Hydrophobiaphobia

I have an irrational fear and have had it for most of my life, which is quite a few years. Hydrophobiaphobia (I’m told this is what it’s called) is fear of contracting rabies. I fear that someday some animal is going to bite me, or even slobber on me, and I am never going to see it again, and then I’m going to get rabies and die.

Dying is almost inevitable in rabies. Only 29 people have survived rabies ever. Even with the Milwaukee protocol, a method of supportive treatment, most don’t survive. Luckily, rabies is rare. Only one to three people in the US die of rabies each year. This is in part because of the over 60,000 preventive vaccine series given each year.

That does not stop me from my fear. I’m better than I used to be as a kid when I would pet cats and dogs and ask myself if they’d bitten me and I just couldn’t remember. I would lose sleep at night checking for brain malfunction.

Nowadays, I just worry a bit and keep an extra close eye on my cats. It’s necessary because we have bats in the house. Cute, fuzzy little rabies vectors that cats like to play with. So it’s a matter of vaccinating the cats and making sure to bring the bats in to the Public Health Department to test for rabies. I think about the actions it takes to get the treatment if it comes to that. And my fear is much better, because I have a solution.

Have I Missed the Silly Season?

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about living in Maryville is what I call the Silly Season. It runs from April through July, and it features little oddities that I’m not sure most college towns (or towns of any sort) have to weather.

The Silly Season usually starts on campus with art projects. Like giant rubber duckies on Colden Pond, or a doorframe set up in the middle of the sidewalk. The Northwest Yeti. Little things like that. Then it spreads to the town, with horses at the local drive-in tied to the order kiosk and a large cow in the grocery store parking lot. Not so much madness as a head-shake and a chuckle. This is our excitement. It’s slow around here.

That has not happened this year. Nothing has startled a smile out of me on campus, nothing unusual has been sighted in town, not even a Weinermobile. I am worried that the Silly Season has expired in Maryville, and I miss it.

It might be time for me to figure out how to revive the season. The trick is that one cannot try too hard to be silly. One can try to get attention, but not try to dictate what kind of attention one gets. And the most important thing, one has to do it without any self-consciousness. One gives in to the awkwardness and goes all-out. It’s the difference between wearing a mascot costume and doing that mascot dance wholeheartedly.

I have too much self-consciousness lately, and I blame my meds for that. Bipolar has a great correlation with unabashed weirdness, but it has a great correlation with other things I’d rather do without. If I had less, though, I’d consider adding some silly to people’s lives here. Set up (with the proper permits) a lemonade stand downtown. Walk in bunny ears through Walmart. Put signs on my car reading “Lauren Leach-Steffens for Whatever” in campaign style. And more.

I hope the Silly Season comes back. It’s good for some Facebook posts from home.

June 1st

I feel a detachment from the outside world, which dresses itself in an indecisive grey-blue sky. I want it to thunder, with a torrent of rain. Life has gotten dusty.

I dress myself in an equivocal mood: I want to stand in the deluge; I want to rest inside.

A Short Hiatus

Wow, when was the last time I wrote here? I think it’s been a few days. I’ve been busy scheduling internship visits and going on internship visits and recovering from internship visits — in other words, summer as usual.

I’m struggling to write. This might be because I skipped to the last chapter of my book, hoping it would be an easy write, and it has been anything but. Maybe I need to go back to a hard chapter and start setting up for the final battle. There’s a few chapters of setup there to happen. Maybe it’s those doubts about writing creeping up again.

I’m not going to get out of those doubts any way but to start writing again. Even this short entry is writing, and I can do this again and again until I get out of the rut.

Effervescent

I want to feel effervescent, like Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: Spring. Effervescent means bubbly, but not in the sense of a bubble bath with its larger, comforting bubbles. Effervescence is fine, tiny bubbles, fizzy bubbles, sharp on the tongue when drinking sparkling water. Where bigger bubbles sing like whales (if they could), effervescence tinkles like fairy bells and giggles.

Today is not an effervescent day. It has been gloomy all day, with a tendency toward light rain. I am not effervescent today, not even bubbly. I’m cold coffee looking for ice so I can chill. If Vivaldi composed this day, it would be the Fifth Season: Blah. The opposite of effervescent.

I don’t know how to make myself feel effervescent, or maybe I do. The right company can make me feel effervescent. A crush can definitely make me feel effervescent. Enough hilarity would make me feel effervescent. (As a nerd, I have some go-tos for this: Galaxy Quest, Middleman, Shinesman, Young Frankenstein). Hypomania makes me effervescent right until I’m clutching my hair and yelling “Make it stop!”, so I don’t want to go there. I definitely prefer the other methods.

Right now, in the middle of a rainy work day, I’m going to have to settle with not being effervescent. That cold coffee isn’t bad with a little cream and ice.

One Small Improvement?

Daily writing prompt

What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?

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Feeling uninspired today, I decided I would try the prompts that are now packaged as part of WordPress. And as you can see from the above, I got a doozy.

I’m all about big audacious goals, showy goals, big reward goals. Intoxicating goals. Probably comes from being one of those honor students who got external validation in the form of praise and trophies.

There’s one little improvement that would increase my quality of life, but thinking about the improvement itself makes me want to sit in the middle of my living room and cry.

It’s cleaning my house.

My house is about what you’d expect with two bookish types working full-time who hate housework. I have writing as my pressing hobby; Richard just hates housework.

