Home Is Where the Plot Disintegrates

The house smells like toast.

Not burnt toast, thankfully. Toast I’ve just made. I heat it up in a toaster oven, rather than a toaster, and slather it with a plant-based butter substitute made from olive oil that is much better for me than butter. Distinctions like this are critical at this late stage of the game. The older I get, the more my body begins to resemble a Final Destination sequel. Filled to bursting with innocent-looking booby traps that, once activated, lead to a domino effect of biological system failures. All that stands between me and a possible blown aortic aneurysm, a stroke, or a pulmonary embolism are three or four slices of bacon. Since bacon is my favorite food, I must cut corners elsewhere.

I can’t even remember the last time I burned toast. My superstition about burning toast has led to my becoming ritualistic about the efforts I’ll go to, just to ensure that I don’t burn the toast. Even though I googled it at one point, and learned that people smelling burnt toast as a precursor to suffering a stroke is a myth. But I don’t want to tempt fate. Some things you do to avoid outcomes that are rooted in fact. Others you do because if you don’t, you’ll die. Or at least that’s what the irrational part of your brain tells you. Apparently, that part of my brain is quite large.

I had a meItdown in my gorgeous, mid-century modern informed living room. I went feral and lost control of myself. Trapped in a state of emotional chaos, I began to involuntarily verbalize my emotions, which led our two cats, Guapo and Petunia, to arch their backs and hiss at me, until they both thought better of it and made a break for the kitty door to escape the experience of seeing me in this state. My metldown occurred on a day that I’d called off work because when I woke up that morning, the first thing I thought was: I would rather go to prison than interact with those fuckers today.

That time period, during which I peaked if measured by the capitalist metrics that framed my perception of life back then, started off on the upswing. I was a federal employee earning more than I ever had at a job I was well-suited for. I was deeply in love with my husband and felt taken care of to an extent that, up to that point, I’d never felt during my adult life. I’d managed to achieve the biggest dream I’d never had, one I didn’t think I’d ever be able to make happen, until I did. I was co-owner of a fabulous house that I loved living in.

My upward momentum was so convincingly steady and unimpeded that I was able to convince myself that I would just keep following the trajectory I was riding forever.

Then my best life morphed into a disfigured mirror image of itself, and I woke up one day on the other side of the looking glass.

My federal job went from being empowering to being toxic and debilitating.

My marriage went from being the greatest relationship I’d ever had to being a cordial, passionless living arrangement.

My home went from being a sanctuary that I loved spending all my free time in to being a trap that I couldn’t escape.

As these changes occurred, my perception of self didn’t waiver. But that was the hardest part about this experience. I knew who I was. I’d busted my ass to get there. I knew my value: as a husband, as a federal worker, as the architect of the life I was living. But the lens through which others saw me seemed to have cracked. Those around me appeared to have decided that my market price had plummeted.

I fought accepting their version of me as my own. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, I refused to cave. I’ve gotta give them credit, though: they tried. They tried hard. But they never understood who they were dealing with. What they had come up against. I was born to run the gauntlet they laid out for me. I’d been planning for it my whole life. They really thought they had me. But when I walked away of my own volition, without asking for permission, without being fired, without apologizing, breaking or submitting, they were left with the outcome their tactics had produced: they’d failed to break me.

I know that, to a certain extent, our perception shapes our reality. And that our experience is defined by how we respond to the stimuli around us.

There I was, in my dream house on a work day, having called off work because the thought of going in and facing the people I worked with, who were deliberately making my work environment toxic to my mental and emotional health, was just too much. I was alone because my husband was at work and I’d scared Guapo and Petunia so bad they wouldn’t come near me. There I was, in my dream house, unable to relax, watch a movie, listen to music, or play a video game, because I was trapped. I had a meltdown that day because I could see no way out of the trap that wasn’t destructive to myself or the people I loved.

I also felt invisible as the being I knew myself to be. A being of value. A being who made a practice of providing others with love, with support. All I kept hearing from everyone was that I had to accept what was happening. I had to stop resisting the way things had turned out.

I remember being in the living room, our fabulous living room, silently screaming for hours. Not having figured out a plan yet. Trying to understand what I had done wrong. Trying to figure out how to fix it. Accepting, finally, that there was no fixing it.

The feelings I had that day: of powerlessness; of shame for feeling so powerless; of rage at the coworkers who’d betrayed me; of contempt for the people who underestimated me; and of disappointment in myself for falling into this trap, came bellowing out of me, unchecked, unfiltered. Loud. But unheard by everyone in my life, except me (and Guapo and Petunia).

I hadn’t yet realized I could opt out of these plot twists that had been foisted upon me. But I was about to.

First, I had to answer some questions: Did I have the courage to break free of these circumstances? Did I have the courage to rely on myself, and only myself? Not me with a husband, not me with a federal job, not me with my dream house. Just me. If I wasn’t my job and my husband and my house, what was I? Would there be enough left of me to keep going?

Did I have the courage to find out.

🖋️CONJURE ME THIS: Describe the location of your biggest scream. What (or who) were you screaming at?