Travel

One Day I’ll be an Old Lady with Jelly Beans in her Purse

Life, Travel, Wedding

These will be in my purse when I'm 86.

These will be in my purse when I’m 86.

I’m sitting in a tiny airport in Oregon waiting on my flight. My anxiety won’t rise above a manageable level since I swallowed a .25 mg Xanax about an hour ago. Anxiety and feelings of what I think are depression have been coming to visit a lot lately completely unannounced. Those fuckers just make themselves right at home, especially when I’m traveling alone and have time to stare back at the reflection of my weird and hardened psyche. 

I just spent the weekend with my super pregnant best friend and her family in a town called Crescent City. It has a population of 8,000 humans and about 10 billion trees, 6 billion of which are redwoods. It’s basically Endor up there. Visiting them is terrific because it slows life down. There’s absolutely no traffic and people recognize each other in the streets. It’s sweatshirt weather every day and everyone lives five minutes from roaring, rocky beaches where a couple of old-fashioned light houses stand out in the distance. In Crescent City the distractions of LA disperse and make room in your body for all those thoughts and feelings you so expertly pushed down to the bottom. There’s no choice but to accept your complexity and fragility as a human being, which is very uncomfortable and refreshing at the same time. 

This whole engagement year has been full of so much joy and laughable stress. It’s a wonderful time to be alive, to be a woman. To feel loved and special and beautiful and worthy of a big, elaborate celebration. But it’s also a time when I’ve found myself backpedaling and quietly cutting myself with the dull blades of self destructive tendencies. I suddenly just stopped taking care of myself. Stopped my exercise and healthy eating regimen, failed to get my nails done on time, which caused me to chew them down to dreadful little nubs that make me feel like I belong in the dumpster. I ran out of deodorant and didn’t restock for 2 weeks. I stopped giving a shit about myself. 

I’m thankful that I can recognize these behaviors as abnormal, probably due to the 15+ years of therapy I have under my belt. It’s fortunate that I have enough clarity to see when there’s turmoil inside and take the steps to fix it. I’m a genuinely happy person 90% of the time, so when I fall into these lows I fall from a very, very high place. 

Dame MAGGIE SMITH British Actress Seen in Edward Albee's play "A Delicate...

Old lady goals: Dame Maggie Smith. I bet there are millions of jellybeans in her pocket book. Legend.

The above was written two weekends ago. Today I feel much happier. Instead of sitting alone in an airport contemplating the fragility of life that I’ll soon be placing inside a giant metal tube that flies through the sky, I’m sitting at the table in my apartment listening to my pug breathe laboriously/adorably. I’m waiting for my broccoli and sweet potatoes to finish roasting so I can have dinner. Drew is on set doing what he loves. I’m not wearing any pants. Life is great.

However, I’m posting about this because I’ve learned that feeling down when there’s “no real reason” is not something to punish yourself for. “Your life is so great! Think about people in the world without roofs over their heads and nothing to eat.” Yes, that is 100% true. But, at the same time, it’s harmful to your entire NESS as a human to call yourself an ass hole, chew all your nails off and decide you don’t need to wash your hair for a week just because you think it’s wrong to feel sad sometimes.

I recently asked a newlywed friend if she ever went through bouts of despair during her engagement year. “Yes! Yes! No one ever talks about it but yes!” she said. The pressures that don’t quite seem like legitimate pressures at the time – booking a venue, finding a florist, making a guest list, getting fit for the big day – do eventually add up. Then throw in those thoughts that loom in the back of your mind like “I might watch him die one day” and “what if this doesn’t work out” and “for better or for worse … oh god, what is worse going to be like?!”  In my case, I dealt with it by subconsciously saying “fuck all of this!” and turning myself into a troll cuticle by cuticle. It’s different for everyone.

So among all the happiness and fairytale-ness that comes with planning a wedding are some very real and valid feelings. While it’s still important to remind yourself to be grateful for what you have, it’s also important to acknowledge when you feel awful enough to go take a nap in a landfill. Because if you don’t, you yourself will become a landfill of terrible, awful feelings and turn into a total nut bag later in life. Wouldn’t you rather be the sweet old lady who always has jelly beans in her purse versus the scary, curmudgeonly woman who chain smokes and chases you away with a broom?

This post was supposed to be about save the dates, but in an effort to become an old jelly bean lady, I wrote about my feelings instead. FEELINGS. What a bitch.