Hi. I am writing to you
on a beautiful spring morning. The forecast calls for warm sunny weather for
the next couple of days—but I don’t believe it. I may have a trace of PTSD from
this winter. I’m expecting snow.
This winter…..can we
talk about it? Do I even dare talk about it? I mean, it’s over, right? It’s not
going to creep up on us again when we least expect it? We’re not living in a
Friday The 13th sequel?
Worst…winter…..ever.
I wish this winter was
a person so you could have at least looked them directly in the eye and said, “Everyone
hates you. A lot”. I can’t prove it, but I think this winter froze my soul. It’s
still thawing out. But I am emboldened to talk about this horrific time by a
conversation I overheard Friday night when I went to the bar up the street for
a beer: a guy said this winter really tested him physically, emotionally….. His
buddy affirmed this by emphatically saying, “Awful” a couple of times. Not going
to lie: it lifts my spirits slightly to hear this. (Or was that the Guiness?). I’m
not happy to hear about other people struggling, but misery does love company.
I myself thought I might lose my frost bitten mind this winter and I’m still trying
to fully recover.
I think my troubles started
before the frigid air and endless snow even kicked in. In November one of my
high school classmates passed away of a massive heart attack. Granted, while I
was once pretty good friends with him, I had only seen him in real life (as
opposed to Facebook) a couple of times in the last 15 years, but it still
seemed to affect me on a few levels:
1.
I felt
really bad for him. A cool, funny, awkward, soft spoken guy. Dying at 41? Very,
very sad.
2.
Oh crap.
That’s right…..being over 40, it’s now entirely possible to have heart attacks.
I knew this, but when a high school friend dies, it’s a message that shouts rather
than whispers to you. Sure, I keep myself in decent shape but you never know
for sure. Wait….what’s this pain in my chest? Something is horribly wrong! Yep,
I’m a longtime hypochondriac. It goes into remission for periods but can flare
up. This may have been the initial trigger of a new flare.
3.
Whether I’m
going to die instantly or live to 90, I’m now at an age where kids (or middle
aged men) I went to school with can actually die OF NATURAL CAUSES. We all know
car accidents are the most common cause of death when you’re young, but heart
attacks? Now we are clearly in the uncharted territory of middle age. By no
standard whatsoever am I young anymore. How did this, like, happen? It seems
just yesterday I was a (relatively) carefree 25 year old subsisting without guilt
on nutritious dinners of Hot Pockets, Steak Ums (even more delicious when you
drown them in cheese), frozen “party” pizzas, and pasta (whole wheat pasta with
low sodium and sugar tomato sauce like I buy now? You must be joking. Refined grains
and Ragu, bitch!).
(DISCLAIMER: the above
use of the term “bitch” is intended in the gender neutral way Jesse Pinkman of
Breaking Bad uses the term or the racially neutral way Kentucky’s Aaron
Harrison said “F---k that n-----a” after losing in the Final Four to the very
white Frank Kaminsky and Wisconsin. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog).
So with this reminder
of my increasingly non-youthful age category, the Holidays seemed sad. I’ve
become a Scrooge. I’m coming out of my non-holly decorated closet here: I hate
Christmas! What’s worse: I hate the fact that I hate Christmas. What sort of jerk
doesn’t like colorful lights, cheerful tunes, Santa Clause, gift exchanging, family
bonding, etc? I used to love Christmas. But who was Scrooge himself? An older
bachelor. Who am I? A 41 year old bachelor without kids but with a former good
friend who just passed away from heart disease. Scrooge (and probably this
writer) only hates Christmas because it reminds him of his own loneliness. To
adults without families of their own, Christmas feels a little like a party
you’re not invited to but it still goes on all around you anyway. It all feels almost
cruel.
So that was two strikes
against me. Strike three came when, partially due to my Holiday blues/mid-life
crisis symptoms, I passed up going to my mom’s on Christmas Day. I still saw
her on Christmas Eve—my attempted guilt allaying rationalization—but after I
didn’t go I still felt crushing guilt to the point where I developed blurry
vision—which had happened once before when I was under a lot of stress. After a
few subsequent repeated episodes of this, I’ve come to realize the blurred
vision actually happens when I start to calm down (the first incident coming
when I drank a huge bottle of water while recording a cover version of Winter
Wonderland—which I had meant to do weeks earlier) but at the time the blurred
vision caused an epic freakout. I was sure I had worried myself into some kind
of medical emergency.
