You Can't Buy Happiness, But You CAN Buy Ice Cream

Today I had a bit of a crisis. (we're getting meta here, a crisis within the prolonged crisis).

Basically one thing goes wrong (for me it was many small things to do with an event that I'm planning in April) and then everything goes wrong and my mind goes on dangerous tangents that are neither healthy nor productive and all of a sudden I'm sitting under a desk at my day job in the fetal position wondering "What the what. How is this me right now. How is this my life."

"How" is a great place to start. HOW did I allow myself to fall into this ditch (perhaps canyon is more apt?) of self pity and misery. And HOW did a missed phone call somehow devolve in to me freaking out over whether or not I can move back into my childhood home which coexists in the shadow of Manhattan and and the shadow of my parents' acutely un-self aware oppressive criticism. GAHHHH. How. How I ask you?!?

And yet, the how of it doesn't really matter. Because despite my certainty that the twisted staircase that brought me from a missed call back to square one on my what-to-do-next version of candyland  was completely illogical, it doesn't change the fact that it happened. And while I adore the lean-into-it strategy on the day to day, it did not seem logical to lean further into my emotional self destruction. And yet...

Maybe we just need to get it out of our systems. I'm entitled to freak out every few weeks, aren't I? Everything can never go right all of the time. It rarely goes right part of the time. SO maybe the old lean into it method is just what we need to do. Embrace the misery. The uncertainty. The desire to drown in a bathtub of Ben and Jerry's pints. Or beer pints. Or both...
Explore the depths of those doubts and frustrations only to discover that, as you originally suspected, you may in fact be cray. And the only solution to that is to keep on trucking.

This would have been a very different set of conclusions if I had written it during my fit of futuristic anxiety (named for its content, not the coolness of its methods), but I write it afterwards, in a moment of, for lack of a better word, clarity.

So here's to hoping that just as we make it through the smaller break downs, with ice cream and the help of our friends, we make it through the bigger ones. That's really all I have to go on right now so if you know better and it's bad news do me a favor and keep it to yourself.