Being a problem is better than Xanax

I’ve written a lot about loneliness. Recently, I decided “gender” would be this newsletter’s main focus. It’s always been my diary wherein I also rant about politics, economics, culture, and social science. And it’ll continue to be primarily that. But I also want to do this full-time and that’s a pretty hard niche to market. Plus, creativity thrives under constraint. Plus plus, no one is going to shoot me if I write about something other than gender. Plus plus plus, I feel confident in my ability to relate anything I’d want to write about to gender.

I’ve always been really interested in gender, even if I wouldn’t have said it that way. From a very young age I was obsessed with sex, men, purity culture, and feminism.

Anyway, this weekend was baby’s first girls’ trip.

A perfect place, if there ever was one, for thinking about loneliness and gender.

Going in, I was so damn tired. Almost as soon as I landed after the nannying experiment the election did not go my way. 

I was sad. And scared. I do not know how bad things are going to get for everyone. 

I waited to see if I’d have symptoms of the sickness everyone had at my sister’s house. I wondered if I should cancel even if I was physically well. Everyone would get a cheaper trip without having to deal with me. I had anxiety about how much social anxiety I would have, being in a house full of women I don’t know well. Plus, I thought, these women live in Huntsville so they probably won’t like me. It’s been hard to make friends here. Between that and the car-dependence and main industries, I figured that even if, by some miracle, there is some mutual affinity it won’t really matter because I’m planning to move to D.C. before long anyway. 

I literally had to tell myself that in the likely worst-case scenario I would just go outside and read books on the porch with a view of the mountains. Plus, like I said, I’d already paid for my share of the Gatlinburg “cabin” (mansion with woodsy decor on a mountainside).

What actually happened I did not see coming.

There was, let me just say, interpersonal drama. It’s a boring story, honestly. Imagine some Real Housewives behavior on an otherwise fairly Leave It To Beaver trip. The important part, for our purposes, is that the woman who drove me up ended up leaving early without making sure I had another way home and is, as of this writing, still not speaking to me. To be fair, I had mentioned on the ride up that Rob had offered to come get me if necessary. Thankfully, I was able to get a ride back with one of the two other women who offered to take me home.

But, I was rattled.

When I tried to look at my situation objectively, I could see I was very likely very safe. But my body and the other parts of my brain didn’t seem to fully agree with that assessment. 

Maybe it was the elevation. Maybe it was something I ate or drank or didn’t eat or drink. I’m sure the exhaustion and the election and the drama did not help. Whatever it was, I had a headache that four ibuprofen and two excedrin and coffee and untold oz of water could not touch. I took a walk, which sometimes helps. One of the women (who I hoped would want to be my friend afterwards) told me a dark shower helps her and her kids. That did help. But once the head calmed down then my stomach really started to hurt.

Overall, I suspect my brain had simply decided that it was time for me to feel my feelings. My therapist told me that sometimes our brains send our bodies physical pain when we refuse to acknowledge unpleasant emotions. It’s like how you might throw rocks at a window when knocking on the door doesn’t work. Sometimes my emotions show up as headaches and stomach and back pain until I experience and accept the rejection, sadness, and/or fear behind them.

I wasn’t really in any danger. I mean, of ostracization, maybe. Not everyone on the trip agrees with me, politically or spiritually. I was honestly so grateful for the “no politics” rule for the trip. I was so over talking about the election. At the same time, that did leave me without a lot to talk about.

I felt afraid to walk around upstairs. I didn’t want the other women to see my face all puffy and red from sobbing and feel like they needed to comfort or avoid me. I was afraid they would think I’m dramatic/unstable/needy.

I got in my bunk bed and did the breathing exercises my therapist recommended. I cried and tried to feel my feelings and breathe into the pain instead of avoiding it.

As my muscles started to relax and my stomach started moving again, I began to think about the difference between depression and anxiety. 

Most people who have depression or anxiety have both, from what I’ve read.

But I and most of my friends and family seem to have a lot more of one than the other.

My mom struggles with anxiety, but depression is definitely her main thing. If you couldn’t already tell, I struggle with anxiety. I only get mildly depressed. I usually don’t realize it until afterward. Boredom is my main clue. I lose interest in all my TV shows, websites, books, and podcasts. I’ve never had a major depressive episode. I still washed my hair and looked for a job and saw my friends when I was most into the idea of kms.

Laying in bed in pain, I decided that anxiety is the fear of bad outcomes. This fear can be catalyzing or paralyzing.

Lately, I’ve been pretty paralyzed by anxiety.

If I were more depressed, maybe I’d feel and do nothing about the fact that it would probably really behoove me to dramatically increase my earnings. But my anxiety has me running scenarios. “If I do X, then this, this, and this will likely happen. If I do Y,...” etc. It’s not a bad idea to do this before making a decision. But since every available path toward making more money that I’ve been able to see has significant downsides I just run essentially identical scenarios over and over again in my head for much of every day.

This is not limited to major life moves for me. I run and re-run scenarios about when and how to tell everyone on the trip that the food I brought got warmer than I planned for it to in the car on the ride up and so it is probably safe, but might not be.

