Worm mode.

Nervous breakdowns, etc.

“(After over a year inside) I know myself better than ever and I hate her,” I angrily wrote in my notes app on July 20th 2021. I’m not sure where I was in my Nervous Breakdown™️ journey at that moment, but I do know that I was certainly cracking up. In July, you could usually find me pacing around the park—looking all frail and forlorn and sweaty and desperate and thirsty—my phone slipping against my sunscreen slick face while I lied to a friend on the phone, “I’m like low-key losing it but isn’t everyone?”

It was not low-key.

After switching medications and taking a few high-key actions, I’m doing better these days. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I can’t breathe, I don’t think about my wedding until I can’t breathe and think that I’m going to die, I don’t have daily panic attacks, I don’t post. I deleted Instagram in 2020 because I hated it, I deactivated Twitter a couple months ago and was too busy freaking the fuck out to remember to reactivate it before my account auto-deleted, so now it’s gone forever. I know that no one’s crying over my absence. It’s actually nice to rid yourself of any delusions that people really enjoy or benefit from your online presence—most online presences are more like online possessions, all of us little demons infecting one another’s consciousness until we exorcise the malignant poster with a spiritual muting. But I digress.

Earlier today, a friend of mine was telling me about some philosopher who wrote something like “only cynics can make love in the town square,” and he was trying to explain to me how he used to see me as a cynic in a positive sense, but all I could think was “I do feel like I just fully showed my ass online for years to my own detriment,” which is a less romantic notion than fucking in the town square while everyone around you politely runs errands and respects your special privileges.

Lately, we commiserate by telling one another “everyone’s freaking out” or “everything is so crazy” or “the world is falling apart,” which is fair to say, sure, but I’m not sure it ever makes anyone feel any better. As I circled the drain of my last spiral, I constantly droned on and on in my head about all the people who were worse off than me, how bratty and stupid I was for the way that I felt, how shameful and wormy my existence had always been, always would be. Self-pity cloaked in self-awareness all tied up in some reasonable world-weariness, maybe. Whenever I heard that familiar refrain—‘we’re all struggling’—I felt like the rock in the Zoloft commercial. A smooth-brained, self-obsessed little loser.

He is the moment.

My name for my state of being at the time was “worm mode.”

“I’m in worm mode,” I’d tell my boyfriend, glaring at him while eating a burnt piece of toast, nursing a migraine while scrolling the Red Scare subreddit in a dark room.

I don’t really have anywhere to take this morose little blog, besides to say that I’m once again experiencing the absolute giddy feeling that comes along after the dust settles, when the fog lifts and the world feels tolerable again. Maybe it’s the SSRI, maybe it’s the ketamine infusions, maybe it’s being able to take time off work, maybe it’s moving around more and eating and sleeping and all of the above. Worm mode wore off, for the most part I guess.

I don’t feel like I know how to write anything entertaining anymore, I don’t know that I ever did. And I don’t think I’m being self-deprecating, really. I think I just feel okay about everything. Digging into the dirt, doing whatever I can to feel better, to be a good neighbor, a whole person. Lavishing in the filth, who cares.

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If you’ve forgotten that you subscribed to this substack, that’s okay. I’m Crissy Milazzo and I used to be extremely online, but now I’m mostly just here and nowhere else. I’m going to be writing every Tuesday from now on. Bye.