#I don’t want to be an overachiever increasing expectations for my fellow interns

[in-tua-deep]

You know those posts that talk about doing work now as a favor for “future you”?

Apparently I am immune to that! My stupid adhd ass is like a border collie! Has to have a job and be doing stuff! So I have been doing my work promptly. I have been proactively doing my stuff that needs done before winter!

This is apparently not a favor. Now I am a border collie who has finished all the jobs and is starting to look at the furniture very speculatively…

[theteej]

“You need to take serious time for yourself, do self-care, or something,” my best friend Mark said to me, uncomfortably earnestly. 

“I’m serious.  You haven’t been letting anything in, and you just have to sit and stop running.  Go process, or feel, or just let it sink in that you did things and you surprisingly don’t suck.”

Fuck, he’s right.

And so that’s what I’m doing.  Last week I booked an Airbnb in La Jolla, a tony coastal enclave of San Diego near where I went to undergrad.  I pretended I was on vacation, but in a pandemic.  I booked a small studio near the water, and planned to spend these next few days reading, reflecting, walking along the ocean, and staying otherwise indoors and trying to wrestle with this whole semester.  I pulled up to the studio last night, unpacked my bags, and cried.  Like cried a lot.  I felt lonely and scared, but also so numb.  I felt a sea of blankness all around me, and a sense of trepidation.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about all of my stupid feelings.

 

Where to start?

 

I feel like I’ve been anxious nearly my whole life.  It’s absolutely something that developed as a kid with a violent, drunken father.  You learn to live in between heartbeats like that, always testing what’s about to happen, trying to think of the next thing to plan in order to stay safe.  Sure, your brain says tauntingly.  Things are OK right now, but what if they’re not in a few minutes?  Or even worse: Things ARE terrible—what are you going to do if they stay that way forever?  These are the gifts Tyrone Tallie Sr left me, along with an unoriginal legal name and a stubborn widows peak visible whenever I grow my hair out for a few weeks.

Couple that with a natural tendency to think quickly, and you have the birth of a personality that masked my calculating self-security by turning those constant permutations into clever moments for interaction or comment.  Like many people, my wit is born of trauma; the ability to process things in quick time is born out of needing to feel safe, and frequently gets deployed to put others at ease.  That’s one of the weirder contradictory things about being me.  I am simultaneously witty and clever and in control, and I am also always quietly freaking out, or at the very least, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Which is why this has been….a damn semester.  Teaching two classes fully remotely with panicked, overwhelmed students in the shadow of an ever-worsening pandemic that stretches on and on without end and feeling daily gaslighted by the endless selfishness of your fellow citizens—what a gift for the anxious.  Ironically, anxiety helped to a certain extent because I didn’t have the shock of falling into a new world of uncertainty or fear that so many non-anxious folk did this year.  But that’s hardly a gift, is it?  Congratulations! You’re already living as if a bomb can go off at any moment, so you’re not struggling to adjust to the new horror show of life!

Teaching this semester has been…just without any context.  I’ve taught online, but not in this same planned way and with everyone panicking, and the looming threat of pandemic and election.  And yet we did it.  We pulled ourselves together, and my students were honest about their needs and their breakdowns and I tried to model humility and grace and confusion and rage as well as they did.  We didn’t fuck it up.  Or, we all fucked up, and it was okay.  We learned things. Students surprised me, and it was glorious.  I got to be broken and I didn’t die.

It was an intense semester of overworking as well.  I was on a bunch of committees, formal and informal, and we managed to get a new minor—African Studies—passed.  I’ll be heading a new program on campus next year, and that’s exciting and terrifying.  And on top of all of that, I couldn’t stop volunteering for stuff, or talking about things I cared about.  In addition to teaching, I gave fourteen different presentations or talks this semester, an increase in expectations or agreements on my part thanks to the ubiquity of zoom.  It grinds on you: the whole, get up, trudge to the back room, power up a personality for the zoom camera, and pour yourself digitally into a screen, only to feel yourself broken into little packets of light and data and scattered across the universe.

The talks went well.  The student evaluations went well.  Honestly, both were fucking great.  And I haven’t let myself feel a goddamn thing.  I let it slide off me like rain on a waxed deck, the droplets beading on the slick wood before slipping away into the darkness.  I cant let it sink in, because then something good might be happening, and the very skills that have made me capable—the whip-fast reflexes, the self-deprecating humour, the rapid analysis—are also tied to the very deep-seeded anxiety. Everything has to be calculated and understood and prepared for, because at some moment a dark curtain is going to fall over the face of a man with my same name. He will smack me so hard I will go flying out of a chair and hit the wall with a soft, sickly whump, a particularly unpleasant of me at seven that I carry sewn into every cell of my skin and fiber of my being. 

