by Sarah Knight
Whether your pocket was picked, your safe was cracked, or your car was jacked, you’re bound to be spooked. And depending on the thieves’ haul, you could be a little or a lot inconvenienced. Throw in any grievous bodily harm and we’ve got a trifecta of shit to deal with—and that’s AFTER you’ve managed to calm the fuck down. But solely in terms of dealing with it—first, secure your personal safety. Call the cops. Think you might be concussed? Call an ambulance.
A friend of mine’s house was robbed recently, with his kids in it. He was meant to be performing in a concert that night, but instead he bailed on the gig, got the bashed-in front door boarded up, and stood guard over his family until morning.
Priorities, pals. Priorities.
You can apply the same triage process to getting reimbursed for the things you lost, and replacing the most urgent ones first, if you can afford it and/or your insurance comes through.
You should also start making the rounds of “So this happened.” By that I mean—tell people what’s up, so they can help you out or at least assuage some of your more pressing concerns. For example, if you’ve got a deadline looming, you’ll feel a million-and-two percent better once you inform whomever needs informing that your laptop was stolen and they undoubtedly grant you an extension, because whomever they are is not an asshole.
This is a terrible, awful, no-good, very bad situation—no doubt about it—but neither a prolonged freakout nor a haphazard effort at dealing with it is going to help you salvage your shit. Take stock, identify your ideal outcome, and then pursue it one concentrated, most-urgent step at a time.
NOTE: If you meant “I got robbed” in the sense that your Pork Niblets came in first runner-up in the Elks’ Club Annual Smoked Meat Challenge, that belongs a few pages back in the catalogue. Next time, may I suggest smoking an actual elk? TV food show judges always give extra points for adherence to theme. Couldn’t hurt.
• I’m getting divorced.
This could be happening to you or it could be at your behest, but either way it’s probably awful for all concerned. I’m not trying to minimize the emotional turmoil you’re going through when I say “One thing you could do is get logical and prioritize.”
But, um, maybe give it a shot?
If divorce is in the offing and there’s nothing more you can do to stop your marriage from dissolving, now’s a good time to focus on what you can control and on achieving your realistic ideal outcome. Maybe that RIO is to part ways as amicably as possible. Maybe it’s to get the house, the cars, and full custody of the Instant Pot. Maybe it’s just to get through the whole process without letting your kids see you cry. It won’t be easy, but if you can crate your emotional puppies—for short stretches, even—in service to those concrete goals, at least you’ll be “dealing with it” in a more productive way.
Plus: lamb tagine in just thirty-five minutes!
• We’re struggling to have a baby.
Jesus, I’m sorry. I told you it was about to get dark up in this piece.
I know virtually nothing about pregnancy except that I never want to experience it, which probably makes me the least-qualified guru, anti-or otherwise, to field advice on this topic. In fact, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a dear friend several years ago, well before I developed the NoWorries Method. She and her husband had been trying and failing to conceive for a long time, and over a plate of Middle Eastern apps I confidently told her “It’ll be okay. I’m sure you guys will work it out.” (In the spirit of full disclosure, I may have even said something along the lines of “You just need to relax.”)
In other words, I responded in the EXACT WRONG WAY. The look on her face was part misery, part second-degree murder.
Admittedly, it’s possible that I’m about to overcompensate in the other direction, but in for a penny, in for a round of IVF, amirite?* If you’re experiencing that same mix of anguish and anger at your circumstances as my friend was, I wonder now—very respectfully—if it might help to crate your emuppies for a little while and send the logicats out to do recon.
Take a deep breath and take stock: Where are you in terms of your or your partner’s child-bearing years? Where are you in the process of trying? Have you done everything you can or are there still stones left unturned? How much more time, energy, and money can you afford to spend?
After confronting these questions, you may not have the answers you want, and you will almost surely still be sad and angry—but at least you’ll have some clarity about where you stand and what your options are for moving forward.
Clarity is good.
Whatever remains realistic and ideal for you is where you can continue to spend time, energy, and money in a productive way—whether it’s to keep doing what you’re doing, or to look into alternatives. In this way, you’re working hard and smart toward reaching your goal of becoming a parent, and you can feel good about that even when you can’t help but feel bad about the parts of the process you simply can’t control.
If you’re dealing with this, I know you’ve been through the fucking wringer, as have so many of my friends and family. And I know that a rational approach might seem devoid of empathy. But it also might help you to accept where you are and get to where you want to be.
• France has run out of butter.
FACT: There was a butter shortage in French supermarkets in late 2017 and I’m not going to say it caused me heart palpitations when I read the headlines but I’m not going to say it didn’t, either. Stay vigilant out there, people. If it happens again you’ll need to bone up on best hoarding practices tout de suite. (And if you think this qualifies as merely “tedious” shit, then you, Monsieur, have never eaten a decent croissant.)
• A natural disaster just hit.
