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I read Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin, and there was one thought in the book that stuck with me.  The book is a series of emails back and forth between two siblings.  Harry admits that he’s feeling anxious because he can’t write: “It seems the more I want to make things, the less I am able to … When I want to write, I find I can’t even read.  It’s truly paralyzing” (p. 75).  He describes his anxiety as “an unfortunate distraction.”

Matilda answers, “I wonder if my life would feel empty without anxiety, like a central character from my life was suddenly absent.  Like there’d been a death” (p. 77).

If a genie popped out of our sugar bowl (it’s the closest thing we own that vaguely resembles a magic lamp… by which I mean that it doesn’t really resemble a magic lamp at all because it’s just a normal sugar bowl, but it has a lid.  So there’s that) and told me that I couldn’t make my own three wishes but he’d remove all of my anxiety, my knee-jerk answer would be, “hell, yes.”  I am an anxious person (cough, I’m sure you haven’t noticed) and my anxiety controls portions of my life.  I would love to be unshackled from my fears and worries.

But.

When I read this passage, I thought about how I would feel if I went through life without worries, without fears, without that underlying sense of dread that is part of my DNA.  I wouldn’t feel like myself.  I’d be like one of those casual, relaxed J Jill models, lounging against the wall with a dreamy smile on my face.  What wouldn’t get accomplished because I didn’t have my anxiety constantly driving me forward?  What wouldn’t get noticed because I’m hyper-aware of my surroundings?  What avoidable events would occur because I didn’t put fear-based safeguards in place?

All of those things seem like a small price to pay for daily worrying.

Because it’s one or the other: I don’t get all the benefits of anxiety with none of the drawbacks.  You can take anxiety as it is and use it well, but in doing so, you also have to experience that anxiety ramp up and residue.

Anxiety is a part of me.  It’s part of my personality and removing it would change who I am at my core.  I wouldn’t be Melissa.  I’d be… someone else.

I liked that idea from the book of a character missing.  I would be Seinfeld without George.  Friends without Chandler.  Those shows wouldn’t feel the same.

Would you get rid of a (mostly) negative personality trait?

I recently read Amy Poeppel’s Small Admissions, and I really loved this sentiment towards the end of the book (on page 356). It’s about a group of friends and family trying to help one of their own through a difficult life change, and this thought comes after the storm, when the crisis has passed for the main character:

Happiness is not a zero-sum game. It’s the only case in which the resources are limitless, and in which the rich can get richer at no expense to anyone else. That day in the park, I found it remarkably easy to own my happiness and celebrate Kate’s as well.

It’s a strange thing, though, how rare, maybe impossible, it is to have everyone you care about thriving at the same time. For a short spell, life seems certain and stable, until something shifts and redistributes, randomly, unpredictably, and when you look around at the new landscape, you see that it’s someone else’s turn now. You redirect your attention to focus on the friend in need. You hope — you know — they will do the same for you, when your turn comes.

It’s incredibly fitting for our particular community; where people are simultaneously navigating their own happiness/unhappiness at the same time as other people’s opposite happiness/unhappiness.  Which, in the end, is maybe the universe’s way of making sure everyone potentially has their emotional needs met.

If we were all sad at the same time, no one would have the emotional reserves to dedicate their energy to others.  We need this imbalance, then, even if it’s hard to navigate in the moment; to have the happiness have to stand next to the sadness and vice versa.

The twins are renewing their passports, so we swung by a chain pharmacy with a photo center in order to get their passport pictures taken.  The passport center consisted of a white, pull-down screen and a person who stood in front of the person, taking a picture with a handheld point-and-shoot camera.  Like the kind I have at the bottom of my purse.  At $14 per person, I expected a tripod.  Maybe an SLR.  But if a point-and-shoot gets the job done, fine.

The guy takes a bunch of photos, most of them terrible, as in the child was at a diagonal angle.  But he finally got a decent one of each kid and went to print them out.  When he handed them to me, he had cropped one of the photos so the child was far to the right.  Not centered.

When I commented on this, he refused to retake the photo and promised it would be fine.  I kept telling him that this was a time sensitive situation — we could not afford, timewise, to send in the passport application a second time if the first photo was rejected.  But he told me it was “good enough” and he was “pretty sure it was okay.”  He took the photo to a person he told me was the manager for a second opinion, and we watched that person shrug.

We ended up going back and forth about this for about ten minutes — ten minutes! — but he wouldn’t budge.  He thought his crappy work should be his final work.