Our house is cluttered. Despite the fact that this house is over twice as big as the one we moved out of eleven years ago, it’s just as cluttered. We just got more stuff to fill the space.

I feel like my writing would be better if I didn’t have to look at so much stuff and move it aside so I can sit down. Having a clean house would feel like a holiday!

I have to start somewhere, and there’s just so much stuff and I can’t throw any of it away. Maybe if I (and/or Richard) pick one room at a time and have a sorting basket nearby. Think of places to put the clutter, places that make sense. Don’t put the clutter in yet another pile to be sorted eventually. Proceed to the next room, which hopefully doesn’t have new clutter piles from the last room cleaned. Phew!

It looks like maybe cleaning the house isn’t a “small improvement” after all.

I Need Something to Wake Me Up

I mean that title metaphorically, not in the coffee sense.

I have become sleepy lately (extending the metaphor). No Big Audacious Goals, just work and writing on a novel I’m afraid is sleepwalking across the countryside. No exciting plans this summer. No tempting opportunities. Nothing that gives my soul a psychic jolt of caffeine (this extended metaphor is getting silly).

I know I should be able to wake myself up, but inertia is so difficult to break. Which is why I need an assist from the Universe. I want this to be a good morning wake up, not a wake-up call in the colloquial sense, or a wake up and smell the coffee. A good gentle shake, or a cat plopping on my chest. Or fireworks, I’d take fireworks. Or someone yelling from the doorway.

In the meantime, I will see if I can make myself that metaphorical coffee.

Music Looking Forward

I will hit 60 in a couple of months. It’s been hard to listen to music, because I keep gravitating to the music I listened to when I was younger, and I get a flood of memories that distract me from the moment. Sixty is a lot of years to remember, and remembering makes me feel old and dizzy.

I’ve read cocooning in the music one is familiar with is a tendency that starts in middle age. Or maybe it’s a Boomer thing. Today I’ve broken the habit and play music I’m not familiar with, because I have cushioned myself in the familiar. Singer-Songwriter music from the ’10s instead of the ’70s. No more dredging through my childhood.

Perhaps this is a key to not letting the big milestone crush me. For I feel like it will crush me, like I will wake up the morning of my birthday and the weight of all those memories will obliterate me. I was born before Kennedy was shot, an event my students don’t even recognize, much less identify with. September 11? They don’t identify at all.

I think the key is moving forward, to save the golden oldies for meditative afternoons when I don’t mind dredging through my past. This is not that time. This time is for something new. The playlist is different, but I’m getting into it. Maybe I won’t get crushed by my past when the time comes.

Not Everything is Content

I just found a prompt on Loomly the other day (Loomly is a social media manager like Hootsuite except more user friendly and much cheaper) that suggested, just as I’ve seen suggested on TikTok, that ‘everything is content’. One should present what one is doing to the millions, thousands, or (in my case) dozens of followers on social media.

Photo by Guillaume Meurice on Pexels.com

I have problems with this. First, not everything someone does is ‘on message’. People expect a theme to one’s presence. On TikTok, @alexisnicole usually forages and makes amazing recipes with her wild crafting. @bdylanhollis cooks vintage recipes with often hilarious results. @dontcrossagayman tells his everyman hero stories about his interventions with bigots and creeps. They stay on message.

Second, not everything someone says should be out there. I have chronic bipolar depression. I know I can occasionally say “I’ve been dealing with depression,” but what I can’t do is go through a stream of consciousness about what it feels like to be depressed. That’s too much. I can’t ask my readers to be my therapist.

I must admit I struggle with content. I seem like I write all over the place, from reviews of apps to snippets of poetry to progress reports on my writing to my own personal experiences. If I have a message, it’s “This is what it’s like for me as a writer.” Part thunderstorms, part computer programs, part coffee, part cats, part violets. I hope it works, because I’m trying to stick to the good content.

The Big Lie

I am just coming out of a depression. I don’t remember going into it, instead easing into it as if it were just a change of season.

I reminded myself that I was not feeling depressed. There was no self-flagellation, no remorse, no desolation. That was the big lie — that my reclusive behavior, my flat affect, and my resignation to being (in my eyes) a failure wasn’t depression.

Telling my colleagues that I was fine if they asked me if anything was wrong (and they asked me at least three times) was another lie. I am known in my workplace as being bipolar, and thus I feel I have to be on my best behavior lest they think I was going to the hospital again. I told my colleagues again and again that I was doing great, and maybe I even believed it because the temporary bubble of positive attention (that I felt I didn’t deserve) buoyed me. But then I fell back into the grey of my life this last winter.

It’s only now that my mood has risen with the Spring that I discovered how low I had fallen. I have depressive tendencies in Winter, but I didn’t expect to have fallen to the place I was this winter. The scale said I’d gained weight; I didn’t pay attention to my looks. I did very little. Too many times, I accepted negative self-talk as the truth about myself.

What could I have done differently? First, I could have caught the mood change sooner. I need to find some signs of the doldrums before they become depression. Second, I could have been more honest with myself and others, and maybe I would have accepted a medication change. Third, I could have been better to myself, but only after the first two were in place.

Bipolar Disorder is a weird disease, seeking balance in a body that wants to go to extremes. In fact, I am watching now to make sure I don’t tip in the other direction toward hypomania with its endless elation and debilitating restlessness. This is my life, and it’s not that bad. Maybe the biggest lie is the stigma I surround myself with that isolates me.