overexposed
Concerned, my best friend asked me if I needed silence in order to work. “No,” I answered, “I need to finally finish building my desk.” She offered to tell the teens to stop playing guitar. “No! I find the sounds of music practice comforting,” I said sincerely. She gave me a look.
I admitted that I am extremely stressed out, but only because of the deadline itself, not because of any one person or their behaviors. So far, I explained, the bulk of the work I’d managed to do was accomplished while the house was briefly, entirely empty. See? No one’s fault.
“The problem is that I'm constantly at the kitchen counter,” I told my friend. I’d gotten up at 4:00 that morning, had showered, had gone to my roost at the kitchen counter... and I'd ended up talking to a teen for three or four hours. While he talked, I looked up the instructions for assembling my standing desk, printed them out. Then I learned my beloved cat had died. “It's all a sign,” I said to my best friend. “A sign to build my desk.”
The desk reassembly isn’t going perfectly smoothly—a few tiny parts were missing, and I was on the brink of tears when I opened one of the boxes and looked at the tangle of disconnected, unlabeled cables inside—but everything that has ever been undrilled from my desktop is now redrilled, extremely poorly, by me. I relocated the WiFi extender to the hallway so that the Internet would maybe reach the other side of the house. There! Success! Everything is fine now. (All that remains is to wait for a new DisplayPort cable and adapter to show up in the mail.)
At some point my friend walked in and noted that my bookcase looked “so good.”
“It’s the only part of the room that does,” I said to her grimly. It isn’t even the entire bookcase that looks okay, either; only the top two shelves are semi-organized. The bottom shelf has turned into just a pile of clean clothes.
She cackled. “All in good time,” she said. I did not smile. I think she secretly enjoys that I have not been able to get on top of my current clutter problem.
Fortunately, when I sit at the desk, I get to stare at a blank white wall: blessedly unchaotic. When I was working in the kitchen, I could seem to only work at night—and even then, only in fits and starts. That’s because of the 24-hour caregivers puttering around (not mine, btw). Anytime someone walks into the room, I drop what I'm working on. I don’t always initiate conversation or even totally acknowledge the person, but internally I fully stop in order to “read the room.” It’s a hypervigilant nervous system, waiting for the threat to pass. Then it takes more than several minutes to get back on track. I think a lot of people are like this. It just sounds like ADHD.
But it was the main issue I’d had at an office job. My original cubicle was against a glass window, where I was able to focus somewhat. But gradually I was relocated toward the center of the office, more and more exposed, so that a managing editor could creep up behind me and check my work over my shoulder. I shrieked a lot. I'm sure coworkers thought I was being dramatic, but my heart was never not racing. I contemplated buying one of those rearview mirrors you attach to a monitor, but I worried this strategy would seem too aggressive. The day after I was moved into my most terrifying cubicle—a sort of fishtank with a wide entrance—my not-work MacBook was stolen straight off my desk. I vowed to never work in an office again.
But the office itself isn’t the problem; it’s the fact that my attention changes focus anytime someone else walks in. What is happening? How can I help? I can’t shut it off! I’ve been furious with my iPhone since the day it launched in 2007. How can a flat palm-sized glass surface be the source of so much strife? It’s an open-air cubicle, of course: all the world’s chaos, right there in your pocket or purse, constantly notifying you, constantly requesting your engagement. Plenty has been written about this elsewhere.
I often think back to my last living situation, where multiple people were living alone for the first time because of previous experiences they’d had with roommates—almost always a battle over noise. One young lady’s last roommate had flown into a rage over the sound of a flushing toilet; the young lady had moved out only after the angry roommate had attempted to climb into her bedroom through the window.
“That is traumatic!” I’d said to her. I hoped she understood the roommate’s behavior was absolutely not her fault. “People need to understand that other people make noise. It’s literally signs of life.” Certainly people had moved into that particular building to enjoy some peace and quiet, but peace comes at the cost of shared walls.
Then I’d remarked that I, too, am insane about noise, but “that’s my problem, not other people’s.” Then I’d pointed around my apartment: White noise machine. Sleep headphones. Daytime headphones. “We have the technology,” I’d said. “People need to take responsibility for their own issues instead of making it everyone else’s problem,” I’d said.
I’d be forgiven for assuming that constantly scanning my environment for minor energetic changes is a trauma response, or that my whole personality is a pile of poor coping mechanisms loosely strung together. But lately I am not totally convinced of this.
Recently I told a friend that I’ve come to believe that any miracle is possible “as long as there is a single mundane explanation for it,” no matter how unserious the explanation. My friend answered with something about “parallel construction.”
I asked what that was, but then, while he typed an answer, I started hammering out a paragraph of my own. I pointed out that I’d really believed all my ‘quirks’ were personality defects, pathologies, results of various childhood woundings, things about myself that I'm supposed to fix. But Human Design—an elaborate natal chart, not the kind of thing I’d ask other people to believe in, but something that does seem eerily true for me—would suggest that those traits are inbuilt, part of my makeup, plotted out before I was born, and not even ‘faults’ per se. Well, what if that’s true? What if various autobiographical details provide a plausible cover story for why I have a high startle affect, for why I am constantly attempting to co-regulate whatever environment I find myself in? What if this is just how I am? (Yep, it turns out that’s exactly what “parallel construction” is—cover stories for narrative convenience.)
And “what if that's just how I am” is a fine place to land, no matter how I get there, because that's the foundation of a concept like radical self-acceptance.
I think a lot about the Serenity Prayer (“God grant me the wisdom” etc.) and what I’ve started calling “pathological storytelling”—external stories that we are asked to buy into, always seemingly to humankind’s detriment—in contrast with the idea of being at peace with whatever is unchangeable. After all, trying to fix destiny is a waste of time; it wastes resources, the time and energy and sense of hope that we should be spending on reclaiming stolen narratives and giving those stories better endings.
Anyway, my desk is built, the door is closed, and I have four opaque walls around me. It’s really all I ask. (The dog knows how to get in, but I feel like she only barges in when it’s an emergency.)