The next day I went to
the ER and told them I had chest tightness and I was afraid something was
really wrong. The intake nurse took me in her office and grilled me—mostly
trying to confirm that I didn’t have any suicidal thoughts which I assured her
I did not---and I surprised myself by bursting into tears while detailing my
guilty Holiday feelings. Another onset of blurred vision ensued. (Again,
because the tears were calming). They did an EKG which was normal (although at
one point the machine started buzzing like a smoke alarm on steroids when no one was in the
room. Being nearly certain of my imminent death, I called for help. A PA came
in, shut it off, and said, “Oh, this thing does that sometimes!” like he was
talking about an old toaster. Thanks. If I didn’t have heart problems before, I
probably do now!). They also did labs—I think they call them “cardiac enzymes”.
Also normal. They gave me an IV. Told me to go home. “Get some rest”.
I was almost feeling
better until the next day after I went swimming at the gym and…..blurred vison
afterwards. Again, I find swimming calming, but at that point I was still
refusing to see the pattern. So the day after it was back to the ER, told them
I had accepted the fact that I was probably just having a mental breakdown but
could they give me Xanax or something? They don’t prescribe Xanax in the ER but
they give me Vistiril as a consolation prize. As far as I can tell, Vistiril
isn’t much different from your basic Benadryl you can get at CVS as long as you
show them your ID and promise you’re not running a meth lab. But it did help me
sleep for a few days when I might not have ever slept otherwise, so there’s
that.
I’m happy to report I
haven’t darkened the door of an ER since, but it’s been an off and on struggle
against myself ever since unlike anything I’ve experienced since probably my
early to mid 20’s—when, probably not coincidentally, I was facing another
transitional phase in my life: the transition to adulthood. I think I just
really fear change. I had wanted to stay a kid forever and when I finally graduated
college—which I sort of passive-aggressively delayed as long as I could—and I saw
the grey, dull, compromised world (so I thought) called Adulthood staring me straight
in the face, I was terrified rather than excited. It seemed like all the fun
was over. Eventually, as one does, I made my peace with it and got on with life---still
reminding myself that I was a “young adult”. But now we have to subtract a word
from that phrase. Today it’s middle age staring me in the face. And again the familiar
fear and feeling that maybe all the fun is over. But it doesn’t have to be that
way. Life begins at 41! At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
And then there was the
winter that followed. The worst possible time for me to have to endure the
worst winter ever. If I was more superstitious I would swear God or fate or
karma decided to make the test even harder for me. I mean once the snow storms
became a weekly (or bi-weekly) event and once daily highs of 23 seemed like a
heat wave, it just started to seem like the world was ending. There’s really
only one logical thing to do in a winter like this: drink. But with my December
health “scare”, I became almost afraid of drinking. Or drinking coffee. Or eating
salty movie popcorn. Or doing anything unhealthy. I drank green tea, I then tried
life with zero caffeine, I tried to load up on fish from Whole Foods (salmon,
tuna, shrimp, sardines---natural sources of Vitamin D which we’re missing in
the winter), I tried making daily green smoothies (using Vitamin D fortified
milk of course). I started going to the gym…..daily. I started using the hot
tub at the gym almost daily because I Googled their touted health benefits. All
of my health nut tendencies—which have been increasing in the last couple of
years to begin with—were in full bloom even if the trees were not. I did notice
how all this fun banishing healthfulness completely eliminated my normal winter
weight. I’d get on the scale and notice I was under 150 lbs—absurdly low for
the non-running season. Huey Lewis’s Hip To Be Square became my life anthem! I
wanted a new drug. One that won’t make sick. One that won’t make me crash my
(ten speed). One that won’t make me three feet thick.
What a bad idea.
While slogging through
such a horrendous winter, a feeling of closed in isolation is probably the
worst enemy—far worse than a lack of magnesium or Vitamin D in the diet and far
worse than the dehydrating effects of caffeine and alcohol. Particularly true if
you live alone, don’t have a dog, don’t have a car, and live in the car culture
state of Connecticut. In some ways, my health obsession worked against me. I
only went to two UConn basketball games this winter—the lowest total in about 15
years. This was partly due to not wanting to stand in the frigid cold waiting
for any more buses than was
absolutely necessary but also because of my alcohol phobia. I always get a
couple beers at games, could I really go and not drink? Under normal circumstance,
maybe. I’ve done it before (maybe twice) but with my battle with anxiety,
forget it. Sitting in those cramped XL Center seats for two hours? Especially
if I was in the middle of a row? Yeah I guess I had a touch of agoraphobia. (Along
with a touch of claustrophobia evidenced by practically living at the Barnes
and Noble café instead of staying in my lonely apartment). So I wouldn’t go to
games at all. Granted, the UConn men were painfully mediocre this year, but the
point is to get out of the house anyway---even if it’s to see a 51-48 battle
against East Carolina.
