Calm the Fuck Down

by Sarah Knight

  No matter how it plays out, you still don’t have your luggage back because you totally gave up on that, which means your lucky shoes, your favorite pajamas, and the team mascot (long story) are lost to the same sands of time under which you buried your head for four days. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to see what’s up over on the Flipside?

  On second thought, yes. I’m interested in “getting alarmed.” Go here.

  I’m willing to “propose a trade.” Go here.

  Gumption levels dangerously low. Better just go straight to dealing with it. Go here.

  Epilogue

  I’m so pleased to see you made it all the way to the end of Calm the Fuck Down. Cheers! And I really hope you had fun choosing your own adventures because that section was a bitch to put together.

  I also hope you feel like you’re walking away with a host of practical, actionable methods with which to turn yourself into a calmer and more productive version of yourself, when shit happens.

  Because it will. OH, IT WILL. Shit will happen both predictably and unpredictably, each time with the potential to throw your day, month, or life off course. Such as, for example, when the first draft of your book is due in one week and you break your hand on a cat.

  Yes. A cat.

  In fact, this epilogue was going in a totally different direction until such time as I found myself squatting over Mister Stussy—one of my two feral rescue kitties, affectionately dubbed #trashcatsofavenidaitalia over on Instagram—ready to surprise him with a paper towel soaked in organic coconut oil.

  He’s very scabby. I’m just trying to help.

  Unfortunately, just as I descended with hands outstretched, Mister Stussy spooked. And instead of running away from me like he usually does when I try to medicate him, he launched himself up and backward into my outstretched fingers.

  Crunch!

  I’ve been asked many times since that fateful day to explain—in both English and Spanish—the physics of how a cat manages to break a human hand. I’m not sure I fully understand it myself, though I’m told Mercury was in retrograde, which may have been a factor. The closest I can get to describing what happened is that it was like someone had hurled a large, furry brick as hard as they could, at close range and exactly the wrong angle, and scored a direct hit on my fifth metacarpal.

  And remember, before I met him, Mister Stussy had long been surviving on garbage and mud puddles. Dude is a bony motherfucker.

  I was momentarily stunned by the pain, and then by the deep, visceral knowledge that finishing this book was about to get a whole lot more difficult. The leftmost digits on my thankfully nondominant hand were—and I believe this is the technical term—fuuuuuuucked.

  Would you like to know how I reacted?

  First, I told my husband, “I need to go be upset about this for a little bit.” Then I went upstairs and cried, out of both pain and dismay. My emuppies were on struggle mode. Then I started to feel a little anxious on top of it, so I took a shower. Focusing on shampooing and soaping myself without doing further damage to my throbbing hand provided a goodly distraction and by the time I was finished, I was no longer sad/anxious.

  I was angry.

  Yes, for those of you keeping track at home, this is how my “I don’t really get angry” streak was broken. By a fucking CAT, to whom I have been nothing but KIND and SOLICITOUS, and who repaid me with ASSAULT AND CATTERY.

  For the rest of the night I walked around the house muttering “I am very angry with Mister Stussy” like Richard Gere when he was very angry with his father in Pretty Woman. I imagined wreaking vengeance upon him—picture the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, with coconut oil—and that gave me some time and space to remember that Tim Stussert (as I sometimes call him) is just a fucking trash cat who doesn’t want coconut oil rubbed into his scabs. It wasn’t his fault.

  Sigh.

  In taking stock of my situation, I realized that in addition to finishing writing this book, I had my husband’s boat-based birthday party to sort out; a takeover of the Urban Oufitters Instagram Stories to film; a haircut to schedule before I took over the Urban Outfitters Instagram Stories; and then I was supposed to pack for a three-week, three-state trip to the US.

  If you started the clock at that sickening Crunch!, I needed to do all of it in thirteen days. Hmm.