I riffed a little on hurricanes earlier in the book, but you’ve also got your tornados, floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and—the star of my most terrifying nightmares—tsunamis. I hesitate to make generalizations (let alone jokes) about this stuff when my husband’s family lived through Hurricane Katrina; my friend’s mom lost her home to Harvey; and just the other day, an earthquake 300 miles away rumbled our house, causing the couch I was sitting on to vibrate like a by-the-hour hotel bed—and killing at least fifteen people at its epicenter in Haiti. This shit is fucked up. But if you are lucky enough to wake up the morning after a megacalamity and you still have breath in your lungs, well, you are knee-deep in dealing with it. And before you can hope to achieve a Full Fix or get started on some Salvage Jobs, you’ll be starting from a place of Basic Survival. Water, food, shelter. You need ’em, so it’s time to find ’em.
But you know that. This is really just me giving voice to your lizard brain, reminding you that your instincts for preserving your personal safety are in and of themselves your best blueprint for “dealing with it.”
• I was diagnosed with [insert something terrible].
Folks, I’ve already accepted the reality that come publication, I will be savaged by no small number of readers accusing me of playing fast and loose with tragedy, travesty, and heartbreak. All I can say is, the book isn’t called Feel Better Sweetie, This Too Shall Pass.
As I have stressed repeatedly, and undoubtedly to my editor’s [though not to the legal department’s] irritation, I AM NOT A DOCTOR. I’m not an expert in anything, really, unless you count “hating the New York Yankees with a fiery passion.” In these very pages I have admitted that anxiety, panic, and ostriching are my own instinctual coping mechanisms and that I often rely on the wonder of prescription pharmaceuticals to calibrate my freakout-prone brain and body.
And yet, also in these very pages, I’ve tried to show that it’s possible to calm the fuck down and deal with things in a more effective, efficient way than by remaining committed to the anxious, sad, angry, avoid-y, flailing processes you and I have both heretofore “enjoyed.”
With regard to a major-league health problem, I harbor no illusions that either one of us could just calmly acc
ept something like a chronic or—dear God—potentially fatal illness. But personally, I would try really, really hard to do as much productive, helpful, effective worrying as I could.
Also, who are we kidding? I would ugly-cry, emotionally eat, and request a medical marijuana prescription, stat.
• Nuclear war just broke out.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. I know when I’m beat.
• Bedbugs.
I’ve never had bedbugs, but my friends did and their lives became a months-long blur of toxic chemicals, mattress bags, and dry cleaning receipts. Maybe I can get them to do a guest post on my website. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, I can tell you that we had termites last year and I’m proud to say I bypassed freaking out entirely. Once we discovered their happy little piles of “frass”* collecting in the closet under the stairs, I went into the Deal With It Zone, I tell you. Vacuumed up the leavings, removed all the food and dishes and contaminable shit from the house, called an exterminator to fumigate, then stripped every stitch of treated fabric and had it laundered. Twice. Then, advised by the exterminator to go the extra and deeply annoying step of removing the affected wood entirely—which would require rebuilding said closet under the stairs—said HELL YES GIT ’ER DONE. A week later we were footloose and frass-free.
Those motherfuckers never saw me coming.
• Death.
You’ve probably been wondering when I was going to get to death. Not hamster or cat death, either, but full-blown human-beings-ceasing-to-be. You’ve been whiling away the hours, waiting for me to walk out into the mother of all shitstorms, wondering how—just exactly how—Little Miss Anti-Guru proposes to calm the fuck down about and deal with D-E-A-T-H.
And maybe I should’ve stopped short of including this section, to avoid tarnishing what precious authority and goodwill I’ve earned thus far. But we all have to deal with death eventually—our own or the mortality of our loved ones—and ignoring that would make me either willfully ignorant or a dirty rotten cheater, neither of which I’d want as my epitaph. Additionally, I think about death ALL THE TIME, so I might as well exploit my own overactive imagination for fun and profit.
To get the full effect, let’s back up a bit to Shit That Hasn’t Happened Yet and talk about anxiety over the mere prospect of death.
For me, this is the Mother of Tarantulas. It’s where almost all of my smaller anxieties lead—like, I just saw the bus driver yawn easily metastasizes into what if we die in a highway pileup and my parents have to clean out our house which means my night table drawer which means… uh oh. Then once I get that far, there’s nowhere worse to go. It winds up being a relief to stare this terrifying what-if directly in the kisser so I can defang it with my trusty CTFD toolkit and move on.
Yawning bus drivers? Think about probability. This guy drives the 7:00 a.m. route between New York and Maine five days a week. He’s entitled to be a little tired, but this is not his first rodeo and he’s packing a 20-ounce Americano with sugar, so.
A heavily reported article by a trusted news source that predicts the world will become uninhabitable by 2040? Ask: Is this something I can control? I accept what I can’t change about this situation (most of it) and turn my focus to what I can (vote for legislators who believe in climate science, reduce my own carbon footprint, move further inland in ten years). I discard. I organize. I calm the fuck down. Again, I’m not going to claim it always works; anxiety, panic, and despondence are bad enough—when you add pain and suffering to the mix, you can get overwhelmed fast. But these techniques do work for me a lot of the time, and that’s way better than never.