So my goal for the
spring and summer……be less healthy. Get back to drinking in moderation, get
back to drinking coffee, and get back to eating some food not on the World’s
Healthiest Foods site. And for the love of God, don’t eliminate entire food
groups from my diet. I’m not going to live forever no matter what I do.
Besides, there’s no guarantee that’s better anyway. Some health obsessed gluten
free vegan marathon runners die young while Keith Richards and Ozzy Osbourne
keep celebrating birthdays. While it might seem like you’re conquering middle
age by becoming 100 percent pure in your diet, it might actually be a kind of
surrender to your fear of it. And while in a perfect world there are strong
arguments against caffeine and alcohol, taking a “holistic” view of the matter,
there may be one key argument for them: maybe they have kept me sane all these
years. Zero caffeine and alcohol gives you a dose of Pure Reality instead of
the slightly distorted view of reality those recreational drugs provide. Pure
reality blows. Drugs are the answer.
This winter also had
another tragic and embarrassing consequence. I feel less comfortable admitting
this than admitting my post-Christmas panic attack: one day in February I’m not
proud of when the high reached maybe 8 degrees, I wore a scarf. My mom had
given it to me—you know how moms are always worried about you keeping warm—and
I humored her by accepting it while fully planning to never wear it. I wore it.
Now I suppose I shouldn’t be so anti-scarf. They’re okay for girls to wear, but
I just can’t escape the notion that scarf wearing guys are, well, kind of
douches. I saw part of a documentary on Three Seconds To Mars on Palladia the other
week and Jared Leto was rocking scarves throughout. I rest my case. I know, I
need to be more liberated in my thinking! What can I say? Either way I guess
I’m officially a douche myself now as well so it doesn’t matter.
This winter I also
learned that I really need to re-learn how to divorce my mood from the weather or
move to Florida or California. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a house. I
mean…I could move. As a kid, the winter just didn’t bother me much. In fact
sometimes I preferred it to summer. (I’ve since realized that is likely only because
we had no central air, no pool, and no easy beach access. We northerners
complain about hot weather in the same way people in Georgia complain about an
inch of snow—but they don’t have plows, sand, or shovels. We each have
insufficient infrastructures to deal with our respective weather abnormalities).
Winter once meant fun, character building activities like sledding, snowball
fights, and diving off our garage roof into giant snow piles. When others
(usually “old people”) complained about winter I would look in puzzlement.
What? They don’t have access to heat? Or a hat? Or, if they’re truly desperate
and lacking self-esteem, a scarf?
This seems like a
common phenomenon: kids can handle winter better than adults. One possible
explanation is simply that kids a) can’t control where they live, and b)
wouldn’t want to live anywhere else if you paid them. As a kid I had zero
desire to move away from the rolling corn fields and bucolic cow pastures of
Ellington, CT. Your childhood hometown becomes almost the only universe you
really care about. The kids in my school were the only people I wanted to impress.
Kids in distant faraway lands like Vernon, CT or Somers, CT were mere abstractions,
let alone kids from distant galaxies like San Diego or Tampa. The fact that we
had cold winters? A small price to pay for living in the only town on earth
that mattered.
Let’s just say my love
affair with Connecticut has since cooled. Maybe adults start to develop the idea that
cold and snow and wind and darkness are just not natural. Like there’s something a little morally and metaphysically
menacing and malevolent about it all. (Check out my succession of words
starting with m! I own alliteration). This, ironically, seems to be more rather
than less true if people have been living in this climate for four decades or
more. I think it’s the knowledge that there are actually other humans who live
in places where it’s 75 and sunny in January. And not just that: in Florida,
for example, the sun even sets about an hour later in winter! Which really
makes it just not fair. So maybe the snowed in northern adult burdened with
this knowledge begins to feel that maybe the truly unnatural thing is his or
her insistence on staying here instead of leaving. Family is the most common
reason to stay, but I sometimes wonder if even that reason is often shortsighted.