The twins and I left and went to Josh’s office.  And then Josh took the kid back to have the picture retaken.  When he walked in, they were happy to make this better.  The manager (a different person from the woman he told me was the manager) agreed with Josh that the picture would have never been accepted because it clearly doesn’t fit passport guidelines.  The manager was willing to retake the photos when Josh asked.

This is partly a story about male privilege.  When Josh walked in, the employee got the real manager.  The manager immediately agreed the work was sub-par and fixed it.  Josh was in there for under ten minutes, the same amount of time I spent arguing with the same employee and trying to get him to re-do his work.  We’ve seen that story again and again.

But the part I’m focused on is that I cannot handle when people don’t put forth their best work as their final work.  No one gets it right the first time 100% of the time, but part of interacting with other humans is owning your mistakes and working to make them better.  That includes taking pride in your work — whatever your job may be — and always attempting to not only put forth your best effort in the first place, but to also correct any mistakes that occur in that first (or second, third, or fourth) attempt.

I used my ire as a teaching experience for the twins.  They got to see first hand how annoying it is to be on the receiving end of someone not making their work better.  I made them promise to never put someone else on that receiving end by not pulling their own weight in whatever task is on their plate, whether it’s a paper for school or following the customer’s instructions for bagging groceries.  And if they don’t do it right the first time, that’s okay.  Just do it again.

Grrrrrrr.  (That was an annoyed sound.)

Curbed has pulled together a guide of the best places to openly cry in New York.  They suggest gently sobbing on the Staten Island Ferry or grabbing a bench at Chelsea Piers for a quick wail.  They’re not snobs — they have at least three acceptable crying spaces in Brooklyn.  Of course, if you need more locations, you can turn to the NYC Crying Guide, a blog recording the best places to cry in the city since 2014.

It made me wonder if there are people who are okay with crying in public and people who would never cry in public.  (And then what do those people do if they feel as if they’re close to tears while they’re out and about?)

I am okay with crying in public.  I figure that if people are okay with me laughing in public or sighing in public, that they can handle me crying in public.  It’s all just physical manifestations of emotions.  As long as the physical manifestations don’t affect other people, I’m fine expressing any or seeing any expressed.  Shouting, for instance, may scare people so I would count that as affecting other people.  But laughing, sighing, crying, all fine.

I don’t look for a particular place to cry just as I don’t look for a particular place to laugh.  So if I feel like crying in the food store as I walk down the aisle, that’s where I’ll cry.  Maybe people think I’m just really sad about ketchup.  Though that doesn’t happen very often.  I mean, crying in the ketchup aisle.  But if I have to cry, I just cry.

Do you cry in public?  Or do you try to never cry in public?  And if you’re in that second group, what do you do if you feel a need to cry coming on while you’re out in public?

I am a slow reader.  Sometimes I’m a slow reader on purpose, like when I really love a book and want to make it last as long as possible.  I did that with the Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman.  I only allowed myself 10 pages a day (or sometimes a little more if I was having a particularly bad day).

Other times it takes me forever because I’m distracted.  I start reading and then remember something I want to jot on my to-do list.  And then I remember something I want to Google, which leads me to three other things I’ve been meaning to look up.  So on and so on.

But really, when I look at how many books other people read vs. how many books I read, I consider myself a slow reader.  I don’t do book challenges because I assume that I will fail the book challenge.  I have only completed 10 books since January 1st, which means that I’m on target for finishing 20 new books this year.  (I’m not counting re-reading books.)  A lot of those book challenges aim for 52 books or a 100 books; goals that are completely out of my normal reading range.

And yet, I can’t argue with this post by Lifehacker that Modern Mrs. Darcy posted on her site.  If you set aside five hours, you can finish a book in a single day.  Make it ten hours to account for distractions, and you can still finish a book in a single day.  All it takes is thinking “how much solitude you’ll need, then double it.”  Like setting the phone in another room.  Turning off the computer.  Letting everyone know that you intend to spend the day reading, and then do it.

Oh, and practice interval reading:

Set a timer and read for 20 minutes, then do something active to keep yourself energized for 5-10 minutes. Think of it as the pomodoro method for reading.

I can do that.  I mean, this article is about reading a book for a class vs. reading a book for pleasure, but it’s still good practice to set the timer and keep the time sacred.  Use the 5 – 10 minutes for the Google search (just jot down the thought on a post-it note and get back to the book) vs. interrupting the book to address things during book reading time.

I’m clearly sensitive about my reading speed or I wouldn’t have written a whole post about it, but it also seems like something I could fix (a bit) if I dedicated some energy toward it.

Are you a slow reader, medium reader, or fast reader?