POOP!

There's this great picture of me---I'm maybe twenty-two years old. I'm in St. Mark's Square, and I'm covered in pigeons. I wish I could post the picture here now, but it was taken in a different age when we took film to a store and had it developed, and it's in a photo album in a box in Maryland right now. You'll just have to imagine the picture, but I'm utterly darling in it; I promise.  Here's the thing: in an active effort to get pigeons to land on me, I paid for the pigeon food that was being peddled to dumb tourists. I loved the feel of their warm little feet. I didn't necessarily want them to poop all over me (as they did to many of the people in the square that day), but I wasn't too worried about it either. So what happened to that girl who so happily covered herself in pigeons? I can tell you that I miss her. Now I go outside every day and try to clear the yard of bird poo and feathers, so my kids won't come into contact with them. This is a time consuming process. So, these days, much as it pains me to have to disagree with Bert, I loathe pigeons. Am I the only one thinking about all the germs on that feather when I watch Forrest Gump?

Though I do still absolutely wash my hands and wipe doorknobs way too much, since I moved home, a lot of my issues have improved. I think this is largely just by virtue of getting out of my own space and thus relinquishing a lot of control and, what's more, relinquishing some of the responsibility I felt to keep the world safe from germs. But where I haven't been able to relinquish responsibility, where my paranoia remains, and what is currently kicking my butt, is wild animal poo. Yeah, the pigeon poo is annoying (it can---though likely won't---make you sick, but it's unlikely to kill you), but I am straight terrified of mouse poop. See, the whole going insane thing started with mice in my mud room and my garages and cleaning up after them and reading way, way too much about how mice can cause your untimely demise, and thinking about how my children had been in that mud room with all that deadly poop while I was oblivious. Like most people, I used to not think much about mice or their poop (those were the good old days). I'd heard of hantavirus, been mildly disturbed about it, thought, "Well, I don't play with mouse poo," and gone about my merry way. But, in fact, I was wrong. I realize now that there is no way there wasn't mouse poop in my dad's sheds, all over the place at my grandparents' farm, in half my friends' garages, etc. I've learned something about mice: if they can get in, they will, and they are everywhere. I can tell that the garage here isn't sealed against mice, and I am utterly terrified of my family going into it. It is causing me significant anxiety. I feel like I can work on it and be able to let go of worrying about the birds, but I don't see how I can be okay with mice. Now, when I drive around, I look at all the garages I pass and assess their "mouseworthiness".  A good half of them are totally mouseworthy. How are the rest of you people okay with this? Is it because, despite the fact that most of us actually must encounter a fair bit of mouse poop, we don't seem to be dropping off like flies? I try to focus on that, but I can only focus on the 50% mortality rate and this: http://www.cdc.gov/rodents/cleaning/ Okay, it's a total hazmat situation! The CDC says so. But I know people aren't following these precautions. There is no way. I can't even manage it, and I'm totally OCD. I can see no way to seal the garage. I found a few droppings (which I hope were old) and cleaned them, which, for me, was quite traumatic. I go out and check for new droppings (which also traumatizes me), and I don't think I've seen any, but that doesn't help much, since always at any time, a mouse could come in and leave some. When looking for a new home, guess what my top priority will be? Here's a clue: not granite counter tops. It needs to be well sealed against mice. And I'll just have to try to ignore that fact that my kids might encounter mouse poop at other people's homes, because, as I have observed, no one else seems to be worried about it, and half of their garages are open to mice---Hello! How is this not a national crisis?

And, get this, last Sunday, when taking out the recycling, I found a dead mouse in the driveway. Is the universe messing with me? It was awesome for my mental health. Really. Look, predatory animal, thank you for reducing the mouse population, but could you please not leave your dead stuff here? Thanks.

Lice and Snow and Maybe Dying---Oh, My!

Just looking at it makes you feel something crawling around in your hair, right?

I guess I passed another of life's milestones; I had my first experience with lice. I hope "had" is the appropriate word and that we have indeed eradicated the lousy suckers. My brother's family was also infested; he suspects a Comfort Inn our families stayed in while in Philadelphia together. That's not brotherly love, Philly, but I still love you. I didn't love spending hours doing laundry, vacuuming, and nit picking (I will never feel the same way about that phrase), but at least lice don't have germs.

