Wednesday evening when you were making dinner, watching a movie, doing homework or prepping your taxes I was in the midst of one of the ultimate and highest forms of misery known among modern man; I had a root canal. Yes, and as you expected, I am here to tell you it was horrible, terrible, rotten, miserable, painful, excruciating, and horrid. I’d use more words to describe it but the pain of it has made me a bit lazy and I feel that seven adjectives should give a you pretty good sense of my experience.
By Thursday morning I was feeling fine-ish, no more excruciating pain. However, by Thursday evening I could no longer eat solid food and I spent the night awake in the kind of pain that makes rational adults consider a do-it-yourself guillotine kit. Enough about my tooth pain, it is the psychological part of this event that I really wanted to share with you. I noticed at the height of my pain that I would instead of coo kind words of compassion to myself I would instead amplify the horror by asking myself the most horrid and irrational questions. I asked things like, “What if this pain never-ever-ever goes away?”, “What if this lasts forever and you can never eat again?” Huh, what the heck? What kind of awful question is that?Obviously, if this pain endured I would have to see the dentist again and he would do something about it. And, actually, that is exactly what I did. This morning I went into the dentist and he addressed the pain and gave me antibiotics.
As horrid as this experience was ( and it was), it was me and that horrible line of questioning about “what if?” that got me into a totally agitated and irrational state and almost had me in tears. I had poured fuel on the fire and the results were not surprisingly hot, heated and smokey. Happily, within a few moments of asking the question I was able to assess these thoughts for their irrationality, but sometimes that can be hard to do. Sometimes our ‘what-if” questions masquerade as concern, as opposed to the anxiety producing fear-monsters that they really are. And very often we don’t answer these kind of questions, seeing them as almost unanswerable and rhetorically terrifying. These kind of anxiety prompting inquiries activate a sense of hopelessness, despair and panic in us—just as they are intended to do, much like “what if that sound in the basement was a robber” or, back from childhood, “What if there is a monster under my bed?”.
The best thing to do with, “what if this horrible thing happens?” questions is to not leave them dangling in your mind but to answer them squarely. “Okay, so what if that terrible thing really does happen? Let me give you an answer to that question, if this terrible thing were to happen then there would be a series of things I could do,” I gently soothed the fear, “if there is a monster under the bed we could scream for our parents, call 911, ask for help, see a dentist, phone a friend–something can be done.” Something about coming up with a plan calms the fear-monster, even though the plan is far from detailed. And then I remind myself that I have imagined monsters many times before and they have never never realized, they have never been under the bed when the morning comes. With a simple plan of action the monsters were now out of my head.
The other day I made a big move in my work life that was way outside of my comfort zone and it felt like a major leap that someone else would make, not a leap that little old me would make, but leap I did just the same. Post-leap I got hit hard with a big wave of “I am in big trouble feeling”. It was weird, I wasn’t sure exactly who I was in trouble with—but I knew for sure that the feeling was crappy and that I didn’t like it and that i wanted it to stop post-haste. When I did a scan of who exactly might be upset with me I thought of my signifigant other and yet that made abzolutely zero sense. I tried to brush off the feeling of “big trouble”, only I couldn’t. And the rational part of my brain assured me that no one would be upset with me for succeeding. Having done that, I still felt crappy, but tried to shrug off the icky-sticky-yucky feeling that lingered.
I have never been a summer person, Fall and all its autumnal pleasures of snuggly sweaters, crisp air, bright orange leaves, and Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes has, in the past, trumped mightily the allure of hot, heat, humidity, stickiness and the endless confusion of how to dress when it is 105 degrees (how exactly do you dress professionally when it is 105 degrees, this still alludes me?). Having grown up in Southern California I didn’t really get seasons. Summer meant for me that it’s hot. Fall is less hot. Winter is a little less hot, maybe cold enough for a coat. Spring is, well, Spring is a lot like summer only without the June gloom. Living in Chicago I learned the lessons of seasons that we Southern Californian’s may miss out on (Californians take note): things change, it isn’t supposed to be sunny all the time; cold weather is awesome because you get to sit in the house with a book and read all day; winter always ends; Spring always comes. I knew some, most, of this stuff intellectually, but I knew it-knew it-knew it after surviving my first four Midwestern seasons—and Midwestern seasons are not for sissies, they are, I suppose, where you go for a PhD in seasons. 
Also, in honor of new beginnings, I thought welcoming Janus to my blog might be a good thing. “Who’s Janus?” you ask, “isn’t that Tony Soprano’s sister?”, and “why are you welcoming her, and not me to your blog?”. Fair question. Janus is not a she but rather a double-headed Roman mythological deity…and as they say ( who are “they” anyway?) always say, two heads are better than one except when it comes to inviting him to a wedding and you have to order two dinners for one person and the price of catering “per heads” gets all cattywompus and complicated; I digress.
Which, lovely you, would you prefer to move into your home—ants or a tiger? Okay, don’t be so quick to answer. Take your time. Sure, a tiger could kill you, eat your furniture and, yes, it bares repeating, it could kill you. But have you ever been inundated by ants? Do you know the torment of not being able to leave out a cup of coffee, or even water, for a moment without risking your entire counter being overtaken. And then once you manage to kill all of them ( and do you ever feel satisfied that you really and truly got them all?) then there is that horrible ants in your pants feeling in which you feel they are crawling all over you even if they aren’t. If a tiger came into my house I would simply leave and call the authorities and wait for them to remove Tony to the nearest zoo. But with ants you are on your own, lady. No gamekeeper is helping you with these And they are so small, so plentiful and there seems to be an endless supply of them just ready to pounce on every surface should you dare to leave a single crumb on the counter.