Throwing Out the World

It’s time. In April 2002, there was the proverbial straw. Something had been building up in me for a year or more so, typically, it was something small that put me over the edge. And I lost my way for 4, 5 months – the longest I have ever been “out”. I don’t remember much from that time – I started my blog in October, 2002 – and that was the kickstart to health … that is when memory starts coming back. But from April to September, October – is more or less a blur (for which I am grateful). Depression isn’t sadness. You yearn for something as concrete and real as “sadness”! It is nothingness, a blank punctuated by moments of sheer psychic agony. Sadness is human compared to that. So I blanked out and flat-lined for most of that year. But you can’t just numb yourself out in one area. You end up going dead all around. Coming out of it was literally like coming back to life. I remember my roommate (and dear friend) looking at me one morning and suddenly starting to weep. “You’re in your face again,” she sobbed. “It’s like you’re back.” I won’t dwell on it because it’s hard to write about and yesterday was a rough day and I’m not in the mood.

But I do want to talk about my index card project, which kind of embarrasses me but at the same time I find interesting. I think I cried harder over the man who was the straw that broke the camel’s back – a man I didn’t even date – than any man before or since. Actually, I haven’t cried about any man since. I think I’m tapped out. But that’s why he was the straw. It was an accumulation of disappointments and I suppose I reached my limit. I don’t know. It was an ocean of tears. A howling to the moon kind of grief. It had no end. At some point in the aftermath of that night in April 2002, I started my index card project which had, as a companion project, what I now call my “cut and paste” project. I sat on the futon couch in my living room, waking up at 5 in the morning to “get a head start”, and had two side-by-side projects:

— going through newspapers and magazines (online and offline), printing out or cutting out articles that interested me – and then taping them into a large notebook. It was labor-intensive. I had to trim the sides (I wasn’t interested in just putting the article into a folder for me to rifle through – they had to be TAPED into a NOTEBOOK) – and also nothing could stick out on the sides – I wanted it to look like just a notebook, and then flip through it like a book. So I needed to trim. I filled trashbag after trashbag with the trimmings. I would sit on the couch with the trashbag beside me, filled to the brim. I probably went through one trashbag a week that way. I have about 10, 12, 13 enormous notebooks (the 5-subject kind) filled with articles that I have painstakingly cut to size. I don’t even know why I wanted to keep most of them. Much of it is enraged post-911 stuff – But to cut it out so carefully … 100s and 100s of articles and op-ed columns. I really need to get rid of those notebooks. I never look through them and all I see now is how much WORK it was to put them all together. In 2002 I didn’t read – not the way I read now – no fiction, nothing for pleasure – I was beyond pleasure. So I scoured the Internets and magazines for non-fiction pieces and cut them down, even if they were 20 page articles from New Criterion or whatever … I needed to save. Save save save, packrat … totally obsessive behavior. Joyless obsessive – not like the happy Dean Stockwell obsessions I allow myself now. It depresses me to look at those notebooks now, but I fanatically maintained them on a daily basis for almost a year. I had stopped writing in my journal after 9/11 – I couldn’t do it anymore. I was already shutting off the interior doors by that point. What else was there to say? The cut-and-paste notebooks became my journals. It’s horrible to look at now. But something in me has resisted getting rid of them. I suppose because … well, it’s part of who I am, 2002 is part of who I am, and those notebooks are the only evidence I have of the state I was in. I’m big on evidence. But I don’t know. I’m still considering getting rid of them.

— The index card project. I’ve always been into history, geography – that is nothing new. But suddenly, post April-2002 – it began to haunt me that I didn’t have all of my information in one place. For what purpose, who the hell knows. Seriously, if the CIA is looking to recruit someone who can rattle off the state of the military’s preparedness in a random South Sea Island and how many workable runways they have, I’m your girl. I decided to go through all of my history books – every single one – and pull out pertinent quotes about countries, peoples, history – and put them onto clearly marked index cards. The project grew exponentially almost immediately. Within a week it was totally unmanageable. But putting it into some kind of shape and order seemed essential to me, in those mentally unstable months when things got so bad. I had hundreds and hundreds of index cards. I would put the name of the country across the top of the card, and then file everything accordingly. So countries like China must have 250, 300 cards all its own – agriculture, different areas, cultural differences, brief bios of all of the pertinent leaders – bullet points about each one – a sentence or so on the Dynasties – you get the picture. Some countries I obviously wasn’t interested in. Frankly I don’t care about Chile. I mean, I don’t wish it ILL, and I am not indifferent to its people’s happiness – but I don’t have a ton of books about Chile, in the same way that I have an entire library devoted to the Balkans. You know, different strokes, different folks. I am FAR from agnostic. I’m a Balkan freak. If I came across a relevant quote or factoid about Chile, I would certainly add it to the index card but the information is not in-depth (I made index cards for each nation in the world – and some remained blank, because I didn’t know anything about them … but that was to be filled in later … at some later date.) I also made up index cards for peoples without a nation – like the Chechens and the Kurds and others … because I needed -why?? – to keep track of what was going on with them as well. You know. In case anyone ever asked, “What the hell is going on in Chechnya?” I could answer. And you know what? My index card project has come in TOTALLY handy at times. My friends who know about the index cards do ask me stuff, “Could you check the index card? I want to know why there’s a civil war in such and such …”

