~
WRITE YOUR TRAUMA: A WORKBOOK EXERCISE
Statesboro, Georgia, 2019
When anxiety Christina comes to visit me
late at night, she lists our current obsessions:
emu wars, mammoths, the word chlamydia
leaning on the insistent doorbell
of my mind. Ding dong, who’s there?
Something stupid. What the fuck.
At one time in my life I thought
I’d grow up to be something fully
articulated, the type of person
who would own a shaker for cocktails
and, at the visiting diplomat’s lecture,
might ask What does that mean for Russia?
Instead, anxiety Christina hands me
a sash, says, Congratulations!
Your body is a dumpster full of cheese,
mixing a manhattan in a Pyrex cup
and listening to the same old Bon Iver vinyl.
Your spirit animal is just some reticulated
woodland creature, too afraid to leave
its burrow. Also, don’t say spirit animal,
it’s appropriation. Cover your mirror
in Post-its with quotes, aligned to a grid
only you can measure. Mop the hardwood
using a special cleaner while you wait
for your anti-anxiety prescription to kick in.
Worry about the plants. When your head
fills with ANTS—automatic negative
thoughts—try to let them stream out
your ears and find some other place
to live. Ants on parade. Ants on the brain.
My favorite phrase is Does that make sense?
Yes, soothes anxiety Christina, of course it does.
It makes zero sense, which is, technically, sense.
~
Christina Olson is the author of Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press, 2017). Her chapbook The Last Mastodon won the Rattle 2019 Chapbook Contest. Other work appears in The Atlantic, The Nation, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University and tweets about coneys and mastodons as @olsonquest.