An absolute nuisance

I worked at Home Depot for almost three years when Natasha started. She started as a cashier. Then she went to the service desk.

Natasha was mean as hell, but so was I by that point.

I don’t know why I liked her so much. I did though. I wanted to be best best friends with her so much.

She was assigned to work the phones one day a week and the call center position was in the same office as me and the other COS (Customer Order Specialist). I used to go out of my mind with nerves every day I knew she was scheduled. She would be nice to me some of the time, but then snap at me or roll her eyes at me other times.

I just lived for those moments when she would laugh at something I said or tell me my outfit was cute.

At the time, I considered myself incredibly left-leaning. It was only because Ernie (the guy I’m now married to-he was my boyfriend at the time) was incredibly left-leaning. I hadn’t known anything about politics when I met him, but I knew that I was feminist and pro-life.

Ernie was so much smarter than me, but he took everything I said seriously. Even when I was being ridiculous. He always had the nicest way of explaining to me that I was being ridiculous without making me feel bad. He still does, actually. He’s incredibly patient and kind to everyone. But especially to me.

Maybe it was because he took me so seriously that I decided I believed in Marxism and social safety nets and Bernie Sanders. He taught me a lot of things and was incredibly knowledgeable.

So by the time I met Natasha, I very much identified as left-leaning, and Natasha was conservative. Well, New Hampshire is a very conservative state. People used to actually stop me to scold me for the Obama bumper stickers all over my car. Natasha would watch Fox News. Which now, years later, I like Fox News. For the most part. I do think they ought to rebrand as political commentary other than “news” but really that could be said of all news channels at this point. Well, Natasha being conservative was one of the only things I didn’t like about her.

She loved country music. She loved shopping. She did dance when she was a kid, just like me, only her focus was ballet and lyrical, while mine was jazz and Irish Step. But like me, she did a little of everything. When you grow up a dance kid, it sort of works out that way. A little tap here, a little acro there.

I guess I liked how comfortable she always seemed in her own skin. She always said exactly what she wanted and never seemed to give a fuck what anyone thought. I care what people think, okay? I wish I didn’t, but I do. I cared what she thought. She was so confident and so funny and so interesting. She was also so pretty. Like so pretty I really think she could have been a model. Now, Natasha was on the heavier side. I wouldn’t have called her fat. I guess some rude people might call her that. She was probably about twice my weight, but it was all distributed really gorgeously. She had this beautiful hourglass shape. Big round ass and tits that were just the right shape, and yes she had a belly and her legs were a little thick, but she really did pull all the weight off in the most beautiful way. And here’s the part where I have to clarify: I did not have a crush on her. Whenever I get clingy and weird at another woman, I know it sounds like I’m crushing. All I can say is that I didn’t want to fuck her. Everything else though, YES. I wanted to do all of the things with her. Watch movies with her, have phone calls with her, cuddle with her, brush her hair, hear her talk, listen to her sing, all of it.

So….yeah, well obviously she was hella creeped out by it.

I bought clothes like hers. I copied a lot of things she did.

And I think all my recounting all of these times I lost my mind over a person I barely knew begs the question: Jen, you see the problem, what do you keep doing it for?

The thing is, there’s like regular brain and then there’s crazy brain. When I’m having a moment and going off the deep end, I usually don’t realize I’m doing it. Sometimes in little flashes here and there, I realize it and try to reel it all in. Mostly though, crazy brain is a whole other feeling. It feels like my regular head just pops all the way off my body and then I’m in crazy brain mode. Whatever, or whoever, I’m going crazy over is all I’m thinking about. It all feels so fast and panicked and my thoughts are like brr-brr-brrrrr! One thought-two thought-over-here-over-there! Hophophophop POW!

I have flashes here and there like “Jen, you’re going nuts again. Stop. You’re being wild and making a fool of yourself, so stop.”

But then I get pulled right back in and that little flash of lucid is just gone.

So like…do other people around me try to tell me my head has popped off?

Well…crazy brain Jen is a jerk.

After my last episode, a friend said to me “I kind of wanted to say something to you, but I didn’t think it would help.”

And I told her, “It’s good you didn’t say anything. I would have been mean to you. I wouldn’t have listened to you. You would have had to deal with a whole lot of rudeness for no reason.”

Because that’s the truth. A couple of people were brutally honest with me. I yelled at them and shut my ears.

Crazy brain Jen doesn’t listen to fucking anybody.

I guess what makes me most upset about my last episode is that I pulled myself out of crazy brain. I did it before anybody had realized there was a problem. I knew what I was doing that was fueling crazy brain and I stopped.

