The Daniels

Daniels have been important in my life. That’s not to say that only Daniels have been important, but that I’ve had a higher-than-average number of Daniels present in my life, and some of them have been incredibly important to me. For starters, my brother’s name is Daniel. When our mom was pregnant with him, before they knew the sex, they asked what I wanted to name the baby—I said Kimberly. Then they had a boy and named him Daniel. (A few years later they had a girl, who they did in fact name Kimberly. Pretty surprised they took the suggestion of their three-year-old, but I stand by it, and I hope you like your name, Kim.) My brother has been the longest-standing Daniel in my life, and he is the Daniel to whom I compare all others. My brother seems to grasp things best when he can physically grasp them, he learns through physical contact and action. Perhaps for this reason, my brother is very gifted musically, and he can play an assortment of instruments. When I picture my brother completely at ease and completely himself, I picture him playing the guitar and looking off into the distance at nothing in particular, not thinking, just playing. He can be explosively emotional, in both the good and the bad. He is a bit of a hypochondriac, which I can understand, because my anxiety has often led me down the WebMD, self-diagnoses rabbit-hole, much to my chagrin. My brother will talk to you about literally anything, and he won’t walk away when the conversation gets hard. He will often forget his keys, phone, wallet or anything else important that one shouldn’t forget. I’ve had many people tell me that he’s the funniest person they’ve ever met in real life, and it doesn't surprise me a bit. This first Daniel in my life set the bar for all the other Daniels I would later meet, of which there have been many. Sitting down to write this, I tried to count them all and I came up with 17 different Daniels that I could identify. I’m sure that means that there have been more and I’ve only just forgotten some of them, but capping it at 17 is still an eyebrow-raising number of Daniels, don’t you think?

My husband’s name is Daniel Smith. We met at a coffee shop in 2010; I was singing and playing the piano, and he was behind the counter making people laugh and serving lattes. As I was leaving, he stopped me in the parking lot and said, “Hey, do you have a boyfriend?” My long-distance boyfriend and I had just broken up earlier that week, so I arched an eyebrow and simply said, “No.” He then inquired, “Can I have your phone number and take you out on a date sometime?” To which I replied, flattered and amused and a little bit flustered, “Uh, okay.” A few weeks later he texted me asking if I wanted to go get a fancy Italian dinner and then go swimming in his parents’ pool. Years later confessed to me that this was all part of his fool-proof system to get laid. Take ‘em out for some spicy Italian sausage, get ‘em to laugh a lot while you’re in the hot tub, and let nature take its course. Apparently eating sausages someone else paid for and sitting in hot chlorinated water makes your date want to bang like crazy. Naturally, I threw a monkey-wrench into his carefully laid plans and I said no, I would not like to go out for a fancy Italian dinner, and I was actually a vegetarian and thought sausage was gross; nor would I like to go to his parent’s house, because I didn’t know him and that just seemed weirdly over-familiar. (I was never good at “dates”—does it show?) I made him a counteroffer: “How about meeting me over at my friend Russell’s house to drink some beers?” Seemingly stunned at being shot down and then asked out on a not-date to drink at the house of some other guy (I’m sure he was thinking, “is Russell’s House a bar? Or am I actually just meeting you to drink beer in some dude’s backyard?”), he agreed to meet me there. We hung out in the backyard with my friends—most of whom were other guys, guys I’d dated, guys I’d known since Middle School—and told crude jokes and smoked gag-inducing quantities of hand-rolled cigarettes. Eventually everyone else passed out on various pieces of furniture or shuffled themselves home, and as he was about to leave I caught his hand and pulled him back and kissed him. He looked stupefied and walked out the front door. He came back in a minute later and kissed me again, as if wanting to prove he would not be out-done, then left again. We’ve been together a decade this past July, and we continue to surprise and delight and attempt to out-fox each other.

