Good Excuse, Bad Excuse

When it comes to things that we are obligated to do, we have a list of good excuses and bad excuses for not doing them. Kind of like when we talk about legitimate and illegitimate government in my political science classes. (What is a legitimate government? What is illegitimate? How come democracy is the only legitimate one?)

GOOD EXCUSES TO MISS THINGS

Projectile vomiting
Family emergency
Your car deciding that it no longers wishes to live
That time I got parked in at my brother's frat house and popped my back tires on broken beer bottles trying to drive on the lawn to escape
Death deciding to come knocking

BAD EXCUSES TO MISS THINGS

Your dog ate your homework
You were up late watching Netflix
Anxiety
Depression

I feel like there are two things in the list of "Bad Excuses to Miss Things" that shouldn't be on there. (Hint: they're anxiety and depression.)

The other week I got a bid for the music honourary, Sigma Alpha Iota. This was my second time getting a bid from them and I wanted to know more about it, so I talked with the former president and my next door neighbour from freshman year, Katie.

She told me the basics about being an SAI brother, how much of a time commitment it would be, how much the dues would cost, if I had to take a little, all that good stuff. I was very excited because this was something that I wanted last year and I wanted it this year, too. But I had some stipulations.

1. I'm president of the mental health advocacy group on campus, Active Minds.
2. I'm a Resident Assistant.
3. I'm deeply involved in Chapel.
4. I'm in a sorority.
5. I spend a lot of extra time taking care of myself because that's how living with GAD works.

All of the time commitment issues were solved. I drew a little pyramid of "Beckett's Heirarchy of Extra-Curriculars" as a mental map.

Then I looked squarely at Katie and said, "I want you to understand that sometimes I won't be able to go to events. And it's not because I don't want to go, it's because I can't go. It's because I'll be too afraid to leave my apartment or because I had a bad day and had problems getting out of bed, or because something minor happened that sent me spiralling out of control and I had to take an hour long shower and cry on the floor for a while. I need you to understand that."

I did not expect her to understand it. Most people don't. The other week while working on my senior thesis, I was missing a paper clip and it sent me spiralling into a panic attack in the middle of the library and I was on the floor for a good twenty minutes, holding my knees and trying to breathe.

There are people that do not understand that this is real and that it's hard to get out of bed when the whole world is scary, that sometimes you just need to lock yourself in your apartment and listen to loud music until you can cope with your own mind.

But Katie looked straight back at me and said, "As long as you send me email that says that you're too anxious to come, you're excused. Don't worry about it."

There are some organisations that I'm involved in where this isn't the case. And it's not that people are mean, or they're terrible people or they secretly have a vendetta against mental illness.

It's that they don't understand what it's like to be afraid to leave your room and miss an important event because you thought that you were internally drowning.

I'm working on a way to make this different. What I know right now is that it needs to be talked about, and that's why I have this blog. I get to talk about my own anxiety and how I deal with it, how I have good days and bad days and in between days that I'm not sure what to do with, and somehow it all rolls together in how I'm moving forward with my life to get where I want to go, not where my anxiety wants to go. And hopefully people like you read it and can relate, and if you can't relate, you can try to understand that life isn't a simple thing, that getting out of bed and deciding what to wear is sometimes a huge ordeal and it's exhausting.

I wasn't able to join SAI. My bank account was too poor. I plucked up the courage today to tell Katie that I really wanted to join but I didn't have enough money, but she just gave me a hug and told me not to worry. I have a love/hate relationship with that phrase, and I probably always will.

I have a network here at my small school, a network of people that I work with that understand what it's like and get it when I send a text that says, "I can't do this right now" and it's accepted without comment, except maybe a "let me know how you're doing".

In order to feel in control, I've gotten good at making lists. Right now I'm making a list of reasons why I need to go to the Centre of Student Opportunity to talk to a nice woman named Laurie about how I want to move to England to blog professionally. It currently looks like this.

1. ENGLAND !##%!#%%$#^!!!!
2. Laurie is nice. She will not hurt you. Repeat. She. Will. Not. Hurt. You.
3. You have a professional blog to show her.
4. SHE CAN HELP YOU IF YOU LET HER.

These all look like good excuses to go the career office to me.

I Walked into Mordor. I Mean, I Used Photoshop.

My epic journey with photoshop in the realms of professional blogging continues straight from the Mac lab, where I am currently sitting, surrounded by people that I don't know.

This is a high anxiety environment for me.