But you know, all it took was one piece of evidence that the person I was losing it over knew who I was and BAM I was off and going again.

Before that I was back in normal brain mode for almost three months.

That whole situation was incredibly painful and I don’t know how to get over it. I’m not going to rehash any details. I think I’m finally sick of doing that. But yeah, it was incredibly painful.

Although, to be honest, I deserved it.

That’s the truth.

I go through life making an absolute nuisance of myself and only thinking about my feelings.

I’m still thinking about my feelings.

I’m not only thinking about my feelings, but literally I’m ranting to myself in my little corner of the internet where like maybe 5 people pay attention to me, so there’s no reason to speculate on anyone else’s feelings.

Yeah, I’m a nuisance.

And I run around acting weird and erratic and demanding attention and then get all shook up when things go awry.

Okay, let me maybe talk a little about what everything was like before my last episode.

That part seems a little important.

Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know.

I probably take myself a little too seriously and treat this life that is actually one long string of idiotic events I do to myself with far more gravitas than it deserves.

But before the whole crazy brain situation of 2019/2020, I was a teacher.

I liked my job, but I felt very out of place. All of the other teachers seemed like they belonged and I felt like a fraud.

I liked working with kids for the most part. I liked finding fun and entertaining ways to teach them about books and writing. I worked in Special Education. It was an autism program. I often covered in gen ed classrooms though. I absolutely sucked with gen ed kids. I couldn’t ever keep control of the classroom. And my goodness did these teenagers do some ridiculous things. Just stupid shit that I had no idea how to handle. I wish I was making this up, but one kid took his pants off in class. I still don’t know why he did it. Probably to shock me and it worked. I think I yelled something like “Oh! No! Hey!” and he smirked and said, “Miss, I need to change.” I gaped at him while the class lost its collective shit and I screamed “Office! Out!”

It was easier working with the special ed kids. It came easily to me. I mean, it was a very specialized program. All of the kids had autism.

I’m married to an autistic guy. I don’t have autism (numerous people have tried to tell me I have autism, but I’m not gonna latch onto a label like that when I don’t think it fits me-we can just call me a weird mix of extroversion and anxiety that probably seems a lot like autism but isn’t). Anyway, I vibe with autistic people. Autistic adults and also, as I learned right away in this K12 job, autistic kids.

I’m not gonna say I was the best and I’m not gonna say I never screwed up. Kids say weird things. Autistic kids say even weirder things. There were times when I didn’t know how to respond and said the wrong thing.

Generally though, I did pretty well. I could joke around with the kids and have fun. In the gen ed classrooms, my jokes didn’t really land. They did pretty good in the special ed rooms though. I think it was just my vibe; my “I love being here with you guys!” vibe. in other words…I doubt I’m even funny to autistic kids, but I think they were polite enough to pretend I was.

I had fun in my job.

What stressed me out about it was feeling like I shouldn’t be there.

I had applied on a whim. I started by substitute teaching. I applied because people who know me in real life…people who know about all my mental health issues…kept telling me I should. I just didn’t think I’d get the job. I thought I’d apply for the substitute teaching job and all my mental hospital stays would show up on the background check.

I guess it didn’t though.

I did substitute teaching for a while, decided I liked working with teenagers, and decided I liked special education best, even though eventually I would have to go back and get another Master’s Degree. I studied and took tests. Every state has different tests for teachers. I know how to study so I passed them all on my first try.

I got a full-time job working in an autism program.

I really loved working with those kids. It made me…not happy..but the closest to happy that I’ve ever been.

There was still something really really wrong though. I don’t know what. Every time I try to figure out what exactly was (is?) wrong, I think I get further away from figuring it out.

It’s probably nothing too deep. Probably just that I want to be miserable.

Except…that was the only time in my life I really didn’t want to be miserable, and I promise, I really was the closest to happy that I’ve ever been.

Except that despite all of that…something was wrong. I don’t know what. I’d explain better if I could.

But this is how it went.

First, I became obsessed with Columbine. I would come home from school, turn the lights off and make a nest in the bed, or sit inside of the closet and listen to the Columbine 911 calls or watch the news footage from that day.

The obsession became all-consuming. I thought about Columbine constantly.

I had people worried.

I stopped doing that for a bit. I wrote a 600 page novel in 3 months.

Then I wrote a 400 page novel in 3 months.

Then I started posting on incel forums.

And then comes the part where I really went crazy, but it’s all too stupid and I don’t feel like rehashing that part anymore.

Right before that part, was the whole long boring, empty, sad slog. All the days of feeling like I was nothing and I was pretending and what was I pretending FOR anyway? What was I waiting to happen? When was “better” coming?