At the age of four, when we were still living on a small farm in Minnesota, I made the first “best friend” I can remember having. I don’t remember most of this friendship, it was 27 years ago, but what I can remember is: sitting in a dark closet, surrounded by adult coats and scarves and galoshes, and pretending it was a clubhouse; playing Sonic the Hedgehog on his Sega Genesis; trying to walk in very deep snow and his boots coming off, and rushing back to the house in thrilled panic at the prospect of frostbite; drinking hot chocolate in the little landing between the upstairs and the downstairs of my house; talking while I took a bath and he sat on the floor of the bathroom playing with action figures and feeling like it was a perfectly normal thing that all friends did together. His name, like my husband’s, was also Daniel Smith. Two different people in two different states at two very different times of my life, one my incidental and proximate “best friend” and the other my legally-bound and intentionally-chosen “best friend”, both named Daniel Smith. Not that “Daniel Smith” is an uncommon name—obviously quite the contrary—but still! That’s pretty crazy, right? Pretty unlikely? And what does it mean? Oh, nothing at all, really, but it is a canny and extraordinary coincidence that makes me smile when I think of it.

There were a lot of other Daniels, too. The first boy I ever kissed was named Daniel—we’d been friends since the 4^th grade, we dated briefly a time or two, and we’re still great friends today. I sang with a few Daniels in choir in high school, and I ran cross country with a Daniel, too. I had flings with a couple of different Daniels while I was at NYU, and I dated a Danielle—I like to think she counts as a Daniel. A high school girlfriend’s older brother was a Daniel, and he actually worked with my husband Daniel at that coffee shop where we met. Me and that Daniel had an intense board-game rivalry at one point, and while he seemed exceedingly smart and effortlessly talented to little 21-year-old me, he was also a terribly sore loser. I don’t know if that made him less fun or more fun to play board-games with, because he was insufferable when he lost, but that made it all the more deeply gratifying to beat his pompous ass at Settlers of Catan.

One of my best friends growing up had a twin brother named Daniel, and he was one of the strangest guys I ever met. We were all the same age, but socially he was years behind--at 17 you'd easily have mistaken his mannerisms and maturity for that of a 12 year old. I remember sitting on the swings at a park near our house and watching with uncomfortable fascination and embarrassed awe as my foster-sister explained the female anatomy and the mechanics of reproduction to this Daniel, and wondering what he was thinking and feeling in that moment. As I got older, I worked with a couple of Daniels: one was a barista with me at a Peet’s Coffee, the other was a coffee roaster and trainer for an independent coffee shop called Farley’s that I used to manage. There were Daniels in a few different bands I occasionally went out to see. There was an ex-military, alcoholic skater Daniel that frequented my local bar, and he was by turns intriguing and unsettling and predictable. There was a Daniel who had a recording studio in his garage, and he would put on shows in his backyard, and he always wore a silly hat. There was a strange Daniel whose house I wound up at a few times, presumably an acquaintance of a mutual friend, and there we would smoke weed and get drunk and argue about nothing. I think I spent New Year's Eve of 2014 with that Daniel and two other Daniels. Daniels, Daniels, Daniels. I didn’t think there would be so many. Some of these Daniels weren’t particularly important to me, but I remember them nonetheless, and hold each one with a special distinction in my heart.

If you don't have any Daniels in your life, I'd highly recommend them.

Expectation and the Unconscious

Sometimes I wake up with a pain in my chest. It isn't always the same pain--sometimes it's a sharp stab, sometimes it's a tight grip around my chest, sometimes it seems to throb with my heartbeat, sometimes it's a vague, dull ache. For long stretches of time it doesn't happen at all; when it does, it's the very first thing I'm consciously aware of as I wake from sleeping. Before I've even opened my eyes, I'm aware of the pain in my chest, followed by a moment of confusion and a little swell of distress. Then I open my eyes, and I take a deep breath and try to "find" the pain, try to figure out exactly where it is and how it hurts. Then I give up. I grab my phone and take a sip of water and try to forget about it.

