Did I Remember To Take Me Out Of The Freezer?
Or, how we break patterns even when they're awfully solid in their ways.
This is just a one thing, not a five things. I hope that’s ok. I have PMDD okay!? And let’s be real, sometimes one thought is more than enough. Especially when it’s a bummer thought. Anyway, I hope this isn’t too much of a buzzkill ily bye.
Baby Trigger Warning: Going to talk about some parental challenges like estrangement, emotional unavailability, and ghosting—by more than just parents but you get the gist. You can skip this, I will not blame you whatsoever.
🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊
My mom used to call me her human toaster.
She’d go on and on about how I was always warm, pressing her thin hands into the back of my neck or underneath my ribcage or on my sun-kissed calves in the summertime when they’d dangle from me sitting perched in our crabapple tree reading. I don’t know if this was a product of her just being naturally on the chillier side or her loyalty to the Cooking Light/Special K/SlimFast diets given it was the early 2000s, but she’d always comment on how much she loved the way my body temp was always higher than hers. Her “human toaster” ready to make things feel cozier, sunnier, and more tepid with just the skin from my literal back.
I don’t really know what happened or when or why but I am decidedly not a human toaster anymore. Far from it, in fact.
My fingertips are always little manicured icicles. I contemplate bringing a jacket even when it’s sunny outside. I’ll wear a crewneck and a beanie to the beach. I’m almost always muttering that the house is freezing, or that there’s a cold spot the builders must not have noticed. I shove my feet under the legs of friends and lovers not because I’m necessarily particularly affectionate but because I can alleviate how frigid my toes are underneath their thighs.
Maybe it was the distance first and then the strife and ultimately the adulthood estrangement from my mom, or maybe it’s simply the nature of “getting older” but I’ve gone from always running hot to taking showers just to warm up. From thinking 40 degrees was shorts weather to constantly having a Pendleton on my bed out of necessity. From religiously running the AC to habitually running the fireplace. From being someone’s human toaster to worrying that something might be medically wrong with me because I’m always in need of a sweatshirt even in almost June.
Yes, this is somewhat literal but also if you are familiar with my writing at all yes, this is of course also a metaphor for something else entirely. I’m not sorry about it. (I’m a little sorry.)
A few weeks ago I did something I have not done since I was in my early twenties and I left a date in the middle of it with no word. I picked up my things, Irish Goodbyed, and left her alone at the bar retreating home safely in the back of a Volkswagon steered by a man named Jeff while she watched him and me pull out of the parking lot. I offered no explanation as to why, I didn’t even give a send off or well wishes. When pressed via text after several ignored calls I literally left it with, “I don’t care to get into this further.”
Mere days later I watched as multiple paragraphs appeared on my phone from someone else about how much they missed me, how much they wanted me in their life, how I supposedly “made everything better.” I tried to handle it with slightly more grace, more gently, with a bit more of a careful hand. But in between the “I can’t be this person for you”s and the “I don’t know what you want from me”s I couldn’t help but feel like screaming “Why won’t you just leave me alone?????” into the proverbial void.
I’m an intellectualizer. I’m not really inclined to invite feelings inside, to offer feelings a plate at dinner, to feel comfortable with feelings having a seat at the table. When a feeling comes up for me it’s not natural in my mind to just allow them to be. I’d much rather try and “make sense” of them—even though that isn’t exactly logical.
At times this absolutely a defense mechanism and it does make me feel (irony) extremely capable of taking care of myself. I do really like having the ability to simply power through even when with whatever I’m being confronted with makes me stroooongly consider laying down in traffic. But at other times it makes me wonder if my ability to shut down, eyes down, power through, make it through is making me less, well, human. Or empathetic. Or able to open up. Or able to connect. Or able to outrun certain patterns. Or EFGHIJK) all of the above.
Maybe somehow the resting body temperature I’ve found myself currently sitting in of 97.something vs. 98.6 degrees has traveled throughout the various networks of my cardiovascular system, permeated each red blood cell, found its way throughout the pulmonary valve and the right atrium and the aorta, ultimately making it far less possible for me to melt by the people around me. Maybe it’s not only my fingers that are constantly fighting off feeling like they’re below zero, maybe my entire aura is in the negatives too. Maybe it’s not just my circulatory system that’s almost always arctic, maybe it’s me.
Maybe somewhere along the way I stopped being a human toaster and became just a downright cold person.
Okay but!!!! I can pitch it well. I can paint it up and make it as palatable as possible. Oh I can spin it into something better, something easier to digest.
