by Carol Brauer
Not very long ago, I was astonished to step into my aunt’s house for the first time. I say astonished, and I say not very long ago, because now it’s no longer something that would surprise me. In fact, I’d smile about it.
I saw a photograph of the same place 15 years back. At the time it was still a relatively normal apartment. You could call it stylishly cluttered, a typical apartment for a pretty, successful photographer from LA who didn’t have the time to decorate but whose life was filled with interesting things.
With time it became an obstacle course. The first time I stepped in, I realized I’d need to photograph the place, otherwise no one would believe me. I never did, because I didn’t want to be believed. I was miserable while there – ignorance, really. If only I could have appreciated the first sparkling manifestation of problem theory.
It was impossible to walk through the place. You had to jump, climb, crawl, duck – a full exercise routine. She had layers of paintings and photographs on the walls (not just one or two scattered neatly – layers). Layers of carpets (three). And everything else in two-digit multiples: cameras, hat boxes, pens (billions), notebooks, hair accessories, shampoos (billions), clothing never worn, clothing from high school, the same outfit in 10 colors, macaws (four! live! loud!), swings for the macaws everywhere, computers (Macs, six!). There were no lights in the place, because the macaws were bothered by them. So she strung the place up with Christmas lights and Tiffany lamps. It would be impossible to give a full inventory of the amount of stuff she kept there. Empty space was her enemy, and she filled it. Yes, even the air was filled. She wired up the house with a home theater system and used to play Dale Carnegie and soundtracks of the ocean, the forests. It was full, that place.
Her forearms were really just scar tissue by this point, since she’d had the macaws for years. Every now and then one of them would get feisty and blood would flow. She didn’t mind, because bandaging them up gave her something to do. These episodes also complicated her relationship with macaws, which meant she had reasons to love them. Her legs were bruised up from stumbling over her own things in the dark. She didn’t mind. Her computers and cameras also kept her busy, between shopping for software updates, hitting the Mac store for parts, or going to camera shops for more stuff to fill the house. And the more stuff she bought, the busier she would be.
So, this was crazy to me until I saw a speedbump. And then I watched a capoeira fight. And then I asked myself why I drink. We have to complicate life, so we come up with problems. Some problems are very direct: we place obstacles for ourselves instead of signs asking for reduced speeds after creating cars that drive faster than they’re allowed to on the roads, invent fights where no one fights. Some problems are multi-layered and lead to one or several other problems at once. Those are fun, too. But mostly, there are no genuine problems. Life is about creating problems for yourself to keep yourself busy and amused. Some people roll cheese down steep hills and chase it. Some people sit down and write out pages and pages of fake problems so that other people can read about them. Literature. It’s ultimate problem theory.
I remember complaining at work one day about how many problems I had to resolve. I was despairing, until my boss explained that work was problems, a series of them, to fix, every day. That’s all it was.
And this newfound clarity was abominable. It’s just not possible to solve a problem if you can’t first take it seriously. It’s all become a game. Nothing quite gets to me anymore, and I’ve stopped reacting.
And at first I tried shopping for disorders. I tried on a few, but none of them fit. OCPD came close, but I’m just not quite there. And if I don’t have a disorder, it means that all of this is order. And that’s unacceptable.
Terribly sane – can there be any worse self-diagnosis? There isn’t. There can’t be. Everything is maddeningly calm and correct, dissected.
Exercise is likely the culprit. After the first 3 kilometers of a run, your body no longer struggles. It sinks into this very soothing rhythm. Which is like death – a pleasant one, but death. Stagnation. I haven’t had a breakdown since I started, and I frankly don’t know what to do with myself. I need daily crises. I just do.
Don’t get me started on the Buddhists.
All this to say: life must be outrageous, and you should always get yourself into trouble. I’d like to return every book I’ve ever read and shred every explanation. There’s no other way to go about things. Explain and reduce everything, and that’s all you will have – a reduced explanation, all neat and proper.
I can’t have that.