Has this ever happened to you? Do you know what it feels like to have your first conscious moment be not just the perception of pain, but the immediate feeling that something is wrong? It's a distressing, disorienting way to wake up, let me tell you. And when it happens for multiple days in a row, something sardonically funny happens: you wake up expecting the pain. And because you expect the pain it is less jarring... but it is also distinctly depressing. If you don't feel jarred by the pain anymore, that means it's become familiar; no longer "just passing through", it seems bound to stay. At the same time, it seems kind of impossible, to be expectant while unconscious--it sounds like a contradiction of terms. It is a contradiction of terms.

Expect: regard as likely to happen; anticipate the occurrence or the coming of.

Unconscious: not knowing or perceiving; not aware.

How do you expect when you're unconscious? The only answer I can think up is that unconsciousness... isn't real? It feels ridiculous to even write that. But I can't reconcile the feelings of familiarity and expectation when arising from a state of unconsciousness without supposing that on some level we are conscious of everything. The mind may be unaware of something while the body may be fully aware of it. We like to think that the mind is the epicenter of the body, the dictatorial overlord that calls all the shots, that keeps track of where everything is and what's going on and when to act and just how to act when the time has come to do so. But like many dictatorial overlords, the mind is sometimes subject to the will of the masses, and the body--greater apparently than the sum of its parts--stages a coup. It will go haywire, it will hurt, it will shake, it will vomit, it will faint, it will act despite the protest of the mind, it will heed no warning and submit to no control. The mind, once pompous and self-assured in its tower atop the body, watches helplessly as its kingdom crumbles and its subjects run amok with scorn and disregard.

There are a lot of metaphors for anxiety. 

That's what all of this comes down to, including the pain. The pain I've woken up with for the last 5 days, the pain that's familiar and unsurprising and expected, is just another metaphor. It's really happening, don't get me wrong--I really do feel stabbing or tightness or aching--but it's a representation of something else, and that something is anxiety. My body is taking something my mind can't comprehend and attempting to make it comprehensible in the simplest way possible: Pain. And my relationship to that pain changes depending on the frequency, the intensity, the location, the conditions in which it is experienced, and whether it feels new and surprising or familiar and expected. 

Here's another metaphor: It's like seeing a cockroach in your house. You wake up one morning and there's a cockroach on the wall. You feel panic and disgust and a reflexive need to act immediately, to get rid of it. Part of your reaction stems simply from the fact that it's so out of the ordinary that it must be dealt with immediately. If you flush it down the toilet or smash it with a boot and then go about the rest of your day, and go to bed and wake up again tomorrow, and there's no cockroach, you hardly even notice that there's no cockroach--why would there be? It was a one-off, an abnormality, an unpleasant but ultimately insignificant experience to be forgotten. Maybe it happens again, five years later, but by that point enough time has passed that it feels like an entirely new experience; you might not even remember that it happened before. But what if you wake up the very next day and there's another cockroach? And what if there's a cockroach, or multiple cockroaches, in your house (maybe even in different rooms, at different times throughout the day) every day for a week. Two weeks. A month. At some point, you don't feel surprised anymore, and even your reaction of disgust has dulled. It's not that you don't care, but rather that you've gotten so used to caring and noticing and being disgusted and feeling panicked that you're just... always kind of in that state. Your body can't sustain the high pitch of panic you felt that fist time, but with the frequency of the recurrence, your body never relaxes like it relaxed before; you never really let your guard down. There is a word for this feeling: Dread. Your body lives in a state of dread.

This is what living with chronic anxiety is like. 

I used to think that there was something seriously wrong with my heart. I was constantly afraid that going to have a heart attack, or maybe that I had some kind of cancer that was affecting my circulatory system. After numerous trips to the doctor, one emergency room visit, a lot of self-medicating and self-destructive outlets, countless conversations with my partner and my closest friends and family, and a year of therapy, I'm now mostly convinced that it's a physical manifestation of my anxiety. It took years before I would believe that I actually have an anxiety disorder, and longer still before I would accept that anxiety isn't as simple as "feeling stressed or worried", but can in fact make my body go haywire. That might sound like a long time, and maybe it is; why would it take years to believe something that was already happening to me all the time?

