Three: The Wedding Ankle
In between the bad blister and the yellow jacket sting, I got sick. I tell you this so that you know that for well over a month, I could not go to the gym. On top of that, I felt depressed that I couldn’t go to the gym, and so I was eating a TON — I mean, a TON — of ice cream. And chips. And burritos. Just, like, sad person foods. So even though I am sure you didn’t notice (or maybe you did, because maybe you are also a woman who is hyperaware of everyone’s sizes at all times), but it was clear to me that I’d gained weight. This was weight that I’d worked all year to lose. It’s hard to tell you about this.
Here is what I mean: all year I (1) counted calories for each and every meal in a meal tracking app; (2) went to the gym four times a week; (3) “weighed in” every day; (4) followed #TransformationTuesday on Instagram; and (5) physically removed myself from all locations where good food was available because there seemed to be a ravenous rodent inside me that would eat any and every thing if I let it free for EVEN A MINUTE. Oh wait! And (most importantly), I (6) lied all the time that I didn’t know that I was losing weight and that I wasn’t really trying and that it didn’t matter to me and that I thought my body would be great no matter what. Because this is the most painful part of being socialized to practice this kind of behavior: you’re not even allowed to talk about how hard it is or how much it hurts. You have to pretend like you eat nachos all the time and the scale never ticks up, or that kale salad is honest-to-God your favorite food, or whatever. Look: I love a good kale salad, truly. But also, look: I lie CONSTANTLY about food stuff and I hate it and it’s not fair but lying about food stuff is just as emotionally addictive as the food stuff itself.
So I was overjoyed when I finally got to go to the gym after a six-week hiatus. It was hard to do all the things it had formerly been easy to do, but I told myself that I’d improve, and I knew I’d hit the ground running after Luke and I got back from Lex and Peter’s wedding in Maine.
The wedding was gorgeous. (Have you ever been to a true Quaker wedding? It’s as close to a real-life miracle as there is on earth.) The reception was like a sophisticated and cool magazine had sprung to life and we got to enter into it and play with all its moving parts. Someone played “All Star” on an electric violin. I wore sandals and my feet looked normal.
But then my feelings got hurt. That’s vague, intentionally, because I don’t know the person who hurt my feelings all that well, and I know that this person wasn’t TRYING to hurt my feelings, and I also was never brave enough to talk to the person about any of this. For all of these reasons, my hurt feelings aren’t entirely mine to share with the whole internet. But the point is, I began to cry and I wanted to get away from the people who could see me cry — partially because I was wearing mostly great black eyeliner that traded the ability to handle saltwater for an incredible matte finish. My eyes were blurry with tears, I’d had two glasses of wine (my legal limit!), and I didn’t see the step down to the outdoor balcony, and I fell.
The crunch of my ankle turning was familiar and hideous, and it immediately spawned a panic attack that spilled out all over the floor, and the railings adorned with gauze, and the tables neatly arranged with bags of fancy nuts. Oh, how I tried to collect myself. But this was the messiest, ugliest, most public panic attack I’d had in years — the kind I swore I wouldn’t have in my 30s, not in public, not at a WEDDING, of all things, where the focus should ABSOLUTELY NOT BE on any of the fringe guests openly snotting all over the balcony. Shame over having a panic attack happens to be a panic attack’s favorite food, by the way. Everything spun out of control. A caterer had to give me a folding chair to sit on. I awkwardly scootched it as far away from the door as I could to avoid notice. The speeches had started. I was that dick at the wedding who cries on the balcony about her own damn shit during the SPEECHES.
The caterer, who had been sent directly from heaven and floated around on a gold-tinged cloud, brought me a bag of mixed drugstore painkillers — I scooped out way too many of them and whisper-thanked her as many times as I could before she had to go do her actual job.
Once, years ago, I tried to write an article about what it is like to have a panic attack. The crux is that nobody has really pinned it down. Some people pass out. I sometimes have times when I can’t breathe and I can’t stop crying and it feels exactly like my entire body is being consumed by what I will here describe as a navy-black hurricane, but I could also describe as a trillion teeny tiny fingers, or the way it feels when you’re driving your car in the dark and it’s sheets of rain and you’re sure you’ll die. After this wedding, I’d find a new therapist — a really good one — and in her office I would start to feel this kind of panic and she’d teach me a trick that goes like this:
Name three things that are blue.
Name something you hear far away.
Name something you hear close by.
Name something else you hear.
Name three things you feel in your body.
This is such a silly and small exercise, but it helps me a lot. Sometimes it seems like my feelings are eating me and I’m getting chomped up, like my whole personhood is cereal. The three blue things activity — not, I don’t think, its official name — helps me pick myself out of my feelings-teeth and see my feelings as being inside of me, and not the other way around. I think the zen-official way of saying this is that it helps me greet my emotions as an observer. “Ah,” I might say. “I am feeling that big thing right now. That certainly is a big, big thing.” As though it is a big, big sweater that I just happen to notice hanging from a rack, and not an all-consuming hurricane-finger-rain-sheet monster.
But back at the wedding, I had not yet met this therapist, and I did not have the three blue things activity, and my feelings ate me. Do you need to know the details of how someone peeled me off the railing? (Thank you, Ryan.) Or how another person pressed me into a garden chair and guided me through the motions of pretending like I needed fresh air? (Thank you, Luke.) You do not. Maybe the worst thing about moments like this is that you know that they will pass, but you can’t feel that they will pass.
At some point, it passed, and boy is it easy to “observe” now, from this great distance of months away. But how huge it felt; chewing me; and then, too, telling me how worthless I was for allowing myself to be chewed.
For another full six weeks, I could not go to the gym.