Highway To Discomfort Zone

The last few weeks I’ve been languishing inside a pretty brutal bubble of anxiety. I’ve never experienced this feeling so intensely before and let me tell you, it’s not great. It feels like anything and everything I could possibly stress about, I’ve been gathering up and squirrelling away to ruminate on when everyone’s asleep and world is quiet. And it’s building into a huge pimple inside my soul, full of a fetid, anxious pus. But listen closely, because I’m about to pop that sucker and release all the things making me feel squirmy and uncomfortable into the world. Best put your anxiety pus raincoat on, kids.

My Body

I've recently lost some weight. I don’t think I look any different but I’ve been getting a lot of comments and WOAH does it make me uncomfortable. Comments about how I look seem to be falling into two categories; kind, and vaguely hostile. Now, it’s not that I don’t LOVE getting compliments, I’m here for compliments. My favourites being, in no particular order, that I’m smart, that I’m funny and that I’m mean, because all my life I’ve worked at these things and so I’m pleased when people notice. It’s just that compliments about my body and the way I look are new, and I have no idea what response I’m supposed to give. Do I self deprecate and say I don’t know how it’s happened or that it’s the result of breastfeeding? Or try and pass it off as how I looked before I had a baby (not the case because I was recently told at a wedding that the old “chubby Maz” we all grew up with has been replaced with a smaller version)? Or do I admit that I work out up to seven times a week and eat two disgusting cups of spinach for breakfast every day? And because of this confusion I end up giving all these answers and more in garbled and awkward exchanges, and thoroughly flustering the other person who just anticipated me saying “thanks”. Really, the truth is, I’ve suffered from a touch of post natal depression after having George, because having two kids means I am forever an adult now, and I’m having an issue dealing with that. One of the few things that makes me feel okay is absolutely smashing the shit out of myself at the gym, goading the fitness instructor in my parents’ exercise class into screaming in my face until I collapse with exhaustion, or running long distances alone in these here hills. I look at my body every morning and every night and in my mind I think “Oh look, my depression body is looking stronger!” but this isn’t something you can straight up say to people, and when I tried once it garnered a more awkward reaction than the self deprecation/workout regime/mumble list.

The other type of comment I keep getting is a sort of snarky observation about the weight I’ve lost, like I’ve done something wrong to my body. One time a woman I barely know said something to the effect of I shouldn’t have lost so much weight but also, how had I done it? And I just deadpanned to her “I’m having an affair” so I could watch her squirm. I was impressed with that comment and how clearly it illustrates that my sense of humour is mostly informed by Mad Magazine’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” but also, shut up and stop making me feel uncomfortable, weirdo.

Gardening

I am an all or nothing girl. I want to be the best, the most loved, the funniest, the fastest blah blah blah and if I can’t win those accolades, I will literally walk away and not try. Once, when I was a teenager playing in the finals of a basketball competition, it became apparent in the first quarter that we were outmatched and inevitably going to lose the game by a large margin. So I just stood down the offensive end of the court, letting them win. Sure, they could have their victory, but it’d be hollow as hell. And so goes the rest of my life, I have matured very little from 17. And at the moment, the thing I’m terrified of failing at is my job, gardening. Despite my mum’s best efforts, gently prodding me to start the garden at my new house, buying me the David Austin climbing rose I wanted so badly last year along with an endless parade of prayer plants and ferns for the house, I just watch them wither and die, because right now, I can’t engage in gardening. I’m so scared I’ll go back to work and not know what the fuck I’m doing, exposing to everyone that I’m a fraud. This fear is followed by the overwhelming feeling that I need to quit before I get hurt. I’m scared to get my feelings hurt by plants. Man, I’m lame. I literally keep deleting and reinstalling my instagram because photos of gardens instil such a cold dread in me that I keep totally melting down and throwing my phone across the room, the bile rising in my throat and my heart racing.

Douchebags

I’m a feminist. I want equality, I want to be afforded the same rights, and pants, as men. I sure as hell want to be able to speak more than 15% of the time without men thinking I’m speaking half the time (that’s an actual stat, friends. If women in a mixed-gender conversation speak 15% of the time, men perceive the gender contribution to be equal. If women speak 30% of the time, they are perceived as “dominating the discussion”, fucking women *eyeroll emoji*).  But anyway, I digress. I recently attended a feminist debate at Town Hall (it was terrible, I don’t want to go into it, luckily there was a Hungry Jacks and a conversational equal to escape to). And just before I left unimpressed, when the topic of college rape was being discussed, the woman in front of me turned around and seemingly addressing me, yelled “teach your sons not to rape!“ Uh, ok, THANKS LADY! As the mother of two sons I’ll start reining in the specific rape training I’ve been giving them. I’ll call Toys’R’Us and put a hold on that “Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego (So I Can Rape Her)?” board game I bought and I’ll throw out the copy of Goodnight Moon which, unlike the version you all know and love, is a rohypnol promotional item extolling the virtues of the drug to small children. The thing is, I’m pretty sure the dudes who commit these transgressions against women know what they’re doing is wrong, but do it anyway, because they just don’t give a shit. So maybe we’d be better off calling out the people who are deserving of such malice instead of the mothers of boys (and also, why is rape the mother’s fault?!) In particular, there is one type of guy who makes my skin crawl and in my current stressed state, I can spot them a mile off and am unable to conceal the look of disgust I get when I’m around them. I think of them as a “gropers”.

A groper is a specific type of guy who will constantly tell you how much he cares for the safety and wellbeing of women, he will say things like “I don’t even know HOW someone could EVER treat a woman badly, women are way better/more special/smarter than us men”. When in fact, they have no respect whatsoever for women and are just trying to sneak under the radar. I have met more incarnations of this dude than I have fingers and toes and let me tell you, while they proselytise the merits of feminism, when you pass out at a party they will put their hand down your top. You don’t even need to be passed out. Once I was in Rome and chatting to a guy in a hostel, telling him how much I missed my boyfriend back home. We were face to face, sitting on a balcony when his little creep hand began creeping under the front of my jumper. He got to my stomach when I whacked my hand on top of his, the fabric of my jumper separating us, trapping his hand against the skin of my belly. I shook his hand out from inside my clothes like a damn spider, looked witheringly at him and went to bed. I can also think of three people on my friends list who have, when I’ve been asleep somewhere, put their hands inside my clothes. I’m not sure what about my lifeless little body implied consent to them, but I can tell you these people weren’t weird, creepo strangers, they were my friends. Every time this has happened I’ve just played possum and pretended it wasn’t happening, and for whatever reason, I still feel incredibly ashamed of it. Like I’d done something wrong to encourage it. So if you’re reading this, and you’ve done this to me, firstly, please never mention it because it will MORTIFY me and you owe it to me to keep, at the very least, your words to yourself. But also, FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKHEAD GO EAT A DICK I HOPE YOU GET HEAD LICE.

I’m generally a problem solver and usually if I wrote this sort of list of issues, I would pose solutions to them. But today I have no solutions, just anxiety, and this was just a brain dump to try and make it go away. But thank you to all my friends who have sat patiently on their birthdays, on their lunch breaks, into the late hours on their phones listening to me go on and on and those of you who just read this now. Your comfort is invaluable and I love you. And also, to anyone else out there who is being kept up at night, haunted by the the sight of neatly hedged photonias on your street, you’re not alone and I’m here if you need to chat.