I cut 18 centimeters off of my hair yesterday. I was bored. I was antsy. And yes I just wrote about my compulsive bang cutting last week. In my defense, my hair was to my tailbone and kept getting caught in my mask and my coat and my scarf. Some would say this sudden hair chopping is a sign of impulsive behaviour as a coping mechanism. Others would say shut the fuck up, it’s just hair.
I’ve been quite itchy lately; both my face because of my skins reaction to asthma meds because breathing is more important than skin so these are the choices we make, and itchy like I just cut 18 cm off my hair.
I have a lot of nervous energy that would be walked out of me if only someone would go on a walk with me so I wasn’t walking alone in the woods not making enough noise to make sure hunters don’t try to shoot me. And so now I’m on a track to thinking I need to adopt a dog to go on walks with me which is probably a terrible idea but also maybe not if plague continues for years. Pet adoption is a very normal reaction in isolation.
But then today I wanted to cry. Not because of my hair (it’s still to the middle of my back, I’m not wanting for hair). Not because I had read something or thought of something sad. Not because hauling cat litter with no car in a plague while severely asthmatic is not ideal. Not because of any pressing issue that I could recognize. It’s that feeling like when you have to sneeze but the sneeze just isn’t quite there, except with crying.
me: woah i feel really wonky today, why do i feel like i need to cry? this is so weird.
my brain: *stares in PTSD*
I still managed to go to the store. I needed kitty litter. Or, well, the cats need it. We all need it, I guess. And as I walked the 20 min from train to store and the feeling of needing to cry sloshed around inside me, I started to wonder if maybe this past 14 months has been the calm before the storm. Or the eye of the storm. Some sort of time that is adjacent to a big fucking storm.
Ever since I arrived in France, I began waiting for the adrenaline to wear off. I’m really, really, really good at putting on an “I’m doing great!” impression. I have a tattoo to this effect. So my general okay-ness was assumed to be temporary.
But what if this isn’t a pause in a storm. What if storm season has passed? Maybe waiting for the 84th shoe to drop isn’t useful because the shoes aren’t gonna drop today? Or maybe they’ll just be like, tiny knitted baby booties for a while. Wait, is the storm of shoes? Is it raining shoes? What’s another metaphor I can use? What if all this itchiness is just your usual, run of the mill plague isolation issues and not the cracking in a dam holding back a monstrous wave of PTSD.
Is that better? Just dealing with plague while chronically ill in a country I don’t speak the language stress instead of years of scarcity in every part of my life and people trying to kill me stress? And can’t one trigger the other? Does it matter why I’m spontaneously cutting my hair and feeling like crying? Why is there no proper weed in this country?
And I think the point is that it doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters that I’m maybe not doing great (and that there is no proper weed in this country). But no matter where the stress is coming from, the answers to it are the same.
So maybe instead of worrying about the possibility of some sort of multiple year-long brewing chemical reaction inside of me, or worrying about why I feel the need to I could just worry about being able to get cat litter.
Whether or not the breakdown happens, we’re going to need cat litter.
We’re all going to need cat litter.
