I have been UBER CONSUMED with anxiety today. I mean, it’s been going on for a few days, but today it was just SO BAD ALL DAY, I actually came home from the office and puked. I’ve had no appetite lately, but I’ve been forcing myself to eat anyway. But I’d just been feeling so nauseous and anxious all day, and as I was riding up my elevator to my apartment I was like, “Holy shit, I’m gonna puke.” I think this is the first time I’ve actually thrown up from nervousness. I don’t even know exactly what’s causing it. (No, I’m not pregnant, don’t even start).
I think it’s a variety of things. I think it’s variables.
Here’s the thing: Life starts out simple, and then you introduce variables. You introduce choices and possibilities and unknowns. Some are broad and some are miniscule and some are somewhere in between, but it’s the cumulative weight of them, over a lifetime, that becomes almost crippling. As a child, they’re introduced slowly, simply. As a teenager they become more complex, heavier. And in adulthood, in a career and in relationships and in a home and in a family, they explode all over you. You can’t even see through all the variables. That’s how I feel right now. Too many variables. Too many choices. I’ve heard this called “problems of privilege,” and while I agree with that label in a denotative sense, to me they just feel like problems, plain and simple.
I recall back in my days as an engineering student, sitting in the lab chatting with a young female classmate from India. She was telling me about the men her parents were considering having her marry. I was aghast.
“Your parents are choosing your husband?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s how we’ve always done it.”
“But don’t you want some say in it? Doesn’t that seem horribly unfair?”
She laughed. “I watch you American girls and your dating. You are always so unhappy. It sounds terrible. I don’t want that.”
I’m almost envious of the days when women had no options, no careers and arranged marriages. I see the insanity in that, but I don’t feel it. I’m tired of options. I’m exhausted from heartbreak and doubt and risk-taking and failure and maybes. I just want to see the path I’m on, get a copy of the maze with the solution on the back.
Later tonight, I went to see an improv show directed by the guy who teaches my improv class. It was a full-length show called Objection! It’s set in a courtroom, and with some guidance from the audience, the actors take you all the way through a murder trial, completely improvised. For the actors, this is entirely a game of responding quickly and deftly to variables.
I was blown away. The ease with which they crafted the story, played off one another and managed the variables was astounding. It was way smarter than anything I’ve ever done. These people have to keep so much in their head at one time, consider so many possibilities, contribute their own variables, thread together a cohesive story and on top of it all be funny? It’s phenomenally difficult. I had a lot of respect for those actors. Maybe what I need is just more improv classes.
