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It's been beautiful these last days of winter, sunny and expansive. Daffodils, little yawning purple crocuses, trees filled with chattering birds. At the grocery store as I stand in line with two grapefruits and a bag of coffee- Mountain Air Roaster's Daymaker Blend- I exchange those spring-time pleasantries with strangers-
looks like it's here to stay, sure hope so. On my daily commute to school I ride with the windows open, warm air roaring in. It's a nice time, filled with biking and science classes and writing assignments, long hours alone to get my work done and the occasional flurry of wedding planning.
But there's this little problem of not having
enough long hours, of being a chronically slow writer with an enormous fear of failure and confidence that drains instead of grows with each article, and it's making me throw up. It's not that I have
more to do or
less time than anyone else, far from it, it's just that I have a severe and very physical case of anxiety that arrives glittering at the doorstep just as life starts to get really interesting.
I have perhaps gotten myself a bit overexcited in the last few weeks. School is time consuming and sometimes feels poignantly pointless since I've decided not to pursuit nursing for now. Work is getting suddenly and awesomely demanding, just like I wanted it to be. Then I had a birthday party and my friend Nell brought over an enormous coconut cake that she had baked. It looked just like a sheep, and when I saw it I felt so happy I nearly passed out. I really got wound up over that cake.
Well it wasn't the cake (yes it was it was four layers and filled with pastry cream so it was, it was the cake) so much as having friends like Nell who are willing to bake you a sheep and then balance it in their lap as they drive it across town to your house. If you take into account how busy we all are, all the deadlines and demands and how intentional we must be with our spare time, things like that just seem extraordinarily and almost confoundingly
nice.
For the party, Nell also made five pizzas and her husband Josh brought over their entire fancy bar, complete with liquor and bitters and silver tools and a table to set it out on. He stationed himself on the screened-in porch and fixed cocktails all night, shaken and violet-hued and served over cracked ice.
And Kelli
did it again, came over and whipped up a party at my house after 3 straight nights working on the pulmonary floor. She brought ice cream and cheesecake, we made lasagna and started talking a mile a minute and drinking New Belgium Fat Tires that go down
awfully easy, it turns out.
That's when things started to speed up a bit on my birthday, a big rush of spring air flooding through the door, Pauline and Lee arriving with a baby dressed in a tiny tuxedo, carrying strawberry pie and something called a chocolate infinity pie, and all of a sudden there were just pies everywhere and also flowers- people kept bringing flowers through the front doors and Dave would take them and stick them in mason jars until we ran out and had to double them up.
Then my cousin came with a bottle of white champagne and my future in-laws with red wine and French chocolate, and then I was in my bedroom wearing my wedding dress as some of my girlfriends and my friend Daniel, who I'd inexplicably dragged into the room with them, were telling me how beautiful it was and wasn't that sash the perfect shade of blue and shouldn't I set that purple drink down?
That was the night I stopped sleeping. And I'm telling you all about my friends who show up with food and cake and wonderful things and all the lovely exuberance of my life lately not to brag, not to seem over the top, but because my delicate little constitution cannot decipher between good stress and terrible stress. So I lay awake that night, the first night of my third decade, with a gnawing stomach ache, and finally drifted into a restless sleep around 3am. "I'm like a little kid who gets too excited about their birthday party and goes nuts," I whispered to David the next morning.
Obviously, it's not just having a birthday and a lot of nice friends. My job offered me 15 extra articles for this month at the last possible moment. They are all destination articles about Boone, the little Appalachian mountain town nearly two hours away, so I have to skip some classes and drive up there for a few days. I'm so grateful to get new assignments and so scared of falling behind in school. I stayed behind in my microbiology lab last week to work on a gram stain, so simple but I'm useless with my hands, and the morose professor exclaimed, "How is it possible that you can't
do this yet?" Kind of a jackass move but the thing is, I agree with him.
Some writers stay up all night, scribbling away like madmen- lamplight, pots of coffee, sheets of paper piling up like snow around them. It's all very romantic sounding and I think it's a big lie. At least, it's not the way I work. Coffee after 1pm makes my stomach pull terrible tricks on me. Around 10pm my brain shuts down its capacity to do anything productive and dives right on into panic mode. So I put on my pajamas and try to mollify it by swallowing a powerful and prescribed hypnotic. This will knock me out until 2am or so, at which point my eyes spring open and I'm wide awake, my stomach a hard knot.
I've learned that the best thing to do at this point is to crawl out of bed into the living room and try to read a book on the couch. Other times I watch old episodes of
Friends. I've come to associate Jennifer Anniston with a dark, quiet house and mild nausea. Some nights I'm able to will myself back to sleep and other nights I can't.
One day this past week, David came home from work and suggested we go down to the Ledges on the French Broad to do a paddling workout. I had that stupid stomach ache, the one that does not go away, but I figured some exercise and time on the river would be good for me. And it was, paddling with just a PFD and no dry top, skin to wind, sun beating down. But then after two attainments a wave of clenching pain hit with such force that I had to run into the woods and throw up as a group of kayakers enjoyed a BBQ picnic to my left.
I'm such a
treat these days.
It will subside though, it will get better soon. The insomnia eventually breaks like a fever and the stomach ache retreats. After thirty lucky, light-shattering and anxiety-riddled spins around the sun I've come to learn the patterns. I hope it will get better before we go to Seattle in a week but I'm not counting on it. Although that's not the worst thing. If I showed up back in that city without a touch of neurosis, without talking too much and too fast and losing my keys and curling up on friends couches with a headache, I don't think anyone would recognize me.
