave particularly well. We have this extra weight for our brains to carry coupled with the loss of many celebrations, milestones and events we normally enjoy together as people.

I underestimated the impact 5 days in the car with a dog who also requires a seat up front, the lack of movement, the additional of booze and the flailing attempt to work remotely from the front seat would have. As we walked into our rental house, and I explained to Ben that houses on the California coast typically don’t have air conditioning, I felt the dam begin to break. 

Another shocking revelation about me, I’m sure, is my resistance to express emotion in any vulnerable way. Especially in front of the man who knows everything about me (I can hear his eye roll from across the room). I was back in my hometown, prepared to curate the perfect experience for our and my visit with my parents and we were already sweating in the swamp of the house we’d just walked into. On day two, with a Whole Foods run, Target run and Trader Joe’s run all under my belt already I was berating myself for not being set up with a Pilates studio yet.

And I finally snapped. I felt the weight of my real fears coming to the surface, this trip might also present some difficult conversations with my aging parents, it might also be a month where work is harder because this isn’t our home and we don’t control the wifi, I also can’t control the weather and the fact that smoke from the wild fires ravaging California is seeping in through the open sliding glass door. I can’t control it. I can’t control if I have emotional baggage and if my chosen partner sees it. I’ve tried to control it and manufacture it and make it take the exact form I want it to for so many years. And I can’t. If you’re like me and you feel the need to be perfect. It can feel so exhausting, wanting to be flexible and feeling surges of anxiety and then punishing yourself for feeling that anxiety becomes a cyclical trap.

Let yourself lose it. Let yourself feel what it really is. I could care less about a wallet or key fob or dead leg from the dog sitting with you for a few thousand miles, but I care and I strive so hard for the control. I care about the control. But it’s not real, things you manufacture can break (and frankly, probably will because they’re not genuine). As I try to pull myself back together after my mental breakdown (over nothing) I am grateful that my challenges are things I can poke fun at. We’re dealing with such heaviness as a global people, don’t let your need for control kill your ability to look up and realize you’re sitting at the beach with your favorite person and your pup who just wants to sit in your lap (but really, all of the time).