Sorry guys, this is deep and a bit humiliating…enjoy?
My mom is dying.
Not in a we-are-all-going-to-die eventually kind of way, but in a within-a-month-I-will-be-an-orphan kind of way. This isn’t a shock. It isn’t even necessarily surprising when one realizes that my mom has multiple myeloma. However, my mom has had this cancer for years and years and has battled back from it time and again. But this time, there isn’t any coming back. This time, there isn’t anything left we can do.
I have repeatedly heard from people that I am coping with this so well. They make that face that we all make when we feel bad for somebody and there is nothing we can do about it and they say that I seem really calm. I never know how to take that. Is that a complement? Are they saying that I have no emotions? I kind of shrug it off. What am I supposed to do? Run screaming into the hallways? I kind of laugh. I joke around with my friends at work who are so great at keeping my mind off this stuff. I try to avoid it. I look at my mom with a kind of distance that you learn from being a nurse. During the day, coping with this stuff is much easier because my job is stressful and my life is busy.
At night however, my brain will not shut off. I start to panic. My chest clenches, my hands go numb. All I can think about is every horrible thing in my life crashing down on me. My mother has been saving me my whole life. My mom is the one who I can always turn too when I need to vent or eat or keep my lights on. She was my best friend. I say was not because she isn’t any longer but because I need to make peace with the fact that its over. Her mind is a little gone. She knows me and my family but she has trouble putting ideas together.It scares the shit out of me so, in an effort to preserve the tiny remaining bit of my sanity, I have turned a mild interest into one of the most bizarre and potentially unhealthy coping mechanisms ever. I’m not drinking or binge eating or doing drugs…well, not the kind I don’t have a script for anyway.
No, this is actually way more humiliating then any of those things.
Let me preface this next part by saying that I have always liked the show Glee. It contains some of my favorite things. Musical theatre, singing, shows about nerdy outcasts and, eventually, the most adorable same sex relationship to ever hit television. I would go weeks without watching and then I would go to a friends house to catch up or watch it on my DVR. Sometimes I would turn it on while I cleaned because I could just hear the music and not have to pay too much attention to a story line. Glee’s story lines are kind of after school special but that is why it is such a nice change from all the drama on television. It was a pleasant, occasional distraction.
Until about three months ago.
It is strange because I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when it went from casual distraction to binge watching. The more medicated I became for my bipolar disorder, the harder it was to ignore my feelings about my mom. Thinking about my mom made me want to think about anything else. Me thinking about things has never been a problem.
Anybody who knows me, knows that my interest in knowing things (anything) is obsessive. I sleep with my laptop on and next to my bed because if I wake up at three in the morning and I want to know if the television star I saw on that show two hours ago is the same one I saw on another show fifteen years ago, I need to know right now. I won’t be able to sleep until I do. I google so often that my friends actually started calling me Noogle (A combination of my first name and google) in nursing school because I just seem to be able to recall an obnoxious amount of information on almost anything. It is less A Beautiful Mind and more A Beautiful Disaster.
So, anyway, I started watching Glee from season 1. Really watching it. All the way through. Then I just started going to the parts that had my favorite songs or the parts that just had Chris Colfer and Darren Criss in them because I just think it is fascinating the way they interact with each other. So much more adult and rational then any real relationship of any teens gay or straight. I became super creepily emotionally invested in them. I still am so judge away.
So this is how my mind works and this is how I ended up so far down this rabbit hole. So once I started watching these scenes over and over again I started watching things about the actors which led to reading incessantly about the actors (another annoying thing I do). I’m strange but I’m a great trivia partner. I knew that Chris Colfer was gay and Darren Criss was (theoretically) straight. I didn’t, however, know that there is an entire universe out there that is actually convinced that Darren Criss and Chris Colfer are an item.
Now, I know that tons of people think this about people who are dating on shows and a lot of times the couples start dating while working together. Proximity combined with chemistry and so on but I’m sure that is far less likely to happen when one co-star is straight and the other is gay and both are supposedly dating other people but…I decided to see why thousands of people were so convinced that this was the case.
Again, I know that I’m a bit obsessive and, more then that, I hate feeling like I’m not in the loop on something so if there was something interesting going on between the two then, dammit, I wanted to know about it. I thought at best, it would be just some silly implied flirtations or the jumping to of much conclusions. I was wrong. These people are as obsessive in their fact finding as I am when it comes to wanting to know something. If you don’t believe me, go to youtube and type in crisscolfer and see what I mean. I am now convinced that Darren Criss is not as hetero as maybe he even thought he was. I have never in my life seen any straight guy gaze at another man the way he does at Chris Colfer. Not.Ever. I’m just saying.
So here is the thing, why would I even care? Why would I watch video after video and read blog after blog about two people I don’t know and have absolutely no ties too? Because it distracts from the total shit hole my life has become recently. It is crazy embarrassing and weird and super scary but it is so much better then coping with my real life right now. Anything is better then my life right now. So, I am not ready to give up Glee or Crisscolfer or my fangirling ways because it is the only coping mechanism I have that will not give me a hangover or more pounds on the scale.
Thanks for listening…Anybody else care to admit to a strange obsession so I don’t feel like such a loser