Referring to my previous post, I spent all weekend trying not to dread Monday, where I would be using photoshop again in class on a computer that I refused to name Gerald. (My previous post is here if you're interested.) In fact, I spent all weekend off of campus and it was glorious.

When Monday rolled around, I tried very hard not to dread working with photoshop again. I told myself all of the things that my therapist told me, happy mantras like "you are not your anxiety" and "crying in front of your entire class won't kill you". I like that one. My mom is very fond of it.

"Beckett, you're not going to die. I promise you if you talk to this store employee, you aren't going to die."

I got my borrowed Macbook, opened it up, and waited with nervous anticipation for class to begin. My professor started out with an apology for the complexity of Friday's tutorial and told us that we had a new assignment; take an image and some text and put them together into a visual argument that had something to do with our blogs.

My initial thoughts: This is going to be fun. I'll make a really cool graphic. But what's my blog really about? It's obviously about England. But it's also about anxiety. I mean, it's really a whole bunch about anxiety. I should probably focus on that. Where am I going to get an image from? Google. Should I Google stock photos? Should I Google inspirational quotes? I should open up photoshop.

I found photoshop by myself, which was a personal victory. But when I tried to open up the proper version, CS6, it wouldn't let me open it because of my preferences. My professor told me just to use CS5 and if I encountered any problems, to flag her down. I resisted the urge to vomit at the idea but opened CS5 and Google to prepare for finding an image.

I spent a lot of time looking up things like England and English Coast and London Underground. I found some really cool pictures.

Oh the beauty of England!

(I wish to impress upon you how long it took me to put that image in my blog simply because I'm currently on a Mac and totally out of my element. But I still have feeling in my feet, I haven't cried, and my ribs have not metaphorically snapped.)

Most of the pictures of England were too busy for me to put text over and I spent the entire period contemplating them on Google. I never actually did anything with photoshop, I just lounged around on Google wondering on earth I could do. When class was over I went to the library and I decided that I was going to use a picture from my tumblr that really had nothing to do with England but more to do with anxiety. But what should I use? What text could I use?

I found this and thought Well, I could do something neat with this.

Lungs are my favourite organ and when I get really anxious, I sometimes have problems using them. I thought about doing something with these interesting flowery lungs. It was also in the back of my mind that there was a prize for the best image that was created, and I happen to be overly competitive. It's a problem. Whatever I did, I wanted it to be good.

After a lot of frustrated clicking, I figured out how to put text at the bottom of the picture. I wanted it to be nice and small and not very noticeable and I wanted it to align exactly between each flower lung. In class we discuss a lot about alignment and proximity and what those can mean. I managed to type in the word "breathe" and stick it at the bottom, exactly where I wanted it. I wanted it at the bottom so that it was the last thing that you saw; you could look at the flower lungs and ponder those first before you got to the word breathe.

There was a new problem: breathe was sitting there, perfectly placed. But it was just plain text. How uncool was that?

So I highlighted it and literally just clicked on everything that I could find to make it look interesting.

The finished product of anxiety and photoshop.

I had a lot of fun playing with the text. I wanted it to contrast with the cream coloured background and I also wanted it to match, relatively, the lung colour. The shading gave it some semblance of standing out and giving it a kind of 3D quality that the lungs had. I wanted it to match the lungs as much as possible so it didn't stick out too boldly. The focus was meant to be on the lungs. I also had the weird idea that the word "breathe" was going to be faded because breathing to me feels like a rather faded idea.

Leave it to me to come up with a strange English major metaphor that I can't fully explain.

So here I am, still in the Mac lab surrounded by people that I don't really know, typing this out and posting my final product of my first real foray with photoshop. I did not need to ask anyone for help. I told myself that I wasn't going to die and as far as I know, while I'm sitting here writing this, I'm not dead. I could ask the person next to me if I'm alive, but that would involve talking to someone that I don't know, and I'm not that good at that kind of thing.

My ribs feel a little bit like snapping. My feet are rather tingly. But I haven't started crying, I haven't hyperventilated, and I can focus clearly on what the rest of my day is going to look like outside of whatever anxieties came out of photoshop.

Have I conquered photoshop? Seeing as I still haven't managed to even open the latest version, I'm guessing that I haven't. But I think at this point, I've figured out how to play with it well enough that when I think about it, I won't want to curl up into a ball and cry.

One small step for Beckett, one giant leap for mankind.

Hopefully my next step is going to be to the Centre for Student Opportunity to look at graduate schools in England.

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.