"Great. Another Sunday working at the Beach. Another journey Eastwards with my stomach churning gradually with more intensity. Another reminder of bad memories. It's not fair that an entire fucking district of Toronto, the town where I
live, should cause such a profound and nauseating physical reaction in my body..."
I literally twitch and flinch. The acid from my stomach slops so far up against gravity that it's practically corroding my vocal chords. It's still thirty minutes away, but I already dread the point in time when I will have to unlock the door and face the public. Engage with people. Have them judge me. Risk them taking advantage of me. Worst of all, risk running into
her. Suffer her and/or her friends mocking me.
Every noise on the streetcar within six feet of me makes me jump. I shrink into the chair, invisibly cowering away from everyone and everything: "Shit!" I mutter in my mind, "I forgot to put my sunglasses on, and it's too late now." In my mind, I fast-forward the act of me trying to retrieve my shades from my rucksack and put them on. My warping perception pictures me fumbling the shades, smearing my fingerprints all over the lenses as I struggle not to drop them. In the meantime I drop the Diesel case they live in and the momentum of the streetcar sends it clattering under the seats somewhere behind me, so loudly that there's no chance I can pretend it doesn't belong to me and slope off the streetcar without it. I feel the crimson filling my cheeks as if someone were pouring a jug of grape juice into my skull from the top.
As if that's not enough to get me fretting, the woman across the aisle is staring at me.
It
might be that she thinks I'm attractive. That could be why she's looking at me, but I just can't believe that in my current state of mind. "Stop fucking looking at me!" my sub-conscious screams at her. Are my flies undone? Are my boxers showing? Did I miss a patch when I shaved my head this morning? Whatever the reason for her looking, it can't be good. Outside it's a grim, grey afternoon but the sky is still bright enough to force me to squint, and I'd rather do that than risk actually meeting gaze with another sentient being. By the time I get off the streetcar in The Beach my hands are almost trembling.
And that, dear reader, is what it's like to have GAD in public.
That's not my point though. At the beginning of the cognitive distortion there is a 'tell' that - if spotted - empowers me to restore confidence and avoid myself devolving into a full anxiety attack. It's egotism. Actually, it's the same tremor in my perception that many people who don't know me mistake for overconfidence. It's the belief that everything is me-centric. That the woman on the streetcar must be thinking about ME more than anything else. That members of the public are laughing at ME because it doesn't occur to me that they might have something better to do.
So despite the discomfort, the reaction, and the struggle to manage it in a way that my fellow TTC riders are none the wiser, at least it's given me an early-warning symptom to look out for.
I foolishly brought this scenario up in group a few days later, and regretted it almost immediately. The mere mention of the name, "Sarah" induced strong emotional reactions in
all group members. The women in the group make me blush with their, "Why does this woman still even
exist to a catch like you?" looks and comments. The guys just want to grab me and shake me. Collectively they force me to admit that she's still on my mind whenever I travel into The Beach - that I still can't quite be over it yet. Then we have a round of, "Well, what's the worst thing that could happen if you did run into her?"
Group is just two hours long so this is a bad question to ask an intelligent, creative guy with an anxiety disorder.
"Well," I begin, "I imagine her, her friends, her daughter, her gay ex-husband - who turns out to really be straight and not 'ex' at all - coming into the store and laughing at me." My face is deadpan. A couple of people look incredulous for a moment, and then remember they're sat on the 17th floor of St. Michael's Hospital. Just two pairs of double-doors separate our little throng from the people in straight jackets in the other wing. I tell them that it makes me feel like Sissy Spacek in Stephen King's "Carrie". That every time I go near The Beach I feel like - at any moment - I might be proverbially doused in a bucket of pig's blood.
"Here's that guy I was telling you about! Can you believe I managed to string him along for a WHOLE YEAR!!! WHAT A DORK! As if I'd ever date him. As if I was ever going to date him. As if I ever meant it when I told him I was buying a big house with lots of bedrooms for all the kids we were gonna have. Let's come back and harangue him again tomorrow - he can't get away, he works here..."
It seems peculiar to me how surprised they are. "But how likely is that?!" they exclaim. "If I were her I'd be way too embarrassed about how I'd behaved to even make eye contact with you," one woman says. Another chimes in: "She's probably avoiding you...hiding at home..."
Embarrassed? That hadn't occurred to me. Any time I'd stood my ground during the 12-month farce she'd seemed utterly unrepentant, often answering with a stunted, "Well then this is over," quasi-staple response. And it's difficult to tell if the sender was blushing as they hit "send". Besides, she lied so pathologically, and did such an exceptional job of triggering my GAD that it's difficult even now to believe any of it was accidental.
But something still nagged me: that I feel just as bad leaving The Beach as I do arriving in it. Run-down, lonely, tired, and a different postcode altogether to 'upbeat'. Right now, I still haven't figured it out. Perhaps that definitely knowing what happened is better than not knowing - even if it is bad news. Perhaps it's that - secretly - my sub-conscious still hopes I'll run into her and all this will have a definite resolution, one way or the other. Or maybe it's that this particular part of town reminds me of a bad experience so strongly that I just feel as sad as I did when it was still happening.
I don't know.
I do loathe myself though, for being a 38 year-old with what turned out to be nothing more than a schoolboy crush. Back at the group meeting though, the members are still pushing me to divulge.
"I guess I feel that I will never find another woman who is such a good match for me," I grudgingly admit.
"BUT SHE'S NOT REAL!" they chorus in reply.
"She IS real," I argue. "I think I saw her one time at The Beach, sat on one of the benches. But I didn't talk to her because I couldn't be one hundred per cent sure it was her...and my anxiety got the better of me. At that split-second in time, I couldn't bear the potential embarrassment of her turning to me and commenting, "I'm sorry - do I know you?" And that wasnt even the worst thing I could think of - I had no way of knowing how she'd react."
There was no guarantee she'd be as pleased to see me as I her. She could've clammed up, tried to slam-dunk me, made things worse, called the cops, burst into tears, or just run off...with or without the optional screaming and/or wringing of hands...
Perhaps this is it. Perhaps my 'dark passenger' (as one of my friends nicknames his anxiety-induced alter-ego) is blaming me: "YOU IDIOT! That was your one and only chance to meet her! Why didn't you talk to her, you pussy?!" And this is why such contemplation and self-analysis is so time-consuming, and potentially so depressing.
But then again, she didn't say hello to me either. I didn't even know she was going to be there - I just caught sight of her as I was riding by. I wasn't prepared, I wasn't expecting it, and one thing's for sure - she had ample opportunity to acknowledge me and make it easier for me, but she didn't.
And I still feel that we are
both losers as a result.
So it would seem this feeling will accompany me for a while longer yet. The only real action I can take is to purposefully do something fun (or at least funny) in The Beach so I have a stronger, more recent, and more positive memory to associate the place with. In the meantime, even if there are no more blog entries like this, there will continue to be feelings like this for a while yet. Hopefully less of the fear, hopefully less of the self-loathing. And as for the lax Degas? Well, the art shop next-door to where I work will have different artists soon, I'm sure.
Roll on summer though.
I react with most hostility and aggression to those who threaten my sources of security.