It's a pretty common response, as it turns out. It takes a lot of convincing to believe there's nothing physically wrong with you when your body is telling you otherwise on a near-daily basis. Partly because there is just so much that could be physically wrong with a person; the possibilities seem nearly endless! Everything inside you has the potential for failure or defect, and every documented medical ailment known to man has, by virtue of our awareness of it, happened to someone. Which means that anything could happen to you. Also, it's natural to assume that the basis of a physical symptom will be a physical cause--that's usually the case. If you're tired and coughing and have a fever, it usually means you have a cold; If you're stomach hurts and you throw up and feel better, it usually means you have food poisoning. If you're waking up with pain in your chest and a racing heartrate in the middle of the night, or you're having heart palpitations throughout the day, feeling dizzy and short of breath and shaky... It's natural to assume there's something physically wrong with you, probably something wrong with your heart.

And even when an emergency room doctor is looking you in the eye and telling you matter-of-factly that you've had a panic attack, that the EKG has recorded your heartbeat and your sinus rhythm is normal, and that this really does happen to people on a regular basis, you don't believe it. It sounds completely ridiculous. How can you go from being asleep to feeling like you're having a heart attack? If you were asleep, where was the opportunity for panic or anxiety to occur? Panic about what? I was asleep! Nope, no way, absolutely not. The only panic that's happening is the panic that the doctor doesn't believe you and thinks you're crazy. There's got to be something physically wrong.

And then a few years pass, and it keeps happening, and you eventually tire of scouring WebMD, demanding blood tests, taking your pulse every hour, eliminating everything from your diet and reintroducing things one by one to try to find some correlation with what's happening to you... And somewhere along the way, eventually, with a defeated acquiescence that's still tinged with skepticism, you accept that you've got an anxiety disorder. It's hard to let go of the hope that there's something physically wrong--and that might sound backward and fucked up. The hope that there's something physically wrong? Excuse me? But it's true. There's a perverse sort of hope tied to physical illness--if there's a physical cause, it usually means that there's a physical solution, and once treated the whole mess will be resolved for the rest of your life. Not so much with mental illness. Not when it takes years to even accept that a physical symptom can have a non-physical basis. Not when you're on a cross-town bus back home from your therapist's office and you start to have a panic attack for seemingly no reason at all, and no matter how fervently you repeat to yourself, "I'm fine, I'm not dying, I'm going to be okay," you still can't stop it. Not when it's nearly a decade after that trip to the emergency room and you still wake up with a pain in your chest and a feeling of dread, and you know the best you can do is accept that it's happening and believe that it will eventually pass, and attempt to go about your day like normal in spite of the fear.

So I sit down to write about it. Because looking at it from multiple angles, recalling it in the past and comparing it to the present, creating metaphors to describe it, giving up on "solving" it in favor of examining it, is maybe the best I can do to deal with it in the moment when happening.  And three hours, two glasses of water and a lot of thinking and writing later, I feel a little better. The pain is gone, for now.

I'm going to go start my day.

About a Baby

this is about a Baby.

what will we do about

a Baby, and when will we do it?

I'm of two minds,

or maybe three (or four or five),

but I think about it a lot.

sometimes I think

ONE: it would be nice to have a Baby

someday but not now

and other days I think 

it would be nice to have a Baby

now and not someday.

I think I would like to have a Baby

and turn it into a whole Person.

I would take care of it with you, 

and we could teach it things

and take it places,

see if it likes the same foods as us

and find out what it's good at,

laugh with it and cry about it and

probably get into some fights, but

I think it would be good to have

a Baby.