It's snowing today, but it's not Snowmageddon, cancel a week of school, like the last round. I despise snow from the depths of my soul. Partly because it's a wet mess that often hangs around being a wet mess for weeks, and partly because it puts my germophobia on overdrive. Why? There was a time I would have asked that very question. I miss that time. Well, think of all the animal poop in that snow---bird, rabbit, deer, squirrel, maybe even (and this really freaks me out) mouse. Have I mentioned that there is entirely too much stuff that poops all over the place on the East Coast? It must be all this dang life sustaining moisture. Imagine all of that poop sticking to your kids' shoes and clothing as they play in the snow. All of it being tracked into your house, not to mention what probably already made its way inside the kids. Shudder. So, anyway, I grit my teeth and try to enjoy my kids playing in the snow. Then it's showers and disinfecting the wet mess and laundry. The whole process is a huge ordeal for me. But I like the hot cocoa.

Oh, and I got medicated! I've been on it for about three weeks. Nothin' yet. I'm still living in a sort of constant state of panic. I almost always feel like my heart is in my throat. I hope it starts to kick in and that we don't have to go back to square one with something new. I probably still need to look for someone who does cognitive behavioral therapy though. This latest therapist didn't really do anything, other than prescribe some pills, but she didn't mention Jesus or pioneers, so I guess that's a win. 

But what really rocked my world since I last wrote was that I had a cancer scare. It looks like I'm clear. Thinking you might have cancer and waiting to get answers isn't exactly a joyride. So I imagined if I were dying, we'd head back home sooner, and I would wither away while watching my children play in my parents' back yard, in the shadow of my beloved Red Hill, where I used to play. Truly the whole thing was gut wrenchingly beautiful, yet I would rather not be dying. I really prefer to watch my kids play without the whole withering away part. But seriously, I was really very scared. I told myself that if I'm not dying, I will give up this germophobia crap. My imminent demise now seems unlikely (yay!). And yet. I can't give up the phobia and the obsession and the rituals. I really hoped that scare would smack this nonsense out of me, but I have a very tenacious mind. 

Is it Life, or Just to Play My Worries Away?

There's this scene in every child of the eighties' favorite music video that illustrates so well how I feel. A-ha dude's trying to break out of his comic strip box, and he's slamming himself against the walls until he smacks the comic out of himself and becomes a real boy. I feel like I'm slamming against the walls, but I just can't seem to break out of the box, shake off the black and white, and get back to the real me. There are few things that are better in black and white. Once I bought a DVD of It's a Wonderful Life, not realizing it was colorized. It was awful. I couldn't even watch it, and I love that movie. Black and white has its place, but black and white is no way to view the world. It's not black and white. It's full of color and nuance, and if you try to reduce it to black and white, you'll be missing something. My take on germs right now is black and white, and it's not working. The fact that 99% of germs are not harmful and are often helpful should get me to relax and settle for washing hands after using the restroom or after taking out the trash, but instead I'm trying to sanitize every.single.thing that comes into my home, and it's a losing battle. My kids go to school. (I have fleeting thoughts of home schooling, but I'm still sane enough to know that wouldn't be a step in the right direction.) My husband goes to work. So I do what I can. They usually shower or at least change clothes after school/work, and then I try to sanitize their stuff---cell phones, keys, glasses, wallets, credit cards, bottoms of shoes, the floor where the shoes have been, etc.

I try not to keep my family from living life, so we go places, yes (though a large amount of hand sanitizer is employed throughout). We go to the movies and to Gettysburg and to church, but it's hugely stressful to me, because when we get home, it's time for me to sanitize stuff. You don't even want to know what an ordeal shopping has become for me. All of this attempting to sanitize is a time consuming nightmare, and it isn't possible anyway. I try to tell myself that it's a done deal, so there's no point. If there's some horrible germ on the stuff, it's probably already in the kid. Besides, I won't, nor could I, bar friends and family from ever visiting (though it is a much more stressful occurrence for me than it should be as I try not to think about all their non-sanitized stuff). I'm tilting at windmills, so why can't I just knock it off? I keep trying to logic myself back to normalcy, but so far, logic hasn't fixed crazy for me. I feel like I have to do as much as I can to keep my family's environment safe, but in a cost benefit analysis, are my efforts increasing our safety enough to be worth it? I'm pretty sure that's a no. Maybe the song's got it right, and it really is "no better to be safe than sorry." Now go get your A-ha on. I know you want to. (Has the synthesizer ever been better employed?)

And let's face it, even if I ever do shake off the black and white, I'll still never look this cool. 

Hallelujah!

I have not had a great couple of days on the response prevention front. I have not prevented my responses. I have been both obsessive and compulsive.
Check out my hands:

Scarlett O'Hara would say those are not the hands of a lady. That's what too much hand washing, hand sanitizer, and cleaning with bleach (without the proper use of gloves) looks like. I know my behavior is really probably worse for my physical (let alone mental) health than coexisting with the germs, but that's not how it feels. So I keep thrashing my hands and loading on the lotion. The lotion is losing.

