I’m working on caring less. No, that’s not right. I’m working on caring less about things I can’t control. Which, in my defense, is mostly everything.
I’ve never been a chill person. I do not go-with-the-flow, I do not relax without my internal monologue speeding up, I do not like last minute plans that I cannot fully prepare for. I keep two calendars (one digital and one physical), I will always make a reservation, I will plan a trip down to the hour, approximate travel times and backups included.
I don’t think I ever wanted to be this way, so desperate for control that when it slips from my hands it feels like my entire world has gone with it. I don’t want to be so rigid that my boyfriend can’t surprise me for my birthday (it took me three hours to un-surprise the surprise because not knowing where we were staying and eating stressed me out too much), or that I say no to seeing friends because I hadn’t mentally prepared for it. I want to be able to just do things.
For whatever reason, I’ve always equated being cool to being chill, and so, because I was never chill, I could never be cool. I accepted this a long time ago, when I was fourteen and watching Gossip Girl for the first time desperately wanting to be a Serena but knowing that I was a Blair. This was solidified years later when I watched Sex and the City, knowing in my bones that I will always be Charlotte, when Carrie and Samantha were so much more enticing. That’s not to say that Blair and Charlotte aren’t cool in their own way (I say more as a comfort to myself than my fictional friends), but they’re not effortlessly cool. Which, of course, is the kind of cool I always longed to be.
It’s the smudged lipstick cool, the French Girl cool, the ‘my hair is big and frizzy and of course it looks chic instead of disheveled’ cool. It feels stupid, to put it into words now, but sometimes I still wish for it.
I need to be in control too much for that kind of cool. I suffer from a kind of compulsive perfectionism that would never even allow a step in that direction. It turns out, being effortless can require an extensive amount of emotional effort. Loosening my grip is one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do.
Dr. K likes to use a traffic analogy to get me to understand that I can’t control everything and that, those things I can’t control aren’t worth stressing about since I can’t change them. Problem is, I don’t drive. It stresses me out. Once, to the point of tears. But I understand what she’s trying to say.
She’s given me techniques (my internal spiral staircase and one-two-three breathing cycles) to help me through the shock of anxiety that strikes each time something bad happens—bad meaning a lot of different things, but always something I can’t fix, whether that’s because it’s not mine to fix, or it’s simply unfixable. My chest will feel so tight it might crack and my fingertips go numb and I’m supposed to walk up and down my little staircase until I can fill my lungs with air again or fall asleep, but I’m always full-body-sore in the morning. I’m always left with the reminder that I am destined to worry, to stress, to hold tight.
I wrote an entire novel about a girl who is learning how to stop holding on so tight, who is struggling to separate herself and her needs from the needs of her family, who in order to feel okay again had to find refuge three-thousand miles away. She thinks that running will fix everything, but I know better.
She cuts her hair into a chic little bob and runs around in loose linen pants and too much time lamenting over her not-so-chic frizz, frustrated with the bangs that never seem to sit just-so on her forehead, worried that she’s overdressed or underdressed for what she’s doing. She makes a new friend and idolizes her confidence, her sureness, her ability to seem so effortless.
The main character, Josie, never reaches peak chillness or ideal effortlessness, the same way that I haven’t—but she’s trying. She’s trying to loosen her grip, to relax into herself, to let the worry and fear and all the feelings that make her feel so out of control wash over her and pass through her.
She tries, and tries, and tries—and I think that’s pretty damn cool.