alright, i didn't think i would post this, but today it seems all too relevant. i took a creative nonfiction course this summer, and it was a truly awesome experience. below you will find a sketch i wrote that was fun but helpful.
for a few months, i thought i was cured.
but then this week happened. it seems that my weak human nature makes change so impossible. anyway, without further ado, here is a little something something that will sum up the past few days. (Andrea, you can stop reading here as you have already endured this psychobabble)
The Mean Greens
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly is an expert on the “mean reds,” those times when “suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of.” For Golightly, the mean reds are temporarily remedied with inevitable trips to Tiffany’s. I suffer from a similar condition I like to think of as the “mean greens,” when I’m suddenly envious without any logical reason --the cure for which still eludes me.
Anything can really set the mean greens off. Finding a cute sweater from Anthropologie only to check my bank account and realize how far out of my price range it truly is. Hearing about a great graduate program in Scotland a well-deserving friend of mine is headed to while I pack up for the glaringly less glamorous move to Pocatello, Idaho for my husband’s graduate work. Even finding out that an ex-boyfriend from eons ago that remains only in my life as a remnant photo in my high school yearbook is getting married seems to set me off.
While the greens frequently spur up in moments of attempted retail therapy or other financial transactions, they aren’t restricted to purely materialistic moments; in fact, they’re generally the easiest to mitigate when they are attached to something shallow and fleeting. Unfortunately, the greens often attach most firmly to where it hurts most, or—even more shockingly—where they aren’t expected to hurt at all. They come as that nagging in the back of my mind that I am somehow behind in life or inadequate.
Symptoms of the mean greens include: sulking, quietly internet browsing for hours on end, and secretly despising those whose fortune is infinitely greater than mine. Though these symptoms often take place in a warm, safe, comfortable home where my loving husband sits—secretly laughing at this silly rage—the greens take over. They block all reason. They look down upon the rational section of my brain and simply state, “Try as you might, there is no key to my undoing.” Frankly, they don’t care how fortunate I really am. They’re just that mean. Attempts to mediate such feelings are often futile.
This is generally where I hear my mother’s voice, reminding me to lose myself in helping others. I have finally grown up enough to realize that my mother is generally right, so I have tried this selfless approach several times; I really have. I visit girls I know who just had babies in an attempt to mitigate my own baby hunger, I make dinner for my husband to remember how lucky I am to have him, and I have even gone so far as to sew aprons and blankets for others in attempts to improve my domesticity rather than focus on my current position as domestically derelict. But the greens are resilient. Soon I find myself thinking that to truly serve others, I would do something larger, grander. I dream of taking humanitarian trips around the world, setting up literacy circles and health clinics; in these visions I become a regular Angelina Jolie—without the film career and vials of blood around my neck. These visions of grand humanity only create a new source of the mean greens—humanitarian envy.
Like Holly Golightly, I don’t really know where this case of the mean greens started or why I allow it to perpetuate. I tell myself that it’s a byproduct of growing up in a large family where hand-me-downs were the norm. Unfortunately for my anger-projecting-psyche, I really loved hand-me-downs; they were a connection to those far more fashionable than I—older, beautiful, female relatives. Then the vicious truth sets in—there is a possibility that I allow the world to tell me what I should have and who I should be. I believe them. When I was young, I didn’t realize that I needed Polly Pockets until every girl on TV seemed to be toting her set with her to glamorous tea parties and play dates. I didn’t care that I dressed badly until the seventh grade when (name withheld to protect the innocent) told me we couldn’t be friends anymore because I needed better clothes. I didn’t mind having diabetes and the challenges it presented in my life until my friends began having child after child and casually telling me all the things I’ll never know until I’m a mother.
It’s not that I am upset with people who can purchase a wonderful wardrobe or happily move forward with their lives. There’s more to it. Despite all efforts to become a strong, educated, independent woman, there’s some dissatisfaction with me.
For now, I live with the encumbering weight of the mean greens, but like Holly Golightly, I dream of being released from their irrational stronghold; I’m still searching for a “real-life place that’d make me feel like Tiffany’s.” As a precaution against future fits of the greens, I just hope it has a clearance rack.
