Disillusionment as Medicine

Because it turns out when your rose-colored glasses shatter, you can actually see much more clearly.

I had a nervous breakdown in La Guardia Airport.

In truth, I’d been teetering on the edge for days — weeks, if I’m honest. When something is “wrong” or someone has upset me, I like to put that into a neat little box in the center of my chest and plaster it over with generous coatings of various drugs. I suppose saying I like to doesn’t quite capture it: it’s a machine that sets into motion long before I am aware of it.

So what happened?

Someone I love and admire yelled at me. Well, not at me, but near me. Towards me, maybe. Growing up with a mother who had a volatile and grotesque temper, I now not only fear anger (and seek to suppress it in myself at all costs), but immediately move into accommodating whoever the aggressor is when anger becomes present. I just want to make it stop. Forget sticking up for myself, forget walking out. I become complicit in my own betrayal, prioritizing the other person’s experience so quickly and seamlessly that my own becomes sublimated before I know it. I begin smoking weed.

Nights and nights of weed-smoking. The type that reminds me of my behavior in my teens, or early twenties. I tell myself: “this is chilllll, who wouldn’t want to light up a J and watch a little Project Runway?” The rationalizations have begun. Soon I’m sleeping worse, waking up tired, blah blah blah.

Last week my therapist, who I have been seeing since I was 18 and with whom I start every weekly session with a “substance use report” (bizarrely my idea, not hers), said, “There’s been a real uptick in your drug use lately. Something to keep an eye on.” I blithely agreed and changed none of my behaviors.

In truth, I was heartbroken. The Man Who Yelled is someone for whom I have great fondness, and who - ugh - I have even, perhaps, idolized. The term that most comes to mind is, he lost face. I saw a different, hidden side of him, that has been there all along but which I’d never seen. It shattered my fantasy of him and broke my heart.

The same man had recently been in my house, inspecting a custom lighting fixture the previous owner had installed which appears as a giant letter T of wood, suspended from ceiling beams. I’ve always relished the thought that it weighs something like 2,000 pounds, made of solid oak, even if it would scare me a little when I thought of whether it could ever dislodge and fall. The Man Who Yelled is curious, and knows how to build things. He asked if he could check out the lighting sculpture a bit more, to see how it was constructed. He said he doubted it was all made of one piece of wood. I said, “Don’t go fucking with my fantasy!”

The sculpture turned out to be hollow, made of separate pieces of wood adhered together and painted to look like one.

In so many ways, this is what I believe “growing up” to be. A process of disillusionment. Of realizing things aren’t what you thought they were. The old “don’t meet your heroes” adage.

But, in having my fantasies shattered — both of my lighting fixture as one solid piece, and of this man as a perfect, unerring mensch — I have come to know both more truly. More intimately, and more actually. I am seeing them as they are rather than how I wish them to be. And truth be told, my love has changed for neither of them. I just know better now.

By the time my cat fell sick and had to go to the animal ER just a day before I was meant to fly to Florida, I was standing so close to the edge I could be said to be a citizen of both what I was standing on and what was beyond it. I have two cats, and the one who got sick is my heart-cat. The one who is like me, and the one who likes me. The one who touches me, who plays with me, who climbs on me. My other cat is beautiful and aloof, an ethereal creature who wishes not to sully herself with my touch unless she explicitly demands it.

After two solid weeks of the weed-smoking and the emotion-repressing, and now with the cat ER thing going on, I was Woman On A Wire. When will she snap???

She will snap as she enters La Guardia Airport, on the phone with her therapist who she realized she was supposed to have an appointment with at that time but had forgotten about amidst stress, denial, and fatigue.

I wailed. Ugly-cried. Big tears, much snot. Just right there in the glistening new terminal (which I think they did a great job with, for what it’s worth). The winter sun illuminated the entire white, airy, Scandinavian-modern terminal and I was as exposed as anyone could hope to be in the reality of my anguish. I sobbed to her, “I don’t know if my cat will be okay with the cat sitter, if it’s okay that I am leaving her. I worry I am neglecting and abandoning her in the very ways I feel I’ve been neglected and abandoned in life!” …Jesus.

I somehow made it through security, got an Impossible Burger (for my first time because fuck it, why not) and ultimately filed into Aisle 21 of my flight. I was sat directly next to someone I had known from my teenage years as an equestrian, and was almost jarred at how easily I jimmied myself out of total hysterical despair and into affable pleasantries. Truthfully, it was a relief to have some new interaction punctuating the run-on sentence of the misery I’d been living in for weeks now. As Monty Python would say: “And now for something completely different!”

And now? The cat seems to be fine. I slept for about 2 days in Florida until strength and sobriety returned to my body, and I ended up having a good time down there. I’ve made amends with The Man Who Yelled. And there is a moment of placid calm, while a fire roars in my fireplace, a playlist indelicately called “Jazz In The Background” plays in the (you guessed it) background, and I am learning to savor this moment — this tiny, gigantic moment — where nothing is wrong, and I am not upset, until the next one inevitably comes and I hope and dream and plan and scheme and wish that I meet it with a bit more dignity and cleverness than the last one.