I go back and forth about whether I should change clothes in the bathroom instead of the shared room. (I chose the latter because nudity is not shameful). It has me wondering what I should say about the drama. If I tell everyone exactly what happened as far as I know, will the woman who organized the trip get mad at me for stirring up drama? Will these women think I’m a backstabber and a gossip? Will they worry that I’ll speak badly of them behind their backs? If I don’t give details, will everyone assume that I did something terrible that I don’t want to divulge?

Anxiety makes me want to make moves to avoid danger. But it doesn’t come with any wisdom about what to do. And it saps the energy and strength I need to actually make a choice.

Now, one might assume that all of this anxiety at least meant that I was always super conscientious and put everyone at ease all the time and was always super helpful and fun and empathetic. But no!

Not only am I not having as good a time as I could be if I were less worried, but for all my worry, I still piss people off and make a bad impression and am inexcusably thoughtless and rude on a very regular basis! It’s funny how often the people most obsessed with not being a problem for other people end up being the biggest problems for other people. 

Then, I had a think about depression. I’ve always been very afraid of major depression. I’ve always been very afraid of being a problem for other people. 

I thought about my friends who suffer with depression but say they’re never anxious. And I thought, lying in bed wallowing in my own pain and sadness, that these friends are actually so anxious about what to do next that they’re paralyzed. They’re so afraid of what they might feel that they become numb to everything. I thought that if anxiety provides a strong urge to make (or at least consider) moves, depression is the strong conviction that there is no move that’s both available and worth making. Depression says “The likelihood of success is too low to justify the resources you’d have to spend to try anything.”

I considered the possible pressures under which depression might have evolved. Maybe it increases the likelihood the species will survive. It doesn’t seem to help the organism very much. 

If anxiety is about avoiding danger, the sufferer must have some hope to feel it. Maybe depression is what people experience without that hope. 

I could see how depression might be adaptive. Maybe depression evolved on the ancestral plane, when everyone is living on the edge of survival. There were probably times when a person asking for help would have just made group extinction more likely. Throwing scarce resources at a person who’s going to die no matter what probably doesn’t increase everyone else’s chances.

Laying in bed, suffering, I thought, “We’re not on the ancestral plane.”

There’s actually a ton of food upstairs. Me asking for help isn’t likely to be a life-or-death situation for anyone, much less our whole tribe. 

My anxiety tells me that I can’t be a problem for anyone. My depression tells me that nothing available to me is going to work out. So I go back to running my options.

“I think I want to be a problem for other people,” I said to myself, laughing.

Because, otherwise, what is the dang point? Let’s say I live a hundred years and never annoy anyone or inconvenience anyone. Imagine that no one ever says “Cathy brought spoiled food to the girls’ trip. What a dumb, annoying bitch.” What will I have accomplished then? Who, truly, the fuckeroonie cares?

Then and there, I resolved that being “low-drama” is not a life goal of mine. 

Besides, often trying not to burden other people actually burdens them more. I haven't asked the married couple I wrote about recently, but I bet if I did they would say they worry about me less since I resolved to stop pulling away when I was hurting and instead just say that I’m having a hard time. One of my sisters has certainly said as much.

Before I laid down, I’d called that sister. She called me back as I was trying to write. I laid on the floor in the dark in the office and cried, letting her be there for me. She listened, affirmed, and understood my sensory issues, even though she doesn’t share them. She creates sensory issues for me most of the time, if we’re being real. But in the space of a ten-minute phone call where I felt emotionally seen and held, my head started to feel better. 

Maybe humans evolved depression for survival. But we definitely evolved for social bonds. We are meant to be and solve each others’ problems. I think we are the meaning of each others’ lives. 

I might even be so bold as to venture to guess that people in individualistic, wealthy, western societies suffer disproportionately from depression and anxiety at least in part because we are too disconnected from our evolved need for deep interdependence.

I really think that the most potent antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication I’ve found, besides maybe exercise, is choosing to be a problem for other people. It’s calling my sister crying. It’s letting my mom be there for me. It’s texting my friend that I’m having a hard time instead of just going silent. It’s walking around the cabin with a red, puffy face. It’s telling the entire room that I’m on the girls trip because making friends, especially women, is and has always been hard for me. 

Depression and anxiety flare up when I do not or cannot ask for help. They thrive off the belief that it’s important that I not bother or burden other people. If I’m right, and this tendency helped ensure their survival, then I guess I’m glad some humans chose not to be pains in my ancestors’ asses. 

But today, most of us are surviving. Too few of us are thriving. I’m not sure “Never be a problem” is all that helpful an instinct anymore. 

After I admitted I was lonely in the circle, a few other women said that they were too. By the end of the trip, I had some leads on jobs I could do from home. More importantly, as I told a little circle of women sitting near the hot tub, I left this weekend feeling less certain that I absolutely must leave Huntsville to be okay.

I found women in Huntsville I’d love to befriend. I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to do, or when, in terms of next steps. Regardless, I’m pretty committed to trying harder to be a bigger problem for other people, and finding people who are willing to be a problem for me.

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