I can’t stop and let it sink in because I have internalized the worst calculus of overachiever life—push harder, don’t stop for the good, that’s normal.  Stop only for the bad to learn from it, take in its horror, and let it never happen to you again.  And so I found myself at the end of the semester holding a bag of relative joy like a party favour, looking around anxiously for bullies to come snatch it out of my hands.

And then Jeopardy fucking happened.

I got to be on television. I got to talk to Alex Trebek, the same man who held my grandmother’s hand on Classic Concentration and saw that her for the beautiful, formidable queen that she was. I got to turn silly trivia knowledge into cash—and I got to do it while being me. And to my confusion—people liked me.  It went well, they felt I resonated with something inside of them, and they liked it.

I do not, in my own skill set, have the tools to deal with that.  I am supposed to be clever and fast, and witty, and engaging and lovable—but I do not know how to actually think of receiving goodness.  I know how to process being witty and clever and delightful—I did what I was supposed to do, good job, next—but I don’t know how to actually take that positivity in.

I keep waiting for all of this to fall apart, for everyone to hate me in the reassuring ways that I distrust or marginalize or disbelieve myself.  And yet, I know that’s not helpful.  Hence, overachiever’s therapy: forcing oneself to prematurely trade on prize money and spend a three day love/relaxation retreat, less than fifteen miles from my own apartment.

I woke up and cried a little.  I then tried to mediate or at least focus on the positives of late.  Nope. Nothing came.  I decided it was time for coffee.  I drank some that I made in the Airbnb, but realized I needed to get outside for a walk.  I changed into a bright yellow caftan and an extra-dramatic face mask, and went for a walk on the streets of La Jolla, the bougie and strange bubble by the sea.

La Jolla can double in weird ways like other parts of the world I frequent.  It feels sometimes like I’m in Durban (if you’re more partial to Umhlanga Rocks or Durban North) or Wellington (if you love Mount Vic or Oriental Bay), or even Vancouver (if you feel like West Point Grey or the haughtiest parts of Kitsilano are your thing).  It’s a rich place, one that I don’t belong in, but one that I can feign a few hours of enjoyment and sun.

Today I walked down palm tree lined streets in the perfect weather, the breeze pushing through my still-short hair with a strange urgency.  I picked up a cold brew coffee and a freshly caught and grilled halibut sandwich that my therapist recommended (we decided to briefly be pescatarian for a day and chalked it up to the ‘medical advice.’), then I turned toward the coast.  I sat for a long time looking at the waves—unsurprisingly—with a bit of anxiety. 

What if I relaxed WRONG?  What if I couldn’t let myself feel joy?  What if I just wasted the day by…eating this sandwich and not fully appreciating the beautiful ocean waves, golden sun, or nature all around me.  After a while I realized that sounded ridiculous, and just forced myself to sit.

And as the old Zulu language dance song “Unamanga” by the late Patricia Majalisa started to filter to my headphones, as I stared out at the sea and the sun, something shifted.  I felt something like, I don’t know, a failure in the sealnt around myself, and some drops dripped in, slowly.  Maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to do this in a grand gesture.  I could enjoy myself and the small joys I’d found in life so far. 

I could be grateful and quietly glad for the little things that happened.  It wasn’t about deserving it, or about it being worthy of me.  I could imagine for right now, that this was a thing that I could have.  I could sit and marvel that some great shit happened to me, and it was OK.  Let’s not get it twisted—I didn’t have an epiphany, there were no turnbacks on the road to Emmaus.  But I did find a little quietude in my soul for a second and stopped frantically Teflon-ing my heart from joy for a second.

I survived a hell semester, and did well. I got a wonderful opportunity and it went well.  I could just let hat happen and also not ignore that it happened, to focus on negatives in an outsized way.  I could, in this single afternoon moment, be delighted that things had gone okay.  And not worry or strategize about the next disaster, which would happen on its own anyway.  And…that’s all I can do right now.

Also, I’m going to work on this more, this whole letting people love me and letting it sink in.  I usually avoid it because I feel like it keeps me off my game from the inevitable disaster to follow.  But that’s not how I want to live.  I’m going to try to think about what it means that some of you all tell me you love me, and then to show it.  I need to reconcile the nonstop whirligig of my mind also turns menacingly in on itself so often, and that acknowledging the gift of calculated wit and mirth also means I have to cultivate love and joy.

So tomorrow, I’m going to go for a brief run, I’m going to drink some lovely coffee, and I’m going to walk along the ocean again.  (And then I’m going to keep staying in this Airbnb so I don’t catch or spread this plague.)

 

What a fucking semester, y’all.