Losing My Shit

I bumped my left elbow on the kitchen table yesterday.  It hurts, even with Arnica.  I lean on that elbow when I get out of bed, a fact I discovered this morning.  As TBG said at the end of this trauma, Kiddo, you shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning.

Maybe he was right.  Maybe my balloon was just ready to pop. 

I went out to run an errand, the same errand I've run every week since March 12th.  I've always been alone on the road, catching up to a car or two at a traffic light or passing one at a stop sign. 

But Arizona is opening up, and there were a lot of cars vying for space on the way there, and more on the way back.  It upset me.  Where were they going?  Why were they going? 

Half the people in the two stops I made were masked, the others were blithely spreading their smiling germs hither and yon.  Only one person looked askance at my covered face, but, in retrospect, his smile might not have been as snarky as I interpreted it to be.  I was on a roll, and things were about to go from bad to worse.

I couldn't get what I'd been promised, and the worker, though behind a plexiglass shield from me, wore his mask around his chin, standing too close to a co-worker on either side.  I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

I got home and began to cry.

I sobbed, moaned, wailed, rocked back and forth for the better part of an hour.  TBG kept trying, but there wasn't really anything anyone could do.  It just had to come out.  And come out, it did. 

Little Cuter talked me off the ledge, giving me sound, Oprah-based advice about redefining the moment, while nodding in total agreement as I listed the things that were causing me to spiral down the rabbit hole.  She'd been there, felt that, agreed with every part of it, understood it all and was just as peeved as I was about the whole thing, even if, right then and there, she didn't need to melt down quite as totally as I did.

I went for a hard swim, got my adrenaline pumping and my heart racing - TBG's prescription for this situation is to become so exhausted you can't think of anything else.  That works for him, and the exercise always does me good, but my girl's shoulder to cry on, even from afar, worked wonders for me this morning.

And now, having written it down, it's over.  Thanks for listening, denizens.