See, those cracks kinda hurt, and they are really the least of it, so I have decided I need to look into therapy and medication again. Can't someone just give me a pill to cure my crazy? Okay, probably not. But I'm hoping to bring the anxiety down enough to help me not to engage in the compulsions, thus allowing me to deal with exposure therapy sans having a panic attack every five minutes. Finding a therapist is really a lot more work than I thought it would be. I figured there'd be therapists aplenty wanting to cash in, but it seems there is no shortage of crazy. All week I've been playing phone tag, being told my insurance isn't accepted, being told my particular brand of crazy isn't really this or that therapist's focus (depression people, you are in the money, by the way; they all seem to specialize in that), and being told "not accepting new patients" (this happens a lot---I suspect an above average ratio of crazy people to mental health specialists in the DC area).

My first therapy session was a trip. It was a huge step for me at the time, and I was pretty sure it would show up on some document to any possible future employer in bold letters reading, "CRAZY PERSON ALERT," but I was desperate enough to live with that stigma. I went to my first therapist before we moved. At first she seemed kinda like what I expected. She told me she's really into brain science. She told me that my serotonin levels are probably off. Okay, seems reasonable. Then she told me we needed to get to the root causes of my anxiety, the real issue being fear. That all seemed properly Freudian. So we played a question and answer game.

What are you afraid of? 

Hantavirus. (I was still mostly stuck on one germ then; mouse poop kinda triggered my germophobia going OTT.)

Why?

BECAUSE I COULD DIE! MY CHILDREN COULD DIE!

So the root cause of your issue is fear of death? 

Duh. Mice would just be cute if not for the fact that THEY CAN FRIGGIN' KILL YOU. Sure, getting sick isn't fantastic either, but what really bothers me is the whole death thing.

So you need to stop being afraid of death.

Yeah, not gonna happen. I don't have any plans to discontinue death avoidance.
---
Then things got weird. My therapist, maybe figuring we were the same religion, it being St. George, UT, started bearing her testimony to me. For real. She had been in a car accident and had a near death experience, she explained. And she had seen the light, so you see, there's no reason to fear death; she saw Jesus. And where would we Utah Mormons be if the pioneers had feared death? (I don't know. New York? Personally, I've never been sure dragging your children across the country with a handcart is the best plan.) I hope she did see Jesus (but if so, which version?), but one more near stranger's near death experience probably isn't the cure for me. Also, I wanted to ask about brain science, to ask if maybe getting hit on the head had caused her brain to fire off some chemicals that made her think she'd seen Jesus. Instead, I nodded my head and wondered if maybe I should look into a more traditional therapist. But there you have it, folks, never fear. My therapist saw Jesus. So it's all good.

Ain't it Great?

There's this song my mom used to sing that often runs through my head, "Boom, Boom! Ain't it great to be crazy? Boom, boom! Ain't it great to be nuts?" Turns out, not so much. When I was a kid, I imagined insanity as sort of throwing aside all of the acceptable behavior and doing whatever the heck you want. Seemed almost like the ultimate freedom. But my experience is that the opposite is true. Crazy is like living in a box that just keeps getting smaller. Sometimes it feels suffocating or like I'm treading water, trying not to drown. Or maybe I just got the wrong kind of crazy. It's a strange thing, having your whole world view take a dramatic shift. And not in a good way. I can't tell you how much I miss me and the way I used to live. It's the freedom that I miss. It's the looking at the world without thinking about all the germs. It's the not having to spend hours of my day disinfecting things. It's the not feeling like I need to monitor everyone and everything that comes into my home. It's like "germ" is always shoving aside everything else in my head. If you find yourself looking for a phobia, don't choose germs. They're everywhere, you can't see them, and they're on people. And you like people, right? No, go for a phobia of elevators or something that doesn't inhibit and bleed into everything all the time because it's everywhere. But, heck, maybe the elevatorphobes feel differently. My 2nd therapist was mentioning some kind of exposure therapy she used on a snake-o-phobe (herpetophobe, if you want to be fancy), and I expressed the opinion that it would be so much easier to be afraid of snakes than germs. She said, "Tell that to the snake people." So I don't know, any elevatorphobes out there, feel free to dispute me, but can't you just take the stairs? I mean, for me, it's sixes. There are the buttons on the elevator and the the dreaded handrails on the stairs. Boom, boom.