  At this point, I didn’t know that my hand was broken. I thought it was a bad sprain and not worth spending untold hours in what passes for an “emergency” room in this town when I had so little time to finish my work. In the immediate aftermath of the cat attack, my ideal and, I believed, still-realistic outcome was to finish the book on schedule so I would have six days left to deal with the rest of my shit.

  So I took a bunch of Advil and got back to work.

  For the next week, I pounded awkwardly away at the last 5 percent of the manuscript with my right hand (and three fifths of the left) while the affected fingers cuddled in a homemade splint fashioned out of an Ace bandage and two emery boards. The look was sort of Captain Hook meets Keyboard Cat.

  Was there an anxious voice in the back of my head saying What if you tore something? What if you regret not getting that looked at right away? Of course there was. It just lost out to the other total shitstorm on the docket.

  (BTW, I’d hate to be seen as promoting cavalier attitudes toward your health, so please rest assured, I am nothing if not a GIANT pussy. If the pain had been unbearable, I would have asked my editor for an extension and gone to get an X-ray. At the time, on a scale of relatively painless to unbearable, I gave it a “tedious.”)

  I was able to ice, elevate, and type (with Righty), and my husband started picking up my slack on chores. I missed out on a couple fun dinners with friends because the last 5 percent of the writing process was taking five times as long as it was supposed to, and when unwrapped, my pinky finger had a disconcerting tendency to jerk in and out of formation like James Brown live at the Apollo, but overall things seemed… okay.

  When I finished the book, I decided a leisurely afternoon at the clinic was in order. That’s when I found out it was a break, not a sprain. Score one for Mister Stussy.

  The next several weeks were challenging. (You may recall that multistate trip I had to pack for. Blurf.) But along the way, I calmed the fuck down and dealt with it. It’s almost as if writing this book for the past six months had been preparing me for this very situation—like some kind of Rhonda Byrne The Secret manifestation crap, except I manifested a shitstorm instead of untold riches.

  I suppose that’s what I get for being an anti-guru.

  On the bright side: when the storm hit without warning, I emoted, then crated the puppies and gave anxiety the finger. I plotted revenge against him who had wronged me and in doing so released my aggression in a way that didn’t make anything worse. I took stock, I identified my RIO, and I’ve been triaging ever since.

  I don’t want to alarm you, but think I might be onto something here.

  Remember in the introduction when I said I’d always had a problem “dealing with it” when unexpected shit cropped up? In fact, readers of Get Your Shit Together know that the writing of that book ended on a similarly chaotic note—we’d been living nomadically for months and the Airbnb we moved into just when I was ready to make the final push on the manuscript turned out to be more of a Bugbnb. I fully freaked out and I did not calm down even a little bit. (I also drew heavily on the Fourth Fund, both at the Bank of My Husband and of the Friends We Subsequently Moved In With).

  Eventually, I got over and through and past it—I know how to get my shit together, after all—but not without wasting an enormous amount of time, energy, money, and goodwill in the process.

  Whereas if we fast-forward a couple years, in the wake of a much more damaging (and painful) shitstorm, I seem to have become rather capable of dealing under duress.

  Fancy that!

  I’m still no Rhonda Byrne, but I do have a little secret for you: I don’t spend all this time writing No Fucks
Given Guides just for shits and giggles, or to make money, or to improve your life (although these are all sound justifications). I do it because each book, each writing process, and each hour I spend chatting away about my wacky ideas on someone else’s podcast provides ME with an opportunity for personal growth.

  I’m giving fewer, better fucks than ever, and I’m much happier as a result. In teaching others to get their shit together, I discovered new ways of keeping mine in line. And holy hell, was You Do You exactly the book I needed to write to heal myself of a bunch of unhealthy trauma and resentment I didn’t even know I’d been carrying around for thirty years.

