Teeth Brushing

Monday, September 2, 2024

In moments of sheer and utter and often time inexplicable sadness, I usually have to force myself to do just one thing. Usually that involves and starts with getting up, moving my body, leaving my bed. This one thing can be: organizing all the shoes in the entryway, or going for a run. It can be taking a shower, because water always helps (what’s that saying about water? Something about tears, rain, and the ocean being life saving? Or maybe the saying is about salt, which would account for the ocean and the tears, but not the rain.) It can be going outside into the sunshine and breeze and watching the leaves sway in said breeze and noticing the said sunshine poking through the said leaves like little droplets of slippery sunlight, letting it all remind me that it’s a miracle that any of us are here.

It can be making a cup of tea. It can be getting the mail. Anything to remind myself that this feeling is exactly that—a feeling that will pass, because no feeling, good or bad, lasts forever. We can’t count on much, but we can be sure of impermanence. When my kids are in this state of mystifying, low lying sadness, I often steal from the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, in which a family sets off on a bear hunt and in the process encounter a series of obstacles that they must go through in order to find the bear: unruly grass, a large lake, a scary cave. At each of these situations, the family faces the challenge and recite the following: “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it.”

And so it is with feelings—we can’t avoid them and sometimes we can’t even (and don’t need to) fully understand them. We have to go through them, we have to ride that wave, but the ride will end. I’m not sure why we, collectively, societally, seem to be so scared of sadness. Sometimes people get sad, and that’s actually completely human.

A note on this feeling: I am now aware that speaking such things out loud to people who have no first hand experience with this what-is-the-point-of-literally-anything feeling is extremely unsettling for them. But to say it to those who know, viscerally, what depression is and how it works its way through the body is like commenting on the weather or telling them that grass is green: No shit. All that to say—this is normal for some of us, and saying it out loud and even making dark jokes about it sometimes helps. Denying its existence does not help.

Nor does making my one to-do task too big, too grand. In fact, that is usually part of what lands me here in the first place: trying to do or be too much, inevitably failing, and then running my head in circles around all of the maddening and untrue shoulds of life: I should be funnier, I should be making more money, I should be more on top of the laundry, I should go back to school, I should be more like her, I should, I should, I should. I could should myself to death. So, my one thing cannot be running a marathon. It cannot be deciding what I want to do with my life. It cannot be trying to pinpoint the reason why I always feel so sad. And most of all, it cannot be trying to decide what to make for dinner that will please everyone and not feel like such a monumental, soul sucking task. Oftentimes my one thing is going for

Today’s to do: brush my teeth. Except I can’t because my husband took the toothpaste (not forever, just for the weekend.) And I really actually want to brush my teeth. They feel somehow slimy and sandpapery at the same time. 

The inspiration for the teeth brushing comes from a book I am reading, which, at 102 pages in, is fucking fantastic. It is extremely witty and specific and I feel deeply, deeply seen. It is called The Wedding People by Alison Espach. Protagonist Phoebe has just tried to kill herself with her cat’s pain medication pills (I mean, really? How great a detail is that) decided not to, forces herself to vomit up the pills like in the movies, and upon waking decides she must do one thing to avoid falling back into the Black Hole: 

“It’s time, she knows, to imagine the things she can do. Right now, it’s not much. Her body feels worn out and weary. But she can brush her teeth. She can use mouthwash. She can drink a bottle of water. Then she can take a very long bath in the beautiful soaking tub.”  (p 90)

There’s that water again. 

Except she can’t take a bath because at this absurdly expensive and beautiful hotel, there is no tub stopper with which to fill the tub. So she goes to the hot tub down below and starts flirting with a man and proposes sex with him because she has been good and calm and predictable her whole life and where has that gotten her? She just tried to commit suicide, so, not far apparently. 

Is it possible to be good and great? Can one be a decent human being and also have fun? I feel like I don’t really know what fun is, I don’t know that I’ve ever known. Maybe for a bit, before I hit 12 or 13 and suddenly became aware of myself, aware of how I might come across to other people. I became gaurded, overly thinking, not wanting to upset. Or maybe I do know exactly what I find fun these days (books and naps, hello; books and naps at the beach and I could actually die, but not of sadness), but have allowed myself to be persuaded that it’s not what I should find enjoyable.

We used to play this game in the neighborhood, I think it was called Hot Box. Two people would stand opposite each other and throw a baseball back and forth and a line of us would run back and forth, trying to beat the baseball. It sounds very basic in describing it, but somehow it was magic, one of those core snippets of memory I have from childhood. We would catch lightning bugs. I was completely in my body, completely out of my head. We would stay out late, just as day was becoming night and the skyline was still light in the distance but at the same time darkness had descended all around us.

Turns out I was right about both, actually. The quote is about saltwater, attributed to Isak Dinesen, author of the memoir Out of Africa:

“The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea.”

Today I experienced two of the three. The closest ocean is, sadly, about 13 hours away, but I did sweat as I sat out in the desert sun and watched my son play soccer, and I cried salty tears while reading The Wedding People. And you know what? I do feel a little bit better.