Tea with milk, one sugar

On crying at work and other universes

I don't know if you’ve ever found yourself in the disquieting position of crying in a plastic office chair facing your boss while she stuffs her fists in her pocket, sympathetically searching for a tissue. The humiliating wobble of your bottom lip, the dip in your steady tone as stress or anger or exhaustion relapses into that common feeling laying dormant underneath everything else. That feeling being: I am a small child and I don’t know how to care for myself.

I have acquired a habit of prefacing everything I complain about with a negation of my right to talk about it. I am incessantly worried that I show a lack of gratitude. I fear that I come off as unappreciative. 

A shit sandwich is when you layer a bad piece of information between two positive statements to make the bad information more palatable.

I tell my friend, It’s fine, really, it’s fine. It’s all manageable, it’ll iron itself out. It’s just at the minute I’m struggling to deal with a lot of things. But it’s all fine, really, nothing particularly bad. I’m just being dramatic.

My friend Becky tells me, Fuck that, Leyla, you can’t be positive all the time. When things are shit, they just are.

Today on the way home from work I came off at the wrong junction of the M60 and ended up going twice around the same roundabout interchange in Stockport. It’s known as the Pyramid roundabout, probably because it’s the second most complicated thing to be made by human hands after Giza. During my second lap of the right-hand lane, right after being beeped at by someone who makes more money than I’ll ever see in my life, I turned into an industrial park, pulled up past the Land Rover showroom and wrenched the handbrake. My hands were shaking like a dog emerged from a lake. I rerouted the sat nav to avoid motorways, cried again, blew my nose, rolled the window down and set back off.

Sometimes I think the M60 is trying to kill me.

This morning, about fifty five minutes before crying to a woman who is assuming the position of my surrogate mother, I had to emergency brake on the motorway slip road because a gargantuan 4X4 BMW decided to blast from eighty to standstill in one and and a half seconds. The car behind me swerved off the hard shoulder. I was millimetres from smashing the bumper in front, millimetres from being rear-ended. I thought to myself, I could have died in this car just now. My body could be dislodged between pieces of sky blue Fiat Punto. In another world, I’m crumpled like wet Autumn leaves on the hard shoulder outside of Ashton-under-Lyne. When they excavate my body from the rubble, they’ll see the smiley faces on my socks and it will all be some contorted pastiche of tragedy. Dramatic irony. Poor girl.

My friend Jenny says she believes in eternal optimism. Eternal optimism is trusting that things will ultimately work out; holding hope that life tends to concave upwards, improve. This doesn’t negate the possibility of having bad days. When things are shit, they just are.

Sometimes I think the M60 is trying to kill me.

Last Thursday, exactly one week ago, I sat face-to-face with a resource I use with the young people I work with. Thick-print typeset reads, PANIC DISORDERS. I studied the diagrams, the A-B-C models. CBT says, you can’t change the activating event, so you must change the belief. I tell myself, You have got to confront this before you avoid it. The thing is, I don’t want to turn into my mother.

Sometimes I think the M60 is trying to kill me, because every time I commute to work I see the worst of human nature. In the hours between eight and nine, everybody is tired and nobody is where they want to be. Nobody is overflowing with patience or caution or heed when their child has colic, or hasn’t slept, or hasn’t said thank you. Nobody wants to think about the prospect of their mind glazing over the blinking screen of Microsoft Outlook for the next eight hours. Nobody is happy when it’s winter, and it’s dark before five, and life is a Fordist production line of Tupperware and Thermos and washing-up sitting in the sink. This makes people act like idiots. This makes people take risks.

Becky tells me, I can sense that you’re diminishing the things that are upsetting you.

Becky is training to be a counsellor, and is one of the best people I know.

I tell Becky, that’s funny, that’s exactly what Colette said to me this morning seconds before I leaked tears onto the back of her very soft cardigan. She asked me how I took my tea—strong, or milky? I said, somewhere in between.

I take my tea with milk, no sugar. When I was a vegan, and I thought that I was going to live forever, I’d take my tea with oat milk. This was a pain in my side because you’d have to pour a lot of oat milk to get it the colour I like, and oat milk is very expensive. I like my tea the colour of eggshells, not pottery.

Colette asks me, Any sugar?

My mum, when I was growing up, would always put a teaspoon of sugar in my tea when I’d had a bad day. Eventually, something Pavlovian happened to me. I’ve never enjoyed a sugary tea without the taste of tears in my throat and a ringing headache. Still, somewhere in the midst of that pain, a sweet feeling of respite would cut through whatever adolescent crisis had caused me to put my shame aside and cry to my mother. That respite was always the realisation that sugary tea is actually really, really good. I’d always make the mental note to try it one day when I’m not choking down a barrage of tears. Like every time preceding it, I’d forget.

I pause and say, yes, one please.

When Colette comes back with the tea, she has forgotten the sugar, but it doesn’t really matter.

In another universe somewhere my body is crumpled into disparate parts by the turning for Ashton-under-Lyne. Maybe my sock is lying by my head. Who knows what mess of limbs a body can form.

In another universe, I didn’t tell my friends that I’ve been struggling for a lot longer than I’d realised.

In the empty shopping centre car park this morning at ten to nine, I thought, I hope this doesn’t traumatise me.

In the end, life is shit sometimes. The shit gets sandwiched, but it’s better shared.