I think the food industry attracts the crazies and the control freaks. I think the potential creativity attracts the crazies, and the grasp of organization and systems necessary to run it well attracts the control freaks, and the potential for creative control attracts the crazy control freaks. Regardless of how we got here, I think the reason why so many chefs and cooks are train wrecks is because ours is an industry, if you're "in the trenches" and working in a hard, stereotypically-"legit", independently-owned restaurant, that isn't able to invest in providing practical care and resources like health insurance for its workers because of high turnover, inherent high risk, and all the other factors that I'm too ill-informed to know anything about. It's a hard industry as a whole, and it takes a lot out of its workers, and when you're already a little crazy, the solution to anything is to push through it, work through it, drink through it, blaze through it, and damn, it is hard. Anyplace I've worked, anyplace I haven't. It's hard.
And sometimes, the result of not dealing with something insidious, like, say, depression or other mental illnesses, or bad experiences, or personal crises - or, more accurately, "dealing" with these things the way you deal with any little stressful day or frustrating customer or my-partner's-giving-me-crap or whatever - sometimes, the result of medicating them with flurries of activity, and creating new projects, and vodka sodas, and blazing to the moon and back, and hiding in your house, and trying to wrap words around something that's already wrapped around you is that, one day, you wake up, and you realize just how bad it's gotten, and you can't drink everything away, because you can't be drunk forever, hello, and there comes a point where you, as a person comprised of neat compartments into which you slide whichever issues you're facing - you realize that this tendency of yours to refuse openness about your pain or problems, or, at least, to accept it only in small doses on your own terms, has affected your standards for what it should mean, and has affected other peoples' standards for how to interact with it, based on what you've allowed, and you feel even more backed into a corner than you were before.
You have - to borrow someone else's wise words - refused to obey your sadness. For a long time. For your whole life, really.
And in a flat calm that means everything in its urgency, you know: you need help. like, yesterday.
But then there's limited resources and no insurance and I'm doing okay, but it's not like I'm made of money, you know? and in the movies, the psychiatrists' offices are filled with many leather-bound books and smell of rich mahogany, and the clientele are slim, shaky, blond women with immaculate bobs and Jimmy Choos and sparkly rocks the size of ice cubes and checkbooks that accommodate throwing thousands of dollars per month at a person who's paid to watch them tear up over a teacup poodle's latest bowel movement.
And then there's the word-of-mouth, this is a great place for free counseling, and, turns out, it's a tiny, rotund German man offering nice talks out of his basement, and those talks are all built around early '80s cliches regarding Jesus Freedom Movements or I don't know what it is, but after fifty minutes of staring at the old hairs wound around the roots of his beige shag carpeting and feeling increasingly irritated, in the enclosed, yellow-lit, dusty haze of his "office" (at the other end of which is a large standing freezer, and it's filled with his brother's venison, he tells you excitedly, because you're a chef) at his relentlessly upbeat refusal to engage with the pain you're trying to dislodge, you walk out the door into blinding sunshine, feeling not at all guilty for tossing his business card on the ground. And that night, you wash all of the clothes you were wearing.
And, alternatively, there are the places that are legitimate, sans freezers, with windows, and degrees and accreditations hanging on cobweb-free, pastel walls, and we should probably meet twice a week, and yes, we offer financial relief for uninsured clients, but we just need copies of your tax returns for the past three years and FICA? amounts and pay stubs and meanwhile I can neither get out of bed nor remember what's on the to-do list I wrote ten minutes ago, let alone survey the range of boxes in my garage and remember which is hoarding my tax paperwork or begin to dig through them without sitting on my garage floor for way too long before breaking down in tears.
And you can always google, ha. ha. ha. Because people have been googling this stuff since approximately 1923 (yeah, it's funny 'cause it's wrong, I get it), which means there are blog entries and resource compilations and Services Finders coming unliterally out of my literal ass on this subject, and you read them all, like, the first eleven pages of results. And wait, is this recent? oh, from 2009? wait, no date on this one... there's a phone number? we're sorry, the number you have dialed. Filter results by outpatient, multiservice, housing, Kendra's Law? Licensed type programming definitions? Human trafficking? Cultural competence? What the hell is this? Wait.. this is for New York? Is there a Florida one? No. How did I find this one? Wait. What?
And even the simple solutions are not simple when you're depressed. and you fight the urge to write between each paragraph things like but i know it's all gonna be okay, hurr-dee-durr-dee-durr!!! No, actually, I don't. Sorry. And I'm giving it little thought, because I'm dealing with today, and nothing beyond. So it's actually kind of hard, right now, to call one number, to be given another number to call for more info, and then fax this info to this number, oh, wait, it didn't go through, try again.. nope, didn't go through.. one more time... do you have a scanner? No? Well, you'll have to fill it out in person, but we're closed Mondays... you could try this location instead, but the address online is incorrect because they've moved across town.. are you ready to write this down? Just be ready to park and walk, because they're doing construction.. you should probably park at this address and cross at this intersection and the door can be kind of hard to find...
Maybe there's not much point in writing it all down. But writing it down gets it outside you, and you know that for every person who scoffs, there's probably two who understand, whether they'll admit it or not. So you'll make the rounds again tomorrow.
At least it's true that there's a measure of comfort in finally acknowledging, for the first time, ever, that things are bigger than Invincible Me, and watching the rigid compartments rightfully collapse in response.
So far: that is the sole silver lining of the past three years. And it is a bright one.
And oops, bye, 'cause I forgot to pay my car insurance, speaking of forgetting everything I ever have anything to do with, ever, anymore.
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