Thrilling insights in diarrhoea, or: One girl and a plastic fork

Okay, so today I am feeling like somebody rubbed my soul in Satan’s asshole, threw my heart into the microwave oven and fried it until it exploded, and filled my head with tar. Tar with nails and shards of broken glass in it. Oh, and piranhas too. In short, rock bottom just hit me with the same terminality as a concrete wall built straight over a highway would hit the first unsuspecting cruiser who happens to be far too busy checking her make-up in the mirror to notice the impending obstacle. I know I just drove that metaphor way too far, but my mind is not the most reliable thing right now, so bear with me.

When I am feeling like this, being on the downswing of that series of mental curves that I seem to be following, the best way of dealing is usually to try to make fun of myself mercilessly until I actually start believing that there is anything funny about the situation. So that is what I am going to do now. So, sorry, no rules post – those are going to be very finely spaced among the rest of the crap I am going to be spewing; you have been warned – but merely an insight into a somewhat unbalanced mind. Doesn’t that make you exited?

Of course it does.

I have something of a social anxiety problem. That is to say, some social situations are perfectly fine with me, while others send me into a fit of utter, helpless, frothing-at-the-mouth sort of panic. One of the situations which my feeble mind is apparently not able to cope with very well is ordering food at fast food joints. This is a bit of a problem, considering that my chronic laziness often lands me in such places in defiance of acting like a normal grownup and making my own food. McDonalds I have sort of, after many years of training, learnt to handle. I simply walk up to the cashier and say “OneMcFeastmenuwithcoketogo,” all in one breath. Then they of course have to ask me to repeat myself, but as soon as I’ve managed to say it once, it becomes easier to remember the second time.

But in other places, such as the Swedish version of McDonalds, Max, I have no such luck. There I will mumble what kind of menu I want, and then, without fail, I will get completely stuck on the first question the smiling girl with a silvery name-tag – that almost half the time spells either “Linda” or “Elin” – asks me. One would think that I would have managed to grasp that there WILL be questions, what with this being standard practice, and that I might even try to prepare for them. But I don’t, and I am uncertain if I ever will. Instead my brain goes into complete lockdown; I stare around in panic, fumbling for words and quenching the impulse to scream “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IF I WANT ONION RINGS INSTEAD OF FRENCH FRIES, OR ONION RINGS AND FRENCH FRIES? WHY DON’T YOU DECIDE? THIS IS WAY TOO COMPLICATED FOR ME!”

And then, like clockwork, only a lot more erratic, my tics start up. My hand starts twitching or doing complicated grasping movements in the air, or, if life really feels like fucking me over, my head starts thrashing rhythmically sideways, making me look like I just broke out of a very small room with very soft walls to grab myself a burger.

It’s like my body feels the panic rising and starts acting up in some strange attempt to signal to the world around you that, “Hey, guess what, I’m a bit special, okay? So that I’m not answering your perfectly normal question has nothing to do with me hating you and wanting your family to die in a fire. I’m just a perfectly ordinary nutter.”

Or that’s how it feels like, because the tics usually start up at the point when I start worrying about that Linda/Elin might think I was offended by the question, as if a French fry killed my mother or something. And that point I will usually blurt out the very first thing that comes to my mind, regardless if this is what I actually want or not, just to be able to get out of the horribly awkward situation I’ve landed myself in with some last little shred of my dignity intact. I will answer any other questions that Linda/Elin might have in a kind of stupor of relief of having managed that first question, not caring at all if I make any sense at this point as long as I am allowed to find myself a table where my spasmodic twitching won’t attract as much attention.

The last time this happened, I actually wasn’t spared of further humiliation even when I’d managed to collect my food and had found myself a table. Because while listening calmly to my friend talking about something, almost like a normal person would, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of utter panic and horror over how much of a pathologic fuckup I seem to be. This came completely out of left field, and gave a great big boost to my earlier anxiety, which hadn’t quite faded yet and was only happy to rear its ugly head for round two.

I started chewing on my straw. And then I continued doing that. And continued. And continued, up until the point where I was madly jamming the straw centimeter by centimeter into my mouth and chewing in a panic-stricken daze at the disgusting tangle of plastic which I had by then created. I kept on doing this for a whole agonizing minute until the taste of plastic and the sharp edges of the straw poking me in the throat almost made me hurl all over my the leftovers of my meal. By then I was in such a state of undirected terror that I had to leave the restaurant before my mind popped another gear and I started skewering innocent bystanders with my plastic salad fork. Things like that tend to look bad to people like polices and judges, even if it is really only a natural reaction, I feel. Natural to a complete headcase, true, but nevertheless.

This is probably going to be the first installment in a little feuilleton that I would like to call “Life with my brain”, and I am not sure it is going to be amusing as much as... well, madly depressing, to tell the truth, but you’ll just have to think about them as my attempts to stay somewhat sane until I am capable to write something with some actual substance once again.

Oh, the mental diarrhoea  of blogging