It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel meh.
Yesterday while zooming with my therapist, he asked how I was handling the current state of the world, lol. Like, bro. So I just shrugged and said I was feeling a little anxious, but ya know, hanging in there. He asked me what I did in order to manage my anxiety, and aside from being filled to my gills with pills, I said, “oh you know, I like to feel prepared, it helps me sort of manage my anxiety in a productive way”. And then he asked the question I knew he would, a question that I had been preparing my answer to while in the shower - starting at my hair mask and body wash and kinda shrugging, giving a little laugh and saying, “you know, the usual stuff”. Hoping of course that my v chill and cool girl vibes would stop the conversation and we could move on to another topic.
My performance of course didn’t fool him. I would be winning no Oscars for my portrayal as “Totally normal woman who doesn’t suffer from crippling end of the world anxiety”. My faux-casual demeanor sent up some big old red flags, which lead him to asking me point blank to walk him through exactly what I was doing to prepare. Which meant I had to sheepishly list off the items that recently arrived on my doorstep. As I explained to him, I consider these things a starting off point and will, as I see fit, continue to add to my “D-DAY” collection.
So far I’ve ordered:
Space Blankets
NOAA Weather/emergency radios w/ hand crank
Solar cell/computer chargers
Headlamps/mag-lites w/ extra batteries
Industrial Walkie Talkies
Gloves that you can use in case you need to like, punch through a glass window or grab barbed wire
Goggles
Masking Tape/Rope (honestly no idea what I’d use that for but seems like it might come in handy)
Knives (protection and just, you know, they’re useful)
Potassium Iodine pills
2 Stocked Go-Bags (one for apartment/one for car)
Water purifying system
The SOS Survival Book
Gas Masks (made sure to order a few extra for my besties!)
To his credit, he really truly tried to keep his face devoid of any reactions or emotion, but whoo boy, the Potassium Iodine and the Gas Masks - those made them eyebrows to shoot up into the stratosphere quicker than he could control them. And I get it - I even added a disclaimer before I launched into my stockpile - something along the lines of, “I realize this sounds insane, but go with me on this” and then tried to sort of convince him that we live in the biggest city in the country and of course shit will hit the fan at some point from some thing, be it the Russians or civil war, so isn’t it better to be prepared just in case? And then, because I can never NOT make a joke about my fucked up life/behavior, I said - you know, if I don’t end up needing the gas mask, I can use it for a Halloween costume or something (I’m 42 years old - what the fuck would I be dressing up as that needs a gas mask?). He really handled it well , insofar as he didn’t immediately have me 5150’d, which I appreciated. But while this behavior might be shocking to him, the level at which my anxiety commits to being a living breathing thing in my life, it’s not shocking to anyone who has ever known me. To know Morgan, is to know her anxiety. We’re like those girls - remember those two-headed twins who were in the news, bless them, the ones who would be happily playing softball or talking about crushes and its like….I’m happy for them, but its a lot - just a lot to process? And like them, interacting with me and my anxiety makes people a tad uncomfortable, even though it shouldn’t - it’s their shit and inability to deal with it, not mine. But ya know, I get it to a degree. But me and my lady A have a symbiotic relationship, and after a while, if you know me, you come to expect that at some point my anxiety will be whispering in my ear that, “while you’re at it - do you need a bow and arrow or some sort of camping kit too? You know, just in case?”.