“No, I don’t take things personally.”
“I’m just going to go to bed.”
“I really don’t think it’s worth getting in to more than that.”
“Yep, that’s fair.”
“I don’t need an apology.”
“I don’t think it’s any of my business.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Nope, you’re all good.”
Call it the biggest benefit of being in marketing. It’s knowing first hand how to market the parts of yourself that would otherwise not sell. Making a deck to sell my ideas on best Instagram practices or ways to be interesting on TikTok is a snap. But pitching myself cracks, flaws, fallibility, walls, mommy issues, other connectivity issues, over-grown nail beds attached to freezing fingerprints, overall uncertainty of who I will be tomorrow or next week or next year? How about I offer you the shut down spin version instead please, thank you, and you’re welcome.
Back in the day I used to pride myself in my ability to turn off my emotions, to look at things with pure pragmatism. I used to brag about “having no feelings” and about the confines of my “dead, black heart.” I used to define myself by somewhat of a labelless stoicism, by unending practicality, by the skillset that let me talk my way through almost anything—even everything my own not-quite-deceased-heart wanted to have a say in.
I think a lot about patterns. Recognizing them, avoiding them, outsmarting them, repeating them, getting stuck in them, undoing them, whether or not they’re avoidable entirely, whether or not all we are is a Tetris game of different patterns over and over and over again. Are we all just doomed to run on the same “because of our parents” metaphorical hamster wheel until the end of time? Is the best the universe can offer us is someone decent to pass the miles with? Is there any point in passing them regardless?
Perhaps I’m trying to blame my mom’s orthorexic lack of body heat for my own hesitation on being someone warm and inviting and capable of having open arms, but it does feel scarily like history repeating itself. That I will be haunted by the words, “I never knew you thought that way about us.” That I will swallow my own fist before even conceptualizing the notion of vulnerability. That I am somehow destined to only being able to connect at arm’s length because if I dared stretch out even an inch further I’d shock someone by the cold they’d find themselves on the receiving end of.
But that’s the thing about patterns, isn’t it? If you find yourself unsettled by the series of shapes and colors and sequences and behaviors and reactions and relationship tendencies and habits and anything else laying themselves out in repetition in front of you, the only way to change them is to deliberately do something different. The only way to break a pattern is to…break it. To put red next to green, a hexagon where there’d once be a rectangle, a thirteen in place of an eight, a speak up instead of a shut down, a “this is what my heart says” instead of saying simply nothing.
My mom used to call me her human toaster and now she doesn’t call me at all.
A sentence and sentiment succinct enough in its knife to the gut it would make anyone feel like freezing is the only option.
But here’s the truth of the matter: I don’t have to be the product of the way I have been treated. For all of my hesitation around being the warmest hug in the room, I know I am not defined by the people and parents who have iced me out. It may take some more thawing, some more time on the metaphorical counter, an hour or two or several longer but I have to believe there’s something I can make with (gestures) all of this.
This is not to say that I expect tapping into my feelings is going to suddenly become second nature just because of this lil’ baby epiphany—of course not. I expect to still balk when I can sense someone not picking up on my discomfort, I’ll probably still not be able to “be that person” on more than one occasion, and I may even ghost someone at a dive bar because they get overly familiar about their past partnerships and I just can’t deal (hopefully not, that sucked). But recognizing the pattern is the first step to breaking it, or so they say. And if recognizing it isn’t exactly the first step to shaking it up, deciding you want to certainly has to be. I’ll confirm with my therapist and get back to you.
There’s a type of ice that occurs during Winter called “grey ice” that I learned about when I was Googling way too many things for this under 2500 word essay to make my various metaphors stick; please continue to bear with me. Grey ice, according to Canada’s official ice glossary (a real thing!) is an ice that is:
“Young ice 10-15 cm thick, less elastic than nilas and breaks on swell. It usually rafts under pressure.”
I find a lot of comfort in nature. In the notion that despite being the only “intelligent life out there” (oKaY btw 🙄) that something bigger than us all is always around the corner to humble us, ground us, or make us realize that maybe everything is a little more interconnected that we possibly thought. Yes, of course with beings like whales and monkeys but also with the rain and frost and moss and mushrooms being the original internet. But even with us and things like younger ice—a concept I didn’t know existed until last night—that is slightly denser than other forms but will still break under a swell.
If a swell is what it will take to smash the patterns that no longer serve me, then I guess it’s good I moved away from the people who also didn’t and no longer live in a land locked state.
And I think I handle a wet cold better than a dry one, anyway.