do you measure first?

This is a bag of everything the fire restoration crew found in our pockets. It is far larger a bag than you might think.

It could begin, say, four tortured hours into trying to hang a TV. Weary and exhausted and hungry because I have skipped dinner, mistakenly thinking that I will eat it while gleefully watching a show on my new television, I have to measure again. But the fact is, I have been measuring, over and over. And now, the numbers are swimming and I still can’t find a way to center the television on the wall and hit two studs with the wall mount. Outside, it is dark when it was once light — something I take personally.

Or, it might begin in a slice of a second. The postman rings the doorbell and the Dane startles awake, all her black guard hair risen in a bristling strip on her back, her bark booming. The puppy scrambles up from his bed, joining his insistent screech to the Dane’s and I can’t get either one of them to calm down.

Or, even, sometimes, it’s simply my mother calling me and asking me for something that I know J is not going to want to do and there, immediately, it is — The burning, blinding, need to run.

*

It’s the intensity of the overwhelm — sometimes it feels like a threat to survival if I stay, that I have to leave if I am going to make it. There have been days J has walked in the door and I have met him right at the frame, my hand on the handle, teeth gripped together so tightly I can barely get the words out: I have to go.

There’s so much intensity in the overwhelm. My body immediately feels minuscule, completely incapable of holding the vast compressive feeling.

*

Days when the overwhelm comes for me in all its ecliptic, totalizing intensity, are days that I cannot recall. Overwhelm takes everything with it. It’s awful when it happens and it can make me awful too.

*

A few weeks ago, my friend K and I are speaking. She tells me a bad morning with her kids is the end of a day.

All it takes is one of my daughters refusing to put on her boots and maybe let’s say the other refusing to eat her eggs, and then somehow we’re half an hour late and I’m sliding into work after the start, and that’s it, she says. I’m done.

She tells me that sometimes her husband will ask her after work how the day was and she will tell him — Awful!

She will launch into the recount of the morning—Breakfast, a disaster. The boots, a war. The traffic, intentionally obstructive. Work, she was late!

Her husband will listen and nod and then sometimes, he will gently ask: But what about the rest of the day?

*

The way I gaped at my friend who gaped back at me.

I know, she said. He measures.

*

It’s simple, what Katie’s husband does — he tries, as best he can, after overwhelm inevitably settles, to measure how long the feeling really lasted. Was it half an hour? Three hours? Ten minutes? He tries to set in context. The morning might have been four hours of awful, but there was that peaceful hour in the afternoon.

This is not the work of positivity, Katie rushes to assure me. It’s math. He uses the numbers to try and curb the catastrophe. To give it shape.

*

He measures, I repeat.

Just that, she tells me. He measures exactly how long the feeling lasted. That’s it.

*

The fact remains that some catastrophe does, in fact, take a day, a year, a lifetime for itself. There is no measure for it. In fact, I am in a season of despair right now — a valley I fell into in late December that I have been falling deeper into ever since. For this, there is not enough metric in the world.

But some catastrophe, like that television on the wall, that postman at the door, that phone call, actually takes less of day than it feels like it does.

So, I’ve been trying to measure, if I can. When the feeling of needing to run settles — or when I finally get a quiet moment, I’ve been trying to measure. In a despair where it feels nothing can be done, let me tell you, a measuring tape feels good in my hand.

---

Tell me what overwhelms you, won’t you please? This morning, I was in the blaze of overwhelm for three minutes that felt like three days. And all because the puppy freaked out at the sound of an incoming call which set the Dane off and I was so flustered I accidentally declined the call, which I actually really needed to answer. Three minutes! That’s the shape of it.