I would like to say I don’t know when the anxiety started, but I do - maybe there was some before it, maybe its naturally in my DNA, but for the most part, I’m assuming the bulk of my anxiety sprung from the fact my house burned down as a child. From what I can remember, I was a little kid, I think I was around 3 1/2 or 4 - we lived in a little logging town in Oregon, my parents had recently separated, so it was just me, my mom and our dog. Our house was a two story place that had been converted into upstairs and downstairs units. We lived downstairs, on a dead end road, with hills packed with evergreens and other trees that would eventually be logged and the beauty of the little town cut away with it. Our upstairs neighbor was a younger guy - probably early 20s - who was a logger and had a new puppy. Because he had to get up very, very early for work, he left a lamp on for the dog so it wouldn’t be in the dark. One early morning, the puppy somehow knocked the lamp over and started a fire. We were downstairs, oblivious and sleeping , while the fire started first as little spark and then engulfed the entire top floor. Our next door neighbor was also a logger and had to get up super early as well. He must’ve been running behind that morning, thankfully, because he spotted the flames and pounded our front down so my mom, the dog and I were able to make it out ok. The puppy upstairs did not, despite the firefighters best efforts, he was just too scared to go to them.
It’s all snapshots of memories, really. Me sitting at the neighbors kitchen table being fed some sort of sugar cereal - I think it was the blue Smurf cereal, the kind that was like giving kids uncut cocaine to snort, while the glow of the red flames flicked through their kitchen window. I remember being doted on by the family while my mom stood outside watching it burn- nothing like being young, broke, newly single with a kid and now having no home. After the fire was put out, I remember looking in our windows after - windows that once housed the celery stocks put in cups of water with food coloring to watch them change from green to blue and avocado pits skewered over a glass on the sills, waiting for the sprouts to come, but now the glass was broken and everything seemed to be covered in soot. But what I really remember, the most vivid memory, is seeing my play dough tubs melted, with the innards of the dough having sort of exploded out of the little yellow containers due to the pressure from the heat. I remember thinking I wished I could go and touch it to see how it felt and see if it still had that same weird slightly chemical smell. But I couldn’t go back inside because it wasn’t safe for a little kid - not with the upstairs that wasn’t structurally sound or all the glass and god knows what littering the floor. Remarkably, they were able to save a lot of personal items. My rocking chair, toys, baby blankets, weirdly records and other things. Being downstairs helped, most of the damage was from smoke - some photos of me as a kid have this weird dark haze on them from being exposed to the heavy smoke. My grandparents came down to bring a few things and I remember being outside with rain boots on sort of angrily stomping a rain puddle and my grandmother saying I looked like the saddest little girl in the world. But, I was lucky and I wasn’t the saddest little girl in the world by a long shot. But what that experience taught me at a young age was, your worst fear can come true. And those fears can sneak up on you in the dead of night, when you should feel safe enough to wander into a dream world, but they don’t care. None of us are safe. Life isn’t safe - there’s always some catastrophe or illness or horrible accidents, or series of events lurking around every single corner. And you know, had I been put immediately into therapy, I’m sure I could’ve avoided my current “Doomsday Prepper” vibe, but what fun would that be?
No, instead I was allowed to cold turkey my fears - be jokingly called a worry-wart and then left to wallow in all of the scenarios that my overactive brain could come up with at any given moment. Oh, that’s also a key ingredient to my personal brand of anxiety - an overactive imagination. Oh baby, you think you can imagine all of the ways something can go sideways? I’ve got news for you, I can think of 50 more AND some of those scenarios will involve androids.
Directly after the fire I became one of those kids who had a lot of stomach aches - the doctor chalked it up to growing pains. Lol. No, that was anxiety. And while I could come up with my own worries - for a while I had reoccurring dreams about a “good Chewbacca” and a “bad Chewbacca” and in my dream, I needed to get somewhere safe but I never knew if it was good or bad Chewbacca helping me, and I would only recognize at the end of the dream that it was the bad one and I was about to die. There were also external things that really helped amp it up to a 12 on the old dial. Some were completely me just being a little too imaginative - for example, right after the fire I became terrified of werewolves. I called them “bear-woofs”. And if there was a full moon, I’d get scared that if we didn’t get home in time, the bear woofs would get us. I thought the Hall and Oates song “Maneater” was about werewolves. I also, genuinely thought that Bob Seger was a werewolf. I think it’s because he, well he fucking looked like some sort of feral creature, but also because his backing musicians were called “the silver bullet band” and what kills a werewolf? Yeah, a fucking silver bullet. Werewolves are clever as hell. And it just so happens that the same year on Halloween, the year I went as a culturally insensitive “gypsy” (which I realize now is not ok, but I challenge you to NOT find a kid in the early 80s who didn’t go as one for a halloween or two), anyway the kids across the street had kind of made it a haunted house and would jump out of trash cans and off the roof when trick or treaters would come up the sidewalk. Honestly, I would’ve still been scared, but the icing on the cake was one of the kids who jumped off the roof had on a werewolf mask and that caused me to fucking DART across the road and under the front porch to hide.
