A Day of Dealing with Photoshop.

Today, I make the claim that photoshop is evil.

I don't think I really have any grounds to make that claim, but I'm going to make it anyway.

I don't have photoshop on my humble PC, which is a big clunker named Kip that used to have a bow in the corner. So when I went into my digital rhetoric class today and my professor said, "All right, let's use photoshop!" I went to the Mac lab across the hall to check one out like most of my classmates that also use PCs. I logged into the shiny and sleek MacBook. I named him Gerald after the dead baby in a book I'm reading for senior seminar. And probably because I named him Gerald, he refused to open photoshop.

My professor had already gone through the basics of our tutorial: open this image that was posted on our class website, drag it over to photoshop, put a frame around the girl's face. (The picture was of a girl and as the class went on, she began to freak me out. A lot.)

Photoshop was still opening. For the past five minutes, while my classmates had been trying to open the image of this interesting looking girl on their own photoshops, I had a pinwheel of death just spinning, spinning spinning and I was plucking up the courage to raise my hand to ask for a new computer.

This guy. This guy right here.

Raising my hand and asking for a new computer had implications. On the one hand, I couldn't sit here all fifty minutes with the pinwheel spinning. However, raising my hand would mean everyone would look at me. What if my professor said no? (Of course she wouldn't, but what if?) What if she said yes like a normal human being? Then I would have to get up in front of the whole class, walk in front of the room, leave the room, grab a new computer, walk back, and be behind.

I raised my hand. Asked. Got a new computer. Felt the judgement. Turned bright red. Focused hard on logging into the new MacBook that I didn't name Gerald. Tried to remember where to find photoshop. Found it. Couldn't find the image on our class website. Started to panic.

For most people, having a small panic like this isn't a big deal. You can poke your neighbour and say, "Hey, can you help me find this image?" And they'd kindly lean over and help you.

My kind of GAD panic went something like this.

My face got really hot. My hands and my feet started to tingle and eventually my feet went numb. My chest started to feel like it was caving in on itself and I thought about how all of my ribs would snap. Breathing became difficult. It became very hard to focus on my computer screen. My legs started to shake and it shook the table that I was at. And the what ifs started to circulate through my head, going farther and farther away from the actual topic at hand, devolving into a spiral of panicked thoughts that made absolutely no sense to anyone, least of all me. My entire face started twitching as I fought off tears that were welling up behind my eyes and making my cheekbones feel thin and fragile.

I could not do this in class.

My friend Lisa was sitting next to me. She helped me open up the image and put it into photoshop. I calmed down a little bit and tried to focus on what my professor wanted me to do. But now I was already in panic mode, and once I'm in panic mode, it's very hard for me to get out of it. The main problem that I have is that I know that something has already gone wrong, and therefore I understand that everything else I do from now on can go wrong and that I'll be the cause of it.

When my professor asked us to push a button that said background, I was already so invested in panic mode that I couldn't find it. Lisa, not so patiently this time (but it wasn't her fault) showed me where it was and it was in a very obvious spot.

This did not make my anxiety better. I focused on the fact that I didn't feel like crying anymore and that I had some feeling in my feet and that my ribs hadn't snapped.

The next part of the photoshop process went smoothly. I made a circle around the image of the girl's face and I played around with it. Lisa made her look like the statue of liberty. I turned her in to a pale gothic redhead with green eyeliner and piercing red lipstick. My anxiety was abating. It was going to be okay, I was going to get the hang of this.

Then we moved onto the next portion and everything went wrong again.

My professor was prowling the classroom, making sure we were doing okay. I was more concentrated on hiding all of my panic symptoms (I was starting to breathe shallowly and some tears were escaping) than on getting my photoshop to do what it needed to do.

I was hoping that I looked like this.

Having the time of my life using photoshop!!!!!

And I was hoping that I did not look like this.

This is how I felt. With numb feet. And sweat. And breaking ribs.

I don't know if my professor saw through it and deconstructed the notion that I'm very good at hiding my anxiety in social situations or if she just saw the my photoshop wasn't working properly. She knelt next to me and slowly started to click on things, making sure that I could see what she was doing. While she slowly went through to figure out what was wrong, I took deep, calming breaths, tried to suck my tears back into my tear ducts, thought long and hard about getting feeling back into my feet and hands, and reminded myself that my ribs were not going to snap in half. Eventually my professor and I came to one simple conclusion: I was using the wrong version of photoshop.

There were five minutes left in class. I opened the new version of photoshop while she went back to the front of the classroom and wrapped up the tutorial. I was feeling a bit better; this wasn't my fault, this wasn't my fault, this wasn't my fault, none of this was my fault, no one had noticed that I had panicked, no one had noticed, it wasn't a full panic attack, everything was going to be fine.

Then the new photoshop didn't open. There was some sort of error.

It didn't matter because class was over, but I wanted it to open to prove that I could do something right, that maybe photoshop didn't hate me like I irrationally thought it did. I kept thinking about the picture of the girl that we were altering and how her eyes kept looking at me, how she had a little smirk on her face like she could see all of the panic that was coursing through each of my limbs and all of my organs, that she knew exactly what I was thinking, and I was on the verge of tears again.

I found myself alone in the classroom with my professor. I hitched up a smile and wished her a belated birthday. We joked for a few minutes and I returned both computers that I borrowed. Then I ran to the library to my study desk and I cried for a good ten minutes.

What's come out of today, all of the panic in the middle of class, is not just that I failed at hiding it (which is something I'm normally very good at) but the fact that when I get to England to become a blogger, I'll have to use photoshop. It reminded me of the time I first set up a blogspot account like this one and nothing went correctly and how I shut out the rest of the world, thinking that I could never do this. How can I be a blogger if I can't use the web application for it?

How can I do what I want to do if I don't know how and I can't get the help that I need?

We have another tutorial on Monday. I'm going to spend all weekend trying not to dread it. Every time I dread it, I'm going to smile and I'm going to tell myself that it is a learning experience and that if I cry in class, that's fine. To hell with everyone there.

To cry is to turn ourselves inside out, and this is a noble pursuit.