  But I have to say that for me, Calm the Fuck Down is going in the annals as the most self-fulfilling titular prophecy of them all. I know how hard it was for me to handle unexpected mayhem just a few years ago, so I also know how remarkable it is to have been able to get this far in training myself to chill the fuck out about it. Yes, a move to the tropics and a massive cultural paradigm shift helped jump-start my education, but I took to it like a feral cat to a pile of trash—and then I wrote a book about it so you can get your own jump start at a much more reasonable and sweet-smelling price point.

  So my final hope is this: that if you internalize all of my tips and techniques for changing your mind-set, and implement the lessons I’ve striven to impart—you’ll realize that most of the shit that happens to you (even failing to bcc more than one hundred people on a work email) doesn’t have to be as freakout-inducing as it might have seemed before you read this book. And that you can deal with it.

  I mean, that’s my realistic ideal outcome for you, and I’m feeling pretty good about it.

  Acknowledgments

  As a publishing insider for many years, I know how rare and special it is to work with the same team, book after book after book after book. It means we’re all having fun and enjoying the fruits of our collective labor, and that nobody has accepted a better job elsewhere. So I really hope I haven’t jinxed that by saying how grateful I am to have been supported by Jennifer Joel at ICM Partners, Michael Szczerban at Little, Brown, and Jane Sturrock at Quercus Books since day one.

  Jenn—my hero in heels, my tireless champion, and the calmest of us all. I don’t think she even needs this book, but I sure needed her to make it happen. And so she did.

  Mike—the original Alvin to my Simon and the Tom to my Foolery. He has tended to these books like a mother hen and made them better with every peck and cluck.

  And Jane—effortlessly co-steering the ship from across the Pond. Her enthusiasm for the very first No Fucks Given Guide has carried us close to the million-copy mark in the UK alone, not to mention given me a regular excuse to both say and be “chuffed.”

  Thanks also to their respective comrades-in-arms, including Loni Drucker, Lindsay Samakow, and Nic Vivas at ICM; Ben Allen (production editor and saint), Reagan Arthur, Ira Boudah, Martha Bucci, Sabrina Callahan, Nicky Guerreiro, Lauren Harms, Lauren Hesse, Brandon Kelley, Nel Malikova, Laura Mamelok, Katharine Meyers, Barbara Perris (copyeditor and saint), Jennifer Shaffer, and Craig Young at Little, Brown; and Olivia Allen, Charlotte Fry, Ana McLaughlin, Katie Sadler, and Hannah Winter at Quercus. Also: David Smith, the designer who supplied the UK versions of all the graphics for my new website, is both patient and quick on the draw, two qualities I love in a person; Alana Kelly at Hachette Australia has moved mountains and time zones to get me publicity Down Under; my friends at Hachette Canada have helped us crack the bestseller list book after book; and, finally, thanks to Lisa Cahn from Hachette Audio and Aybar Aydin, Callum Plews, Gavin Skal, and director Patrick Smith at Audiomedia Production.

  Of course, the fourth NFGG would never have been possible without all y’all who read installments one, two, and/or three. A bigly thank-you goes out to my readers worldwide, as well as to anyone who’s bought a copy for someone else as either a sincere or a passive-aggressive gift. (I’m looking at you, Sir Anthony Hopkins!) And thank you to the dysfunctional families, terrible bosses, fair-weather friends, and schoolyard bullies who built my audience from the ground up. Much appreciated.

  Speaking of building from the ground up, I also want to thank my parents, Tom and Sandi Knight. They never once told me to calm the fuck down, even though they probably thought it frequently.

  Finally, even when the topic is calming down, writing a book is a struggle. The following individuals all did their part to soothe me in my time of need: Pépito, Sir Steven Jay Catsby, Steinbeck, Millay, Baloo, Ferris Mewler, Mittens, Marcello, Benjamin, Steve Nash (Steve), The Matterhorn (Matty), Joni, Edgar, Misko, Hammie, Mushka, Dashiell, Moxie, Gladys, and [begrudgingly] Mister Stussy.