So yeah, I had my own overactive imagination coming up with things to be worried about, and then you go and throw in my dumb-fuck deadbeat Peter-pan ass dad, who thought it would be cool to plop his weirdo daughter in front of the tv with those pastel colored mini-marshmallows (the ones that looked incredible but that were more than likely made of toxic dyes and probably asbestos) so she could watch the miniseries “V” with him… when she was four years old. FOUR!!! Nothing like being panicked that everyone is a lizard person come to steal our saltwater and eat our guinea pigs. That same genius also let me watch “Poltergeist” who led me to hating Jello and also legitimately turning catatonic when I would get scared. I also ended up having to plug my ears and hum when the commercial for Poltergeist 2 would come on the tv.
Other ways it manifested during my early childhood?
A truly insane fear of being in buildings (stores/restaurants) too close to closing time. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I would lose my mind if someone tried to take me into an establishment within an hour of it closing. Thankfully in the 80s you could just leave your hysterical child in a car outside for an hour or so and no one batted an eye. I was also, understandably scared of fire. I had a full fledged panic attack while being an acolyte at church - I stopped halfway down the aisle and walked backwards back out of the sanctuary while trying to pull the little handle down to extinguish the flame. That ended my acolyte career on the spot. I was scared of hospitals. I was scared of elevators. I became extremely scared of robots/androids. I was scared of Russia (to be fair - was young Morgan Nostradamus? Cause this bitch was onto something!). I was scared of being possessed. I was scared that if I accidentally lingered too long while drying off from a bath or shower, that God would think I was being inappropriate and would give me AIDS as a punishment (I would like to point out that I lived in deep east Texas and I fully blame whatever hideous, horribly backwards and intensive and bigoted religious shit that was spouted off about that disease on the asshole Baptists in my hometown. That one was at least not on me). My pediatrician had a letter I wrote him when I was around 10 framed in his office - it was all the things I did not consent to them doing to me at any time. The list included spinal taps, bone marrow transplants, chemo, this weird thing I saw on some after school special about a kid living with Cystic Fibrosis. I was just covering my bases and making sure they understood my boundaries and they thought it was a real hoot.