Someone I know is terminally ill or inching ever closer to simply terminally old? Acknowledge the inevitability. This Category 5 is already formed; it’s going to be excruciating when I have to face it, so why torture myself when I don’t yet? When I’m gripped by the pointy little teeth of these particular emotional puppies, I pry them loose—logically, rationally, and methodically. I bargain with myself. I’ll avoid freaking out about this now, and focus on something I can control—like picking up the phone and calling my ailing friend or grandmother—before the day comes that I have to take my fine feathered head out of the sand to mourn them. That these mental negotiations actually succeed in tamping down my anxious flare-ups is almost as much of a miracle as someone beating stage-five cancer. I think that alone renders them worthy of your consideration.
But, of course, there’s also the kind of death you don’t see coming. The sudden, unpredictable, unfathomable news that takes you from anxious worrying to devastating reality: Shit That Has Already Happened. I could try to soften the blow by saying I hope you never have reason to take my advice on this front, but we both know you will, and insincerity is not my forte.
So when that total shitstorm lands, how do you deal with it?
My doctor once told me that a sense of injustice is one of the biggest triggers of anxiety and panic, and I can think of no greater injustice than the death of someone you love, whether anticipated or unexpected. When it happens, you’re likely to experience a range of prolonged, chaotic emotions. Sadness, certainly. Even rage. But while depression and anger are among the five stages of grief made famous in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s seminal book On Death and Dying, I will also gently point out that acceptance is the final stage.
And by now, you know a little something about finding your way there. Not necessarily to accepting the outcome itself, but simply accepting the reality of it, enabling you to move through it, past it, and on with your life.
I’ve been there—getting the call, crying for hours, stumbling through days, wondering if anything would ever hurt more or if this would ever hurt less—and in those moments, I remind myself that I’ll get to acceptance someday because this is what humans do. None of us live forever, which means that every day, whether we know it or not, we encounter someone in the process of surviving someone else’s death. For me in recent years it’s been a friend who lost her brother, a colleague who lost his husband, and each member of my family who lost in one man their partner, father, sibling, uncle, and grandfather. Watching all of them get through their days and move forward with their lives shows me that it’s possible to do the same.
It won’t be easy and it’s going to hurt like all fuck, but it’s possible.
And where do you go from there? Apart from grief, which is nearly impossible to control with anything other than the march of time, what are the practicalities of “dealing with” death? Often, we inherit responsibilities such as organizing a funeral, emptying a loved one’s house, or executing a will. And morbid though these tasks are, in some ways they can also be helpful. In addressing them, you’ll recognize elements of sleight of mind—such as refocusing your foggy brain on detail-oriented plans that require all logicians on deck, or occupying your wringing hands on mindless chores that allow you to zone out for a little while.
At some point, you’ll have been practicing calming the fuck down without realizing it. And once you experience the benefit of that a few times, you may even get better at doing it on purpose.
However, and as Kübler-Ross describes it, grieving is a nonlinear process. You may feel better one day and far worse the next. I’m not saying it will be okay. But it will be. As the one left behind, you’re in charge of what that means for you.
And just remember: anytime you need to let those emotional puppies run free, you’ve got the keys to the crate. There’s no shame in using them.
Woof.
Over to you, Bob
Whoa. That was intense.
But… would you agree that the catalogue of terror becomes a little less scary and a little-to-a-lot more manageable when you confront each entry rationally instead of emotionally, with a pragmatic outlook on outcomes?
And that these techniques can actually be applied across a pretty wide range of what-ifs and worries?
I hope so.
Calm the Fuck Down was always intended to offer you one set of tools for all kinds of p
roblems. I mean, despite my relatively low-impact tropical existence, it’s not like I had the time or wherewithal to write a book that covers every possible iteration of all the shit that might and/or probably will happen to every single reader, and how to handle it.
But you don’t need that book anyway.
What you need is a mental toolkit that you can apply to every possible iteration of all the shit that might and/or probably will happen to you.
That, I think I have provided. And in just a moment, it will be time to let you flex your brand-new decision-making, problem-solving skills in a ski-jump finish worthy of our old friend, Italian superhunk Alberto Tomba.
Before you turn the page, though, I just want to say two more things:
1. I have faith in you.
2. Immediately following the next section, there’s an epilogue here. Don’t forget to check it out for the final word on my own personal quest to calm the fuck down. It involves a feral cat, some coconut oil, and a shitstorm the probometer could never have predicted.
And now, onward to the next… ADVENTURE!
IV
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:
When shit happens, how will you calm the fuck down and deal with it?
Part IV is going to be so much fun! In an effort to put everything I’ve taught you throughout Calm the Fuck Down into practice in one zany, interactive section, I’ll present you with a totally plausible shitstorm and YOU get to react to and solve it your own damn self.
Ready?
Good. Because shit just happened, yo.
You’re traveling far from home. Far enough that you had to fly, and for a duration long enough that you couldn’t fit everything into a carry-on and had to check some luggage. Also, you’re traveling for an occasion that required you to pack a few specific, very important items in your luggage. Now that luggage is lost somewhere between your point of origin and your final destination.