I went to yoga with other teachers and talked about recipes and skincare and everything boring and flat, and I felt more like I’m not a real person than I ever had in my life. I felt fake. Like I shouldn’t be there. I felt like eventually they would all notice I shouldn’t be there. Like my camouflage would stop working.

On the weekends, I went out for drinks and out to hipster breweries with this group of 30ish professionals. I didn’t feel connected to them at all and I wanted to be connected to someone so much.

There’s other stuff too. But of course, I can’t talk about everything, because my life involves other people and other people don’t always like to be written about.

Maybe I had no right to be, but I was lonely.

I’m less lonely now, but I’m not going to pretend it’s all patched up and perfect. I still feel alone sometimes. Even though I understand a lot of it is in my imagination; it’s still how I feel.

I can’t tell if this was a big part of it or not. And I’m the adult, so I’m just a dumbass if it was a big part of it, but here it is: Teenagers are not kind to substitute teachers. Even after I got my full-time position, I would cover in gen-ed rooms regularly. Every insecurity I had those kids got to.

Pimple lip. Wash your face. You have a mustache. What’s wrong with your skin?

I know. They’re kids. And I wasn’t a nice kid myself. I never insulted a teacher’s appearance, but I was shitty in my own ways.

I was about to turn 30. then I was 30. Then 31. I was insecure about getting older, feeling ugly. And the next generation was telling me every day that I should be insecure.

Isn’t that pathetic? I cared what a bunch of kids said about me.

I really tried not to let it bother me. I tried to stay cool and calm and professional. Only twice did I have to turn and look at the whiteboard and blink and tell myself “If you cry, it’s all over. They will not feel bad for you. They will make fun of you worse. They will go wild and laugh at you if you cry.”

And I never did burst into tears in front of the kids. I never did that.

The kids I always liked talking to the best were the foster kids. I feel like that must be so awful to bounce from one home to another. You get attached to people and then they leave you forever. I couldn’t imagine that.

I never consciously had favorites when I was a teacher. I wouldn’t even, not even in my head, admit I had a favorite. But look, I’m never going to be a teacher again, so here it is. My favorite kid was a 14-year-old who had been in foster care for years. She was inappropriately clingy and affectionate some days. She was so desperate for someone to love her. Other days, she would snap and yell and be difficult. The other kids weren’t always nice to her. Even in a special education program, I think they could sense the desperation on her. She stole things. She was rude. She was a pain in the ass.

I wished wished wished so hard that I was in a place to take her. We didn’t have as much money back then. We lived in a shitty apartment downtown. We were barely getting by. Even with both of us working professional jobs, I live in a high cost of living city.

I cried more than once that this desperate little thing lived in a group home run by staff. That she had so much sweetness if she could just get out of her own way. And if people could just be a little patient with her.

Towards the tail end of my time in K12, she started talking about boys. Then she started throwing herself at them. She passed a note to a gen ed boy once. He came and gave the note to me. He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t want her to give me notes like this,” he said.

I said, “You understand that she needs a little kindness, right? It would be really kind if you didn’t make fun of her for this. If you didn’t tell your friends, because if you do, they’ll make fun of her. I’ll tell her not to give you notes again, but it would be very kind of you not to set her up to get laughed at.”

Kids think teachers don’t know what goes on between them. Well, a lot of it, we probably don’t. But we definitely hear and see more than they think we do.

He did tell his friends. Girls did make fun of her.

It made me incredibly sad.

Couldn’t they see she was looking for some love? Why should they laugh at her for that? When they had homes with parents and siblings who loved them. This girl saw her mom sporadically, every few months. Half the time, the woman didn’t bother to show up for the scheduled visits.

One of the male teachers in the program said once, “She’s going to end up in a not good situation one day. I think we all know that.”

He was a good guy. She had nobody to give her birthday gifts, so he bought her a nail kit for her birthday. He asked the other teachers what he should buy her. We told him a DIY nail kit, and then to go along with that, another female teacher and myself took her out to get a manicure. Got special permission from the principal and everything.

I would have fostered/adopted her if I could have. But we were barely getting by back then. We didn’t have the money or the space.

I don’t know where any of this is going.

But that’s about as well as I can summarize what I was doing and what I was thinking, before my last episode.

I was thinking, I’m lonely

I was thinking, I’m not connected to anyone

I was thinking I’m a fraud

And I don’t belong here

And I’m ugly

And I’m getting old and I already looked so gross, and now I’m old on top of that.

And I wish I wish I wish that I could save her. That I could give her the love she never got. Which probably is incredibly inappropriate for a teacher to think.

But well, I’m not teaching anymore.

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

Here I am. I’m alive. I must be.