When I’m in a bad mood I tend to make it everybody’s problem. Usually not on purpose — it’s a negative externality of my face, of features that broadcast every slight change in disposition with near mathematical specificity. My mouth is a bell curve with a Y-axis grading on a scale of “a little annoyed” to “utterly inconsolable,” the slope of my frown growing steeper in proportion with my level of agita.
This tell has been my lifelong ruin. It’s in stark conflict with everything I want to be (British), decidedly the opposite of a “stiff upper lip” sort of sensibility. But I can’t blame my inability to Keep Calm and Carry On on my face alone. If my Garfield-like scowl hasn’t already made my feelings obvious, you’ll know how bad I’m feeling because I’ll tell you so. I hate letting a bad mood stew inside, allowing it to fester, ferment, go to seed. To name it is to diffuse its power, crowdsource a solution, and to move towards feeling less shit.
It was a Wednesday like any other, but something about the cocktail of my brain chemistry, the temperature, boys, and hours logged anxiously checking Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Instagram and Instagram again ensured that by 2PM I was feeling utterly dejected. By 4 I felt I had to send a bonafide press release to all those with the thankless task of loving me unconditionally, chief among them being my mom.
“I’m down in the dumps” I told her, and she responded in her particularly pragmatic way, assessing me with the systematic rigor of a field medic, hell-bent on identifying the source of the pain, of stopping the bleeding. My answers were honest, if pathetic, half-assed expressions of one who’s trying to articulate something ineffable, feeling more and more pitiful as my long-suffering mother asked follow-up questions I didn’t care to answer.
The work day ended, and I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb.” My team was scheduled for a morale-boosting pasta-making class at Forsythia. I’d walked by it a hundred times, a big-windowed storefront with Kerrygold-yellow panes and a room filled with wooden workstations, waist high. We had mise-en-place for Negronis and the restaurant’s cute founder (Hi Jacob!) showed us how to make four different types of pasta using just durham, water, and a butter knife.
My hands caked in flour, I couldn’t reach for my phone, couldn’t indulge in the compulsion to scroll Instagram for the 72nd time that day, finding misery where I thought the dopamine would be. My anguish flowed through my palms, pulling and stretching the dough until it felt like a leather belt, (which is how Jacob said we’d know it was done). I inched closer and closer to a state of elation with every little orecchiette I pulled off my pointer finger. The cure for my mild depressive episode had been this, an activity boasting the perfect combination of immersion and whimsy, spent singing “That’s Amore” all the while.
Ever since this pasta epiphany, I’ve confirmed repeatedly that infusing my weeks with healthy doses of Luddism could be my cure. These practices have to be uncompromising in their demands, insisting that I engage with them wholly and completely, undiluted by a playlist or a podcast. They'll force me to amputate the phantom limb that is my iPhone, at least for a little while.
I’ve found it in pasta making, practicing tennis, and in visits to the public pool on 77th Street where they make you stow all your personal effects in a middle-school-style locker upon entry. All these and more serve as training wheels on my mindfulness bike, until I can find ways to live in the moment all by myself. But since meditation still sounds like the most insufferably boring thing imaginable, practicing my serve serves beautifully.
The Forsythia class ended with a fixed-menu dinner, a parade of warm focaccia and salted butter, a simple green salad, and finally, the fresh pasta we’d just gleefully shaped ourselves, smothered in a tomato sauce that would make your nonna say “buonissima!” It was then, practically blushing with delight, that I decided to check my phone. A missed calls from my mom, a text reiterating “I just tried to call you,” and finally, “Miss Kate, will you please check in?”
I felt a new layer of blush bloom, this one brought on by guilt and embarrassment, picturing my mom worried sick I’d jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge while I’d been giggling making gnocchi. “Hi sorry sorry I’m totally good I’m at pasta making class for work feeling totally better sorry.”
The next morning, she’d forwarded me a voucher for free virtual cognitive behavioral therapy — “tools designed to help navigate stress, anxiety, depression and other emotional struggles.” That would probably work. But for now I think I’ll stick to self-medicating* (*taking up ceramics).