It's Everything I Wish I Didn't Know
The Shitshow Room as a nausea-inducing, revolving restaurant.
I was recently reading about “revenge bedtime procrastination.” I have been occasionally prone to periodic sleeplessness, where I stayed up silly-late scrolling through Twitter, or watching some crap TV show, and just called it boring old insomnia. But who can resist reading about an affliction that sounds like someone named it by spinning The Wheel of Madness? Not me! According to the articles, RBP happens when people are feeling feel a lack of control because their work and personal boundaries have been blurred by, say, a deadly global pandemic.
Lately I believe that I have a touch of “revenge work procrastination”™️ in which I put off doing work in favor of going to sleep to try to make up for years of working myself sick.
This is my meandering way of apologizing for the long gap between posts.
This morning, we welcomed a new pandemic mascot to The Shitshow Room. I am captivated by Baarack, a sheep that was found in Australia. When shorn, he yielded “a fleece weighing more than 35 kilogrammes - nearly half the weight of an adult kangaroo” which is a spectacular detail. From now on, I want everything explained to me in relation to the height or weight of an adult kangaroo. Baarack is a symbol of all the things that have piled up during the pandemic year. He represents the heaviness we all feel these days. As my friend Sasha said, “Have to love an animal that can grow its own weighted blanket.”
Like a lot of you, I have really been struggling with the approach of the Pandemiversary and the overwhelming feeling of grief for the world, and for the more than 500,000 people who have died, and the countless others who are suffering with long-term aftershocks of Covid-19, both physically and mentally. I can’t believe it is March in a few days, and that it has been March for almost a year.
There have been loads of news articles and essays recently that have talked about hitting the pandemic wall, but I keep thinking that the phrase implies that there was a state of wall-lessness that existed at some point during the past year. I have been a Humpty Dumpty of the pandemic wall for some time now. Hit the wall. Fall off the wall. No being put back together. I really liked this piece by Maya Kosoff, about the “pandemic wall discourse.”
Some days I can barely move, I feel so heavy with sadness. And then some days I can’t move but everything feels like it is moving. Like The Shitshow Room as a nausea-inducing, revolving restaurant. Those are the days the vertigo has rolled back in town.
It was sometime last January —the so-called Before Time—that I got the flu for about a week, and then that morphed into a cold and just when I thought it was gone, it would turn into a feverish, flu-type deal. Then the vertigo kicked in. I felt nauseated all the time. My usual one-day, pre-period migraines started to stretch on for days. I literally couldn't see straight or concentrate. I would freak out at myself for my lack of discipline when I forgot to do something.
I had some medical tests that didn’t determine anything terrible. I hadn’t traveled outside NY before I started feeling poorly, so I wasn’t considered a risk for contracting the pneumonia-like virus that had been reported in China a few weeks earlier. People now ask me if I think my health issues are Covid related and it’s kind of a “yes with an if, no with a but” situation. (I have regularly tested negative for the virus since tests have become widespread.) I am routinely playing a game with myself called “Anxiety, Covid, or Menopause?”
Anyway, when my body went a little 🥴, I went on trying to power through my job for weeks and weeks and weeks until I just couldn’t anymore. It is frustrating to feel like you let the people you work with down. It’s frustrating to not know why you are sick. I felt like a failure.
For most of my life, I’ve super drawn to, and very good at, dealing with chaos. I can see all the whirl around me and I try to sort it out like a puzzle. I would make plans and backup plans. I think that’s why I was initially drawn to and was good at working in breaking news. When I am dealing with crazy, messy news, I have a purpose in a crisis: Report the news, take care of my team reporting the news, deflect distractions, absorb everyone else's angst, don’t get upset about the crisis itself. Keep the Really Big Emotions away.
Productivity is like a drug and this kind of work fed a craving for me. A need to be useful. A need to try to fix things. A need to find clarity in the chaos.
Oh sure, eventually there would be a massive adrenaline crash, and I would be unable to stop crying and have to rest and build up my strength for the next disaster, but, this worked for me for most of my life. Or at least that is what I told myself.
Now, I know I need to figure out another way to work through the horribleness, but right now, I am not sure what that looks like. What happens when someone fueled by working in breaking news is broken by it all?
I guess, as they say, “Stay tuned” ....
Now, for a few recommendations!
I am currently reading Tessa Miller’s smart, superb What Doesn’t Kill You: A Life with Chronic Illness - Lessons from a Body in Revolt. The Daily Beast and Slate have run very good excerpts, but you should really buy the whole thing!
I often think about a fantastic essay in Sloane Crosley’s Look Alive Out There, about dealing with prolonged vertigo, which opens with her describing feeling as if “a basketball-playing giant has broken into my room balanced the mattress on his fingertip and started pushing for his own depraved amusement.”
I also recently reread this 2003 essay by Laura Hillenbrand, author of “Seabiscuit” and “Unbroken”, and this line jumped out for its beautiful description of a really horrible feeling: “Every few days there was a sudden plunging sensation, and I would throw my arms out to catch myself.”
In non chronic-illness related news, I have decided I now only want to read stories about the Trump administration from the point of view of restaurant people.
SIDEWORK: Thank you for reading The Shitshow Room! You can sign up for The Shitshow Room for free, but if you if you do decide to become a paying subscriber, $5 a month (or $50 a year), I will be donating half the proceeds each month to a few charities that help struggling food-service workers and Americans experiencing food insecurity. I will let you know when we make a donation, how much it is, and who we are helping. Our next round of donations will go to New York Common Pantry. We have previously supported No Kid Hungry and World Central Kitchen!
Follow me on Twitter: @lisatozzi or email: lisatozzi@gmail.com