Detox | Worry, run, repeat

“I do not remember when I discovered that I have

a musical name suitable

for autographing on metered poems, and for flaunting

before the faces of friends who have ordinary names

and who do not understand the significance of

having a dubious name

that raises suspicions about you

and that suggests you become someone else”

-Iman Mersal, “I Have a Musical Name”

Yet another monotonous day, but we keep on pushing.

I’m The Anxious Daffodil — my anxiety defines me, but I like to think I’m more than that. Sure, I worry a lot and I do very little, or so it seems to me. But come on, who isn’t anxious these days? It’s an impossible moment — a moment of suspended action. At the start of every day I promise myself that I would do something different, something that would bring me a bit of joy and comfort. But it’s hard. The sun is less harsh now, but the holiday doesn’t feel like a holiday and I’m unable to leave the house. I could go for a short walk in my neighborhood, but wearing the mask annoys me; I still can’t get used to it. And so I stay home and try to kill time. Fiona Apple’s latest album helps me get through the day. She sings about loneliness, about having to constantly move to prove you exist, about the “heavy balloon” we carry around all the time — just when we manage to rid ourselves of it and “spread like strawberries,” it somehow manages to weigh us down again.

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I spend the first half of the day in a failed attempt to make Circassian chicken, or, as we call it, sharkasiya. What on earth made me think that I could pull that off? Especially given that my whole history in the kitchen began a few months ago, with the start of this damn lockdown. The sauce is inedible so I end up eating only the boiled chicken and rice. How sad is that? Then I do the dishes, those fucking dishes. Lately it feels like I’ve been spending more time at the sink than anywhere else in the house. Is this what life has come down to? We cook, we put the food on plates, we eat, then we do the dishes and on and on till the end of time? 

I miss the restaurants. See, I’m lazy, and I love food. I enjoy my meals, even more, when I’ve spent no effort in making them. But what are we to do? My flatmate promises to do the dishes every day but they stay in the sink for hours and I can’t stand the sight of a sink full of dirty dishes so I end up just doing them myself. 

Because of her, my flatmate, I spent the holidays feeling like I was under siege. After I survived my mother’s endless nagging and decided not to visit my parents for Eid, my flatmate told me her boyfriend would be staying at our place for a few days. I was tense at first, but I gave up after making sure that he’d been self-isolating and had only been exposed to as little human contact as possible over the past few weeks. I placed many regulations for the visit: he has to leave his shoes by the door and wash all the kitchen utensils he uses himself. I gave her an extra bottle of ethanol to make sure they had enough to stay sanitized, even though my stock was running low. I knew I was being a pain in the ass, but I was trying to shield myself from all the extra anxiety I knew I would be experiencing while he was at the house, not just the possibility of contracting the virus. Even though they abided by the rules, I was still on edge. This pandemic is making it hard for me to tolerate someone I’ve been living with for over a year, let alone that guy I barely even know. 

I don’t want to sound like a bitch. My flatmate is nice. She lets me borrow her books and she shares her premium Spotify account with me. But I’m just so sick of hearing her laugh every day when she talks to her boyfriend on the phone though (they laugh now, but I could hear them fight over the silliest things when he was sleeping over). She’s also terribly loud when she exercises in her room — the beat-heavy tracks she listens to, the constant thumping on the floor as she does her jumping jacks or whatever. I also can’t stand it whenever I open Netflix (I share my account with her) to continue watching my show only to find her watching a documentary about the British Royal Family or some other thing I couldn’t care less about — why on earth does she insist on using my profile when she has her own?  Anyway, that show I’m watching — it’s supposed to be a comedy, but the second season is really dark. For three full episodes, the two women protagonists had a dead body in their freezer, and at some point, they started chemically dissolving dead rats in the bathtub as an experiment. That’s not what I signed up for, Netflix! I’m still hooked, though — it’s pretty intense:

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I’m now listening to Jad Shwery for some reason. Perhaps because when I remember my adolescence — all the school drama and the boy I was obsessed with who decided to fall in love with one of my best friends — it makes me feel that my life now isn’t that bad. I’m alone but at least I’m not fantasizing about someone who doesn’t even know I exist. 

Two months ago I started seeing a nice, smart-enough guy I met through one of the dating apps that a friend talked me into trying after years of resistance from my side (at the time I couldn’t get over how sad the idea of letting some algorithms control my love life was). But then the pandemic struck, and all the possibilities went down the drain. I wasn’t willing to take risks for an attempt to build some kind of intimacy with a man who didn’t mean that much to me in the first place. At the start of the quarantine, we were WhatsApping every day, but slowly the messages stopped. Part of me couldn’t stop checking the phone every two minutes, waiting for him to reappear. Welcome to Generalized Anxiety Disorder, where you can’t help but obsess over things that aren’t really that important to you — about everything for that matter. That’s how your brain functions and there’s just no stopping it. Now, I close my eyes and I try to relive our first and only kiss, but I can’t even accurately recall his face. I take a look at his Facebook profile picture. Just as I suspected. I don’t feel a thing.

