I am forever worst case scenario girl. I try not to be, but it’s just how I roll.
I can have a twitch over my eye, and if it lasts for more than a day, I’ve researched every issue I can possibly find on Web MD. I had a bad last few weeks struggling to remember things and chalked it all up to early onset dementia. Because I googled it, and that makes sense as opposed to holidaisical exhaustion combined with vitamin D deficiency. {I’m totally rational over here, as you can see.} Last summer I had throat cancer {really, I had severe reflux} and unfortunately, that’s just where my mind goes. My {kind} friends call it my spidey senses, and I call it high-functioning anxiety.
If you have anxiety, you’re with me right now and know it’s just my default mode of worrying. There’s always something in the back of my mind that I can brush off and move on with life. But when I travel… it seems to rear its ugly head in the very worst of ways.
Flying, stuck inside my brain, is a lot. I’m a lot. We recently took a 4-hour flight to California, which equates to eight hours total, because ideally, you get to come back home. On the way, we had the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to keep us company. On the way back, we were unfortunate enough to experience what it was like to fly in 1998 with zero wifi. {Kind of felt sorry for the flight attendants} and I had nothing to occupy my brain but a thought process that went a little something like this:
Is the guy beside me a terrorist? He’s on his phone. Will he stab me first to create a distraction like that usual person in the movie who ‘goes first’? Do I fit the part of the usual person who goes first? Does that mean I have no real potential left to give to the world? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?! Did he spend so long in the bathroom because he’s flushing a bomb that he can detonate later on his phone? Why is he on his phone? Won’t, at the very least, the signal distraction cause a crash? The flight attendants said not to be on our phones and I should probably tell someone. I’m pretty sure this dude is texting. But then I would be THAT person. I’d rather be THAT person than dead. Oh good. He got off his phone.
I then proceeded to engage Jamin in a ten-minute conversation while we flew over the water: Would I survive, if I jumped out in that moment because a terrorist had a bomb? Why would I have time to jump? Why am I even thinking about this?! But while we’re on the topic, what is the proper jumping technique to live? Do I make my body straight and then ball up at the last minute? Or is it the opposite? Would I hit the bottom of the ocean?! Would I survive only to be eaten by a shark? What if I break a leg? Can I float? Gigantic cannonball, suckas. They’re totally gonna make this a Lifetime movie if we go down.
After that, I went to the bathroom, and worried about the back spray of the toilet circulating throughout the tiny compartment before I could get out of the bathroom {because ew} and if the last guy had the flu, what was the probability of actual infection. Maybe the guy who’s sitting beside me is not a terrorist, but sick. Bless. Now I feel sorry for him. He was probs texting his mom.
I still don’t want to die.
It was after a recent party situation {where I was ready to go home at 9 pm rather than hang and make small talk} that I confessed my endless onslaught of irrational thought to a friend. Turns out, I’m not the only one who feels this way, and she told me at least I hide it well.
Some may call it mad self-preservation skills.
I call it exhausting.
seriously though, cali is gorgeous
So I told you that not to confirm that I do, in fact, need a running supply of Xanax, but to set the stage for this:
Imagine my surprise when yesterday morning, I woke up to the house shaking. But let’s back up for a moment. We live in Nashville. We have tornadoes and flooding on the natural disasters front, and that’s thankfully it. We have to wake our kids and the whole thing is usually a nightmare because we’re trying to round everyone up and get them downstairs. For some reason, I’m always stuck with our giant {manbaby} child who is thirteen and almost bigger than me, who isn’t capable of waking up. Jamin gets the other two downstairs and I’m screaming at him while the alarms go off that we’re all going to DIE and throwing on lights just so he’s coherent enough to make it down the stairs. You do what you have to do. Fun times.
The house can blow away but the house doesn’t shake. The irony isn’t lost on me that we were just discussing the idea of earthquakes with our friend in Cali, and here we were in Nashville three days later, with the house shaking.
Jamin tossed and turned a bit. I think in retrospect, it was because the house was shaking and it woke him, but in the moment of my half asleep version of myself, I thought he was making the bed shake. I was all, sheesh Jamin, you really went into the full-on alligator death roll over there. Cue one second longer, I was totally awake, and realized that even though I’d never been in an earthquake before, it was shaky and this is probably what one feels like.
It’s not an earthquake, I told myself. You’re always thinking about the worst case scenario. You’re so paranoid. Calm down. Your blood sugar is probably low and it just feels like the bed is shaking. {No worries, I’m totally side-eyeing myself right now, too.} That, or that thing from the Exorcist is shaking your bed. This is the battlefield of Franklin, so there’s probably an angry ghost soldier at the foot of the bed and that’s more likely than an actual earthquake in Tennessee.
At this point, my bedside water supply a-la my Yeti cup was shaking, and the headboard was vibrating, and I still wrote it off. I almost woke Jamin but figured he’d think I was just being maniacal again, and rightfully so. I’m basically the girl who cried wolf with worst-case scenarios, and this would be me, waking him from the perfectly normal night’s sleep to tell him the house was shaking.
Except the house was shaking.
Doesn’t The Rock appear in natural disasters and like, rescue people or something? If he could get on that, that’d be grrrrreeeaaatttt. Thanks, Dwayne.
So I waited, like a kid on Christmas. And when The Rock didn’t appear to rescue me, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Our youngest woke up with a coughing fit just as I’d faded back off {he hasn’t been feeling well} and we got him settled back into bed.
When I muscled my way out of bed a few hours later {it’s been a long week with a work weekend and a sick kiddo} I was kinda shocked to see that an earthquake had in fact, happened that morning at precisely around the time I was awake. The largest one in 45 years at 4.4 magnitude. I kind of wondered if that’s what woke our youngest with a coughing fit. My theory is when they use the spine adjuster thingy {clearly – see above points – I’m no doctor} at the Chiro, it makes me want to cough, so wouldn’t small vibrations cause the same thing in someone who’s sick? Or probably just wake him up enough to make him cough? Both theories work.
Anxiety girl overthinks it, once again.
I ran to Jamin showing him my phone with the news, and felt totally vindicated. We all could have died! SEE? It was an earthquake And I didn’t wake us!?
He was a little confused as to why I was being so animated, mumbling things about The Rock. But also glad I didn’t wake him because sleep.
When does this anxiety superpower pay off? I’ve always lived with the delusion that I’ll actually avert disaster or survive longer because of these crazy thoughts of mine. Then, I spend my whole life being paranoid and write it off when it actually matters. I was being dramatic again, but I’d written our tiny natural disaster off in lieu of sleep, since we are in Tennessee, after all.
On the way to drop our middle kiddo at the elementary school an hour later, Jamin pointed to a knocked over trash can in the middle of the street. “DANGIT, it’s that EARTHQUAKE again!” he exclaimed.
So much damage.
Touché, Jamin. Touché.
We brought the rain {and rainbows} with us to Cali… and apparently the earthquakes back with us to Nashville.
If only it’d been The Rock, instead.
Tommy B. says
We live in Athens, TN, right next to the epicenter in Decatur, and we slept through it. I’m also from Cali too, so I guess a 4.4 wasn’t that much to me.
Rose Lefebvre says
I laughed. I spent most of my life in S. California and got so used to earthquakes that I would just roll over and go back to sleep. I am more afraid of tornadoes!
Jenna says
This is hilarious!