Then came the fear of tornadoes. Look, if you live in New York or Seattle or LA or Vermont or I dunno, Lapland, you can be scared of tornadoes with very little impact to your life. Maybe you watch Twister and think, thank GOD I don’t have to worry about that. Unfortunately for me, after the fire, we eventually went back to where I would be raised from 6 years old - on - East Texas, specifically in Tornado Alley. And boy if people don’t LOVE to talk about the tornado of 1982, which really was an awful and terrible experience for everyone in our town. But like, you keep telling these stories around a kid with anxiety who, multiple times a year, had to deal with tornadoes rolling through, and the potential for tornadoes being constant, well, you end up with what I became - a fucking maniac. I became obsessed with doppler radar. Our town during storms would change the time and temp channel, channel 2, which normally just ran a ticker with community announcements, to a very 80s janky radar, so we could see what was coming towards us. Hearing the “bleeee bleee bleee” of the emergency broadcast announcement still sends shivers down my spine. I had a working knowledge of all the counties in North Texas and SE Oklahoma thanks to knowing exactly what town and county was under what watch or warning. Our house didn’t have a basement, most in East Texas don’t as the ground is unforgiving. Only some of the older homes had them, and luckily one of those houses was across the street from us. So, when the sky darkened and Channel 2 turned to the radar, that was when Morgan kicked into fucking gear. I was a 9 year old with a fucking go-bag. I had a backpack that had some first aid stuff in it, a flashlight, I think a Casio walkman - cause you know, still gotta rock out to your Debbie Gibson cassingle as you’re getting impaled by 2 x 4s flying through the air, and then the real kicker was my bike helmet. Because, my dead-beat dad by that point had morphed from letting me watch horror films to making a fucking pretty penny on what we later found was trips to South America living his best smuggler life. But the positive of that was, I started getting some really kick-ass gifts in an attempt to buy my love. One of which was a teal Peugeot mountain bike with a matching helmet - this was the late 80s, so no one used bike helmets, we liked to get our brains scrambled thank you very much, which allowed me to repurpose said helmet as my Tornado Bonnet. If anyone spent the night and a storm was coming, they knew the fucking drill - you put your shoes neatly by the door so that in the event a tornado was coming, we would run be prepared to put on our shoes and run across the street and into the neighbors basement. Neighbors who, to their credit, didn’t seem to mind a strange, hysterical child running into their basement unannounced at breakneck speed multiple times a year. I still have friends who joke about the shoes by the door, and it is funny and weird - the image of me demanding that people follow my safety protocol - like, thats wild? There were no adults telling me things were going to be ok - because deep down, I knew they didn’t know if it would be ok and wouldn't have listened to them anyway. I knew I’d have to take shit into my own hands If I wanted to come out the other side, and that meant being prepared. Then, after tornadoes came a 10 year stint where everything merged into a crippling fear of flying.
But this anxiety has served me well in a lot of ways. Do I wish that I wasn’t constantly expecting the worst? Yeah, I feel like life would be a little more fun. I think that you know, maybe I wouldn’t carry so much tension in my neck that my boxing coach said I have the shoulders of a heavy weight fighter. Maybe I wouldn’t have cracked a tooth from clenching my jaw due to worry. On the other hand, do you know why I am very, very fucking good at the jobs I do? It’s because I think ahead. I’m the person on the plane counting the seats and looking for the emergency exit and thinking about who I need to step over in order to pry that fucking door open and get to safety. I can anticipate my bosses needs. I can anticipate the ways things will go wrong - because I know that everything can go wrong at any point. Nothing is perfect and no outcome guaranteed. And because of that, I am a master of logistics. Master of contingency plans. I can turn something from a disaster into controlled chaos.
I’ve learned that my anxiety is as much a part of me as my love for 80’s dad style divorce rock. You really can’t separate the two - no matter how much I wish or the people around me wish that we could. It’s just who I am now. So, instead, I’ve had to learn to channel my anxiety into ways that I can at least feel like I’m attempting to meet the darkness head-on. I’m used to the uneasy laughter when I list off my doomsday supplies. I know that people are worried about me when I try to kindly give them a heads up about the potential of a cyber attack on the power grid, and how we have to be as prepared as possible for that. I know the look in my therapists eye, and I know that he’s going to have a LOT of notes to share with my psychiatrist, probably questioning if it might be smart to put me on a higher dose of something. Are Quaaludes still a thing? I get it though, I sound slightly manic and over the top. But the reality is, the bad shit will happen. Someone said that if the train is going to crash no matter what, why does it matter when it does? Just enjoy the ride. And I think most people are wired that way. That does sounds refreshing. But then there are people like me: shoes by the door, who still believe Bob Seger might be a werewolf, and who google how to survive a nuclear winter. To each their own, I guess. Until whatever happens, happens - I’ll just be listening to We Didn’t Start the Fire on repeat.
Oh and PS - I have extra Potassium Iodine if anyone needs some.