World's Worst Roommate
OCTOBER, 2022
When I was four, I became hyper-aware and therefore terrified of the fact that everybody dies and death stops for no one. Not something that is appropriate to share with your peers at the lunch table over your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and boxed milk. This fear became so strong that my mother had to start telling me that the deceased people in my life actually just up and left for Las Vegas, which marks one of the four times my mother lied to me and I eventually found out. The other three? Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. I don’t want to talk about it.
I’m not sure why she chose Las Vegas to be the city in which the undead congregate, but I think it’s because she figured that if I was young enough to believe her, then I was too young to go tour casinos.
But I digress.
I learned to worry before I learned to walk. As a result, I spent many days of my childhood playing with sandboxes in front of doctors and talking to them as they told me in kind, somewhat patronizing, voices to just not be nervous about the things that made me nervous.
I don’t know if any of the doctors discovered anything particularly groundbreaking about me, except that I was exceptionally gifted at generating fears, rationalizing these fears, and defending these fears. That I worry just like my father does. That I exhaust my mother. That while most families have a necklace or a recipe as their family heirloom, mine has nerves and I was the lucky heiress.
I wish that I could say it went away (It didn’t. Sorry kiddo) and I wish that believing in Las Vegas heaven still worked on calming me down, but anxiety doesn’t stop for anything. It is always with me, most of the time in my periphery, some of the time in the center of my scope. I compare it to a bad roommate. One that talks your ear off until three in the morning and wakes you up with tornado sirens. One that leaves passive-aggressive post-it notes all over your room like “Hey girlie, I love love love how outgoing you are but I can’t stop thinking about that time in biology discussion when you said orgasm instead of organism. You should be embarrassed of yourself <3!” One that knows every detail about what you love and what you hope to accomplish and holds it against you, distorting it in a way that corrupts what you care about so dearly. It’s a hateful and falsely calculated entity, constructing an argument of nonsensical information in a way that somehow sounds real. It’s an essay that I BS-ed just enough to receive an A. It’s the “what if?” whisper in your ear, it’s the older kid on halloween telling you not to go to the house down the street because the guy who lives there chases trick-or-treaters with a chainsaw. It’s also the person who will chase you with a chainsaw with no blade. But you don’t know that it’s harmless when you’re running, and not even when you’re catching your breath (in through the nose…2…3…out through the mouth…2…3…). But most of all, it’s annoying! Like a fire alarm low on batteries beeping all night every night.
And you eventually learn to live with its presence and you eventually learn that you have the power to talk back to it, taunt it, and rise to the challenge that is fear itself. And you learn to say “screw you I’m making toast this morning and the toaster won’t blow up!” And you learn that even though anxiety is a bitch, and astoundingly so, you are too. And it gets smaller and smaller and bigger again and then smaller and smaller then bigger then smaller, and such is life. Maybe it will never go away, maybe it will. For me, it probably won’t and that’s okay, most of the time. Because I can’t let a bad roommate, or a guy with a fake chainsaw, or a bad essay pull me away from the things I love. I can’t and I won’t, and that’s a decision that I have made, and one that I continue to make.