I was at my local grocery store earlier today, grabbing the essentials to make chili. It's fall. It's Cowboys football. The cold and melancholy are settling in for the year. All sorrows are less with bread, no? Bueller?
The store has a special running, where you get a book for $1 with the purchase of selected food items. So, when I bought some shredded cheddar for my Frito Pie, I started looking at the basket of books to see what I could grab. I was just going to grab a book and give it to a friend, for her kids. Under the endless pile of Winnie The Pooh, Sesame Street and H-E-Buddy books, a pair of own eyes with the words "Don't Worry!" over them caught my attention. I flipped through it and the pages landed on this image:
The sight of this page, both made my heart overwhelmed with sadness and anger. Last night was a long, long night. The kind of night that you fall asleep completely spent from crying for hours. Where you go to sleep knowing no one really gives a shit how you are feeling as long as you're there for them when needed. I grabbed the book with the intention of writing a post about that single image. I wanted to be cynical, to demand that we stop teaching children lies like this. Having them grow up believing in love and truth and fairness. To stop feeding them crap like you can be happy if you try hard and do right by people. That everyone has their someone and because of that, they'll never be alone. I know. I may have had a rough night even after I went to sleep.
When I got home, I was putting my groceries up and my mom called again (she had called last night). She wanted to see if I was still "off". Last night she was forcing me to talk instead of cry quietly on the phone. She demanded to know, even after I said I didn't have the words to explain my grief. "You have the words, you do. You just don't want to say them. TALK." The call ended when I broke and told her to just leave me alone. This morning she was calmer, but I could still hear the tension in her voice, the worry... Would I do something stupid? Why am I not saying what's wrong? She was also relieved I didn't hurt myself, apparently. The call was short and when I hung up, I felt heavy. I opened the book and flipped through it...
This was no ordinary book. I kept flipping through the pages and reading, waiting for the happy-go-lucky bullshit message, but it never came. This book had a specific, Yari'esque nudge to it. A page showing a group of nervous, cautious penguins read ..."We must move with the times, as soon as the times are sure which way they're moving." Another one showed a frog hanging from a crocodile's mouth, and in beautiful script font it said "Some days are better than others. This, unfortunately, is one of the others." The next page greeted me with a big brown bear, dragging itself across two pages, with the words "At my current rage of progress, I'll soon be somewhere behind my starting point." I smiled, comforted, as a frog with big red eyes declared "I could try resigning myself to fate - but what if fate refuses to accept my resignation?" Page after page of what some may consider depressing messages for kids. But, halfway through the book, the message becomes clearer. The confused looking crane tells me to not let success go to my head..and if I fail, to not let failure go there either. The cat grooming it's paw whispers "If you take care of yourself, that will be one less person you have to worry about." And the last page shows me the same nervous penguin from the beginning, now jumping off a glacier saying "Do something important with your life: enjoy it!"
I felt calm. I felt comforted. I still felt sad, but not hopeless. I still felt lost, but not forever. The author said that she was born a worrier, but after watching that 'Life After People' series..she realized 3 big things:
1. Nature will clean up all or messes eventually; everything will be fixed, everything will eventually be OK.
2. Whatever happens, we are but a tiny blip. We might as well stop worrying about the small stuff, because in the grand scheme of things, even the things we think are really big...are actually tiny.
3. If there is no point in worrying, then we may as well be happy. It is as simple and as difficult as that.
A $1 book was able to calm me down more than hours of self mutilation, days of bone crushing grief and $50 spent talking to a guy with a notepad who solves everything by medicating me. There's nothing wrong with feeling how I do. I can't help things from happening in my life or to me. Eventually, things will be OK. I just have to make it through today. Celebrate my little victories and stop waiting for someone value me how I deserve to be. Only I can do that.
So, I'll make some chili for my Frito Pie now. Something is bound to break, work, happen. I am a good person.
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