  But it must be said that no one, human or feline, did more to help Calm the Fuck Down come to fruition than my husband, Judd Harris. Not only did he build my new website—a Herculean undertaking on behalf of a persnickety client—he made my coffee throughout and tended to my broken hand and bruised psyche at the end, and he was there for the nineteen years that preceded the writing of this book, including both the best and the worst stretches that inspired it. He is my favorite.

  Want more Sarah Knight?

  Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.

  Tap here to find your new favorite book.

  About the Author

  Sarah Knight’s first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, has been published in more than twenty languages, and her TEDx talk, “The Magic of Not Giving a Fuck,” has more than four million views. All of the books in her No Fucks Given Guides series have been international bestsellers, including Get Your Shit Together, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks. Her writing has also appeared in Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Red, Refinery29, and elsewhere. After quitting her corporate job to pursue a freelance life, she moved from Brooklyn, New York, to the Dominican Republic, where she currently resides with her husband, two feral rescue cats, and a shitload of lizards.

  You can learn more and sign up for her newsletter at nofucks givenguides.com, follow Sarah on Twitter and Instagram @MCSnugz, and follow the books @NoFucksGivenGuides (Facebook and Instagram) and @NoFucksGiven (Twitter).

  Also available

  Praise for Sarah Knight

  “Genius.”—Cosmopolitan

  “Self-help to swear by.”—Boston Globe

  “Hilarious and truly practical.”—Booklist

  * If you’re having an A-plus day, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all is right with your minuscule slice of rotating time bomb, you probably don’t need to calm the fuck down. Congrats. Go outside, enjoy. Things will turn to shit soon enough, and I’ll be waiting.

  * Where “not especially calm” equals “a total fucking lunatic.”

  * Gopher colonies being a prime example of an underlying problem.

  * Welp, looks like I found a title for my next book!

  * It’s a series, guys. Cut a bitch some slack.

  * Please don’t email me about the detriments of crate-training your dog. Please. I’m sitting up and begging you.

  * These are the jokes, people.

  * I guess I technically broke my own rule about Shit That Hasn’t Happened Yet. Whatever, it’s my book.

  * Hahaha you’re about to have a baby. There won’t be a break in the action for eighteen years.

  * This Category 4 goes out to a Twitter follower who seems both admirably self-aware and destined to remain single forever.

  * From “The One the Morning After.”

  * For linguistic continuity with the NoWorries Method, I use “worrying” here to mean “any way in which you are exhibiting the signs of a freakout.”

  * Someone who was anxious about finishing her book on time may also have pruned a gigantic papyrus bush with a pair of kitchen scissors today.

  * At this time, I would like to apologize to anyone who bought this book at the airport for a bit of light travel reading.

  * To those of you wh
o got that reference, congrats on being at least forty.

  * This is assuming you didn’t disinvite them already, which would count as PHEW to the MAX but also leave me unable to follow this hypothetical to its messiest conclusion, and that’s no fun.

  * I’ve been rocking a 5se since 2016. No complaints.

  * Full disclosure: there was some delayed-onset freaking out on that one, but at least I had already asked and answered the important questions before I started sobbing into my Amstel Light.

  * 1998 was a tough year for me, okay?

  * That’s a Sarah Knight original inspirational quote. Slap it on a throw pillow and sell it on Etsy if you’re so inclined. You have my blessing.

  * I also asked “How did you deal with it?” and given the responses, I’m more confident than ever that you and your family, friends, enemies, neighbors, bosses, coworkers, underlings, significant other, and especially someone’s sister-in-law Courtney really need this book. I hope it’s working out for you so far.

  * To this day I wonder if the Big Boss threw me into the lion’s den on purpose. I would not put it past her.

  * You could also say Fuck it and move so far off the grid that Uncle Sam couldn’t find you with an army-issue Mark V HD Long-Range scope. Good luck! I’m sure that’ll be easier than paying your taxes.

  * There definitely are.

  * Yes, I know I’m pushing my luck here. It’s part of my charm.