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Anyway, back to Jad Shwery. Where did he disappear to? I ask Google, which leads me to his Instagram account. He’s older now, more mature. He wants to adopt a kid because he doesn’t believe in bringing new souls into this world. There are pictures of him in the protests in Beirut, he’s fully invested in the Lebanese revolution. He speaks of the controversy he caused at the beginning of his career with a measure of wisdom, saying he was “clumsy” at the time, but he promises that he will continue to surprise us (Oh my God, remember “Funky Arabs”?) How come no one’s written about Jad Shwery as a unique, early-2000s cultural phenomenon? He was only 24 when he turned the music scene upside down with the video he directed for Maria’s Elaab, and with his own songs (yes, I looked up his date of birth). Was he clumsy? Maybe, but he was pretty cool, refreshing in a way. 

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God, I’ve practically spent the whole day whining, reminiscing, and stalking Jad Shwery on social media. What’s wrong with me? I’m going to watch a film now. I will not give in to the urge to watch a sitcom I’ve seen tens of times before. No, I will leave my comfort zone. I have to use my time in quarantine productively as we’re being told everywhere online. Soon enough I may find myself having to go to the office every day again, and then I’ll be pining for a few quiet hours like these to watch an actual film that demands a bit of focus. 

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But of course my dreams are shattered. Ziko, my late aunt’s pet turtle, is faster than our internet. For every five minutes it plays, the film buffers for another 15. What kind of viewing experience is this? Oh well, it’s a pretty slow film anyway. No, describing a film as slow is a very superficial way to put it. Let’s say it has a bit of a reflective pace. I lie back down on the couch and decide to embrace the interruptions as part of the affective experience of the film. A film isn’t finished when the director stops filming or the editor reaches a final cut, I tell myself: A film is only finished when it reaches its viewer, and each viewer has their own experience, and this — unfortunately — is mine. 

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I watch the consecutive images of New York’s streets in the 1970s on my small laptop screen. I’ve always wished to visit this city, but in this film, it seems desolate and depressing. Is it really as magical as they say? I know it’s often been romanticized in film and TV, but here we see the city through the lens of a woman who’s a stranger to it, who’d moved there from her native Belgium to pursue a career in filmmaking. In the background, the director, Chantal Akerman,  reads a collection of letters she received from her mother, where the latter asks how she’s doing, tells her that she misses her and updates her with the family’s news since she’s been away. We witness life in one city and hear about it in another, across the ocean. And in this contrast between sound and image lie layers of meaning. 

However, the film triggers my anxiety and my sense of guilt. How I hate this sense of guilt. My mother, like the director’s, is skilled in making me feel guilty. The mother tells her beloved daughter that she’s proud of her for following her dreams and sends her money and clothes and lots of love. However, she never stops asking when the daughter is coming home, or describing her loneliness in her absence, or voicing her disappointment that she wasn’t there for this family event or that, or complaining about her deteriorating health.

My mom does the same thing every day. She calls me asking why I don’t visit them. I tell her that I’m afraid of infecting them, she asks if I have a fever, I remind her that 25% of coronavirus carriers show no symptoms. She always responds the same way: my sister visits them, my sister cares more than I do. She doesn’t understand the extent of my anxiety and how it controls me. When I told her I started seeing a therapist she said she believes this whole therapy thing is bullshit. She insists that I turn on the camera every time we talk. Last time I refused and when she asked me why I improvised and told her I was naked because it was too hot. I was actually smoking a cigarette and wasn’t in the mood for one of her lectures about the effect of nicotine on my lungs, especially during such a pandemic. You’d think that since she’s so concerned about my smoking habit, she’d also understand why I was so scared of seeing her and my father, who are both well over sixty. But no. 

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My slow internet forces me to take several breaks throughout the film. During one of these, I scroll through Twitter and find out it’s novelist Radwa Ashour’s birthday. I was never a fan of her fiction, but I’ve learned to keep that to myself now because every time I said that in the past I came under fire. However, influenced by the endless praise of her admirers, I decided to give her work another chance. A while back I started reading Al-Rehla (The Journey), in which she chronicles her experience as a graduate student in the United States, but I ended up dropping the book halfway through. Now it sits on my nightstand with five other books I started sometime during the past few weeks but never finished. Another symptom of my anxiety: the inability to focus long enough to follow anything through to the end. And here I go. I abandon the film and reach for The Journey, flipping through the pages.

“Running is a state I’ve always lived in. During my childhood, it was life’s energy that overflowed within me and urged me to run. In my adolescence, I ran in fear of my developing body and the confinement that awaited. Then I kept running so I wouldn’t lose my equalness to the men of my generation. I run to learn. I run to be independent. I run to avoid being brought back into my parents’ care and guardianship. I run so society doesn’t place me in the inferior spot pre-prepared for women. I kept running until running became second nature to me.”

Even you, Radwa can stir up guilt in me, just like my mother. The truth is there is another reason why I decided not to share my true feelings towards Radwa’s work. She is a female Egyptian author appreciated throughout the region, and they aren’t many. So if I’m unable to celebrate her work, it’s probably better if I at least shut up. But this idea in itself makes me feel guilty, even angry. Don’t we women have the right to critique and be critiqued, just like men? The passage I read makes me identify with Radwa even if I don’t particularly like her writing. I’m still not crazy about the narration, and the direct political messages that fill the text. But I promise myself that I’ll continue The Journey: in gratitude to Radwa’s years of running, and because I, too, run — even if it often feels that I’ve barely left my spot in ages.

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Tomorrow is another day. I will finish the film, or the book, or maybe just cook something edible.

This was The Anxious Daffodil. Stay well, and anxiety-free.