I think we would make good parents,

even though I worry about some things;

that's nothing new,

that's normal.

but then I think

TWO: what about School? 

it's taken me years to get to

this point, to figure out what I

want to do, what I could be good at.

I'm so close to being done, but

maybe I won't finish at all if we have a Baby now,

or maybe I'll finish first and then we'll have a Baby--

but then what was point of School?

what about the actual

THREE: Job? how do these things fit together?

I'm not even done with school yet and I already wonder

things like "what's the point of finishing or

even trying to get a Job when

we want to get pregnant soon? 

when will I even have time to get a Job?

what if I'm already pregnant when I start looking?

how long could I work?

what if I have to leave and I don't go back?

will I resent you, will I resent the Baby,

if I don't get to do the Job?

will I want to work if I'm staying home, or

will I want to be home if I go to work?

will my Baby make me miss my Job

or will my Job make me miss my Baby?"

And sometimes I worry I will resent you

for not having to make this choice,

because I already do resent it a little.

Not a lot, not anymore, but a little.

And what about

FOUR: the fucking Pandemic?

I can't really know but it feels like years

we have left of this. years. 

and that makes me feel like we can't wait,

we have to just do it now.

but another part of me thinks,

"this is so fucked up.

how can I be pregnant in this Pandemic

when I can't even go to the store,

not-pregnant, without feeling on-edge?

I can't meet new people. I can hardly meet

not-new people--getting close to anyone is a risk.

only moreso with a Baby. how can I 

have a Baby when I often feel so

isolated

and I can't just live my normal life?"

what WAS my "normal life"?

will there even BE a "normal life" to go back to?

sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

especially because of the biggest looming fear,

the realest, darkest fear,

that nests, that puts down roots,

both within me and without.

the shitshow that is

FIVE: This Fucking World.

I can't think about

This Fucking World

without feeling

afraid

disbelieving

hopeless

trapped

enraged

disgusted

disappointed

arrested

because in some ways, everything feels the same;

everything feels like it's always been

a bunch of bullshit, a charade,

a lot of rich people laughing at our expense.

but lately it's been worse than that,

it's been looking sicker, more poisonous,

and the future feels like

a white flag in tatters,

and falling-down towers of

a corporatized, authoritarian,

washed-out, Mad Max wasteland of civilization.

sometimes it feels like

the end, the ruin,

isn't in the future but in the present:

the breaking and the dying,

the corrupting and the debasing,

the denial and the rupture;

the brain-dead, soul-sick stomping of

Proud Boy boots and the swinging of

simian-alien Q Anon flat-earth fists;

the death-chant of gleeful and

venomous dogma,

the rousing chorus of

one last victory song of the Patriot Front.

it feels like now is the hour

of ruining, of losing,

and the future...

the future is nothing.

the future is an endless stretch of

parched, scorched desert flats

full of biting whirlwinds and

invisible, shimmering fires.

the future is bodies sprawled out

naked in the dust,

fists grasping plastic bottles,

guns and gold and

old Property Deeds,

faces frozen and

mouths mangled in

silent screams of anguish,

anger, terror, pleading;

bodies that died wanting

for things they needed like

shade and water,

kinship and kindness.

what kind of world is this,

what kind of future can there be,

what kind of life

for a Baby?

a Baby feels like a chance, 

an act of hope;

but what hope is there to give

this Baby, who is not in fact

a chance or an act,

but a Baby

and, eventually, a Person?

my heart breaks at the thought of

walking a Baby out into this

hellish place and uncovering its

little eyes and saying,

"welcome."

my heart aches at the thought of 

looking this eventual Person in the face and

trying to explain why

this is what they got.

I want you, Baby, but will you want this?

I want you, Baby, but I didn't want this.

I feel like I will lose something

no matter what I choose and

like every choice comes with

a predestined apology.

I will be sad and sorry, Baby,

if you aren't born,

and I will be sad and sorry, still,

if you are.