Just taking one isolated example here, but my grandparents moved to Florida
right around the time I was born. My grandfather (this was his second marriage)
moved thousands of miles away from his kids and his grandkids. On paper, he
should have been nearly a stranger to me. But they came up here periodically
and my brother and I visited them for sometimes weeks on end down there and we would
do everything together. This was much more quality time than we would have ever
experienced if they had stayed in Connecticut. We would have probably seen them
on more occasions during the year, but I’m sure mostly for those family get-togethers
with a dozen people that last a few hours. No doubt in my mind: I was closer to
my grandparents because they moved thousands of miles away!
So of course I’m
thinking more seriously than ever before of trying to relocate to Florida or California.
Maybe the winters just make me crazy now? I can’t even guarantee this would not have happened in the middle of the summer, but I doubt it—at least not with the
same severity. It did start to feel like my lingering anxiety and the weather
merged into one, forming a tag team more indestructible than Hulk Hogan and Mr. T at the first Wrestlemania. Just when I thought I had finally killed it off it would come
back just as once I thought it couldn’t possibly keep snowing and couldn’t possibly stay this inhumanely cold, it
would snow more and get colder still. Maybe winter doesn’t create problems, but
it amplifies them and that’s almost as bad.
Or I can learn better
coping skills. Would I have been better with a pet? Or living in a city with
better mass transit? Or with a girlfriend and/or family? Or a job that felt new and exciting and challenging rather than too often a dull and aggravating grind. Probably. I certainly don’t
organize my life to best prepare for rainy days—or brutal winters. I also didn’t
do enough of the very things I can do already that make me happy and sane like writing,
reading, playing guitar. That’s how anxiety is a greedy, evil pest. Once it
grips you, you’re so afraid of it lurking around the corner, you go into a
hyper-defensive mode and you become actually less likely to do things you enjoy
when common sense would seem to say you would be more likely to do them. But it’s
playing offense by doing those things that will likely kill it off for good. If
you’re playing defense by always trying to be on guard against it, you’re
playing the game on its terms, not your own. It breeds a fear of fear itself, which breeds more anxiety. The caged bird only wins if it
sings.
But I did start going
on offense in some ways—I started seeing a therapist, I signed up for voice
lessons (though much like the guitar lessons I took years ago I’m starting to
realize it’s about the amount of practice, not the amount of lessons), and I
even went to church a couple times! The first mass was really nice, the second
one was Palm Sunday. Need I say more? This crazy, wholly unexpected decision was
driven by my extreme nostalgia for visiting my grandparents in sunny Florida.
We would go to 5 o’clock Saturday mass and I would have to wear long pants.
This was the only time I remember being uncomfortably hot in July in Florida (because
they had central air, a pool, and a beachside condo). I’m hardly devoutly
religious but I think the real point of church is the community aspect. I have
no idea whether atheism is true or not, I just know it offers no community. And,
say what you want about the Catholics, but there are positive aspects to the
teaching. One can say they focus too much on sin, but you might argue they only
do so to focus on forgiveness. The theme of forgiveness is everywhere—asking God
to forgive our sins but also forgiving “those who have trespassed against us”.
Who can argue with that? The priest also mentioned—of course—the death of Jesus
and noted how often only through pain and suffering can growth and change
occur. In happier times, I would have passed this off as typical Catholic grimness.
Given all of my recent pain and suffering and the realization that the only
real reason I was there was due to said pain and suffering, I actually almost
got choked up by this. Also the priest told I nice story. An eagle ends up
living in a chicken coop. A stranger comes by, sees this, and points out the
problem to the farmer, “That’s an eagle. You can’t have him living with
chickens”. The farmer says, “No, he’s been raised as a chicken, it’s all he
knows. He’s just like a chicken”. The farmer calls the eagle and says, “Fly,
eagle, fly!”. The eagle flaps its wings and starts to fly until the farmer
tosses chicken feed on the ground and the eagle swoops right back down again.
Not giving up, the farmer tries again and eventually the eagle flies away and
leaves the chickens and the farmer for parts unknown.
He didn’t supply the
moral of the story but it seems clear: we have to be who we really are but sometimes
that means having to make painful choices to leave everyone and everything we
know and many of our old habits behind. This actually struck a chord with me as
well.