I was obsessive: I had to put stuff on 5×7 index cards – nothing smaller. And 5 x7 are at times harder to come by. My dad got me old-fashioned card catalog boxes – which perfectly fit 5 x 7 – so I would line up my index cards in the boxes – and I made little dividers which seriously, I look at now, and all I can see is mental mania. But regardless. “Croatia”. “Laos”. “The former Yugoslavia”. “Belarus”. HUNDREDS of dividers. The project was a neverending one. I knew I had certain blanks to fill in … I needed to get up to speed on certain areas of the world … Any time I read any fact in any article anywhere that seemed to be relevant, or like I might “need” it later (that was a key part in this whole 2002 year … I suppose I felt like all I did was lose things. Big things. Things I wanted and yearned for and hoped for and dreamt about. I just lost. Over and over. So I was making for DAMN sure that I was not going to lose all of THIS. It was the world, and I wanted to capture it – for good. On 5 x 7 index cards).

And I guess over the last couple of months I have finally been considering getting rid of those index cards. The fever passed. 2002 passed. The card catalogs stayed stacked in my closet – not sure what I was holding onto them for. But then … gotta say … I’d feel the flickerings of something going on, some harbinger of doom along the 2002 line (I now know the signs really really well) … and suddenly I’d find myself working on my index project again. Without even really questioning why. I’d just feel the urge. “Let me break out the Iran cards and get to work on filling in some blanks about the Baha’i … or Mashad … or their current birth-control initiative …” It was that specific. As though someone would turn to me randomly and say, “So. What do you know about Iran’s current birth control initiative?” My response would have to be, “How much time do you got?” I don’t think I was collecting information in order to spout it back to someone (although that has, like I mentioned, happened) … it was a need to organize, put into place, capture …

I took it to an obsessive level, which is not surprising. I didn’t think to myself, “I need to do this in order to survive this year …” Of course not. You don’t think that clearly when you’re in a crackup. You do what you think you need to do in order to survive.

But I guess why I’m writing all of this is to say I’m ready to let go now.

I’m ready to throw away the world. It makes me nervous … like I’m throwing away something vital, something important to me … and so I suppose that’s why I’m writing about it right now. To capture, yet again, the index card project … without having it sitting around my small apartment, gathering dust, and … haunting me. Somehow, it haunts me. Evidence of how lost I was, how lost I could be again if I am not careful … it’s almost like I’ve kept it there just in case things get that bad again.

That’s what’s making me nervous. I am just realizing this now as I write this. I feel like I might need that safety valve … the “comfort” of my index card project … in the future.

But right now, with all that is going on with me right now, I don’t feel like I can even allow myself the luxury of thinking that such a mindset will ever come again. No. No. Since I started my blog, I made a conscious decision to express my obsessions here – in this venue – to not hoard it to myself, where I have a tendency to get manic, and voracious (where obsession becomes something that is not fun, but a compulsion. You MUST do it. I lost sleep over my index card project: I’m behind!! I’m behind! It is unforgivable that I only have ONE card about Tajikstan … I must rectify that! And so I would).

I’ve written before about my blog, and how I found an outlet for my obsessions that was not only fun for me – but has ended up being cathartic for others. I cannot tell you how many people write to me saying, “I loved what you wrote about Bill Pullman -thank you – I love him too!” or “I can’t believe I’ve never seen In a Lonely Place before!” or all of the Lucy Maud Montgomery fans who write to me. These emails literally pour light into the darkness. I LOVE them. I don’t respond to all of them – for no reason other than I have a life and time is short – but please know that I read every single one, and adore them. Not to mention the hordes of Dean Stockwell fans who have come into my orbit because of all I have written about the man. This is how I choose, now, to deal with the mania that comes from time to time (and I am fully aware that the obsessions are “sublimations” of other things – but I’m a HUGE fan of sublimation. I’m also a huge fan of repression and denial, but I’ll write about that at another time.) And instead of hoarding my obsession to myself as some kind of shameful secret (ie: index card project) I’m out here, sharing it, and it has made a huge difference. There are those who roll their eyes at me, and I get mean comments from time to time from people who are embarrassed by how far I get into whatever it is I am obsessed with … but I’ve had to deal with douchebags like that my whole life. Doesn’t bother me at all, because the overwhelming response is one of appreciation and also catharsis, as in: “I thought I was the only one who got obsessed about things like that!!” Nope. You are not. Let us come together and revel in the things that give us joy.

This entire post is to say that I threw away my entire index card project this morning. It was time, that’s all.

But naturally, I had to “capture” it one last time before saying Goodbye forever.

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That is the World According to Sheila. I think I’m okay with letting it go now.

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49 Responses to Throwing Out the World

  1. Ceci says:

    Congratulations on this huge step you took, Sheila!

    Being an obsessive hoarder myself, I KNOW how hard it must have been to make this decision and actually go through with it.

    You GO, girl!

  2. red says:

    Thank you, Ceci!! It felt good!

  3. Kelly says:

    Happy New Year!
    I can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with all the extra space in your life. Frankly, I’m hoping for some acting projects, but anything you chose is, of course, fine with me.

  4. Diana says:

    Oh, Sheila. This was just – unbelievable. I’d read the Sandman post before and it blew me away then. But coupled with this, it’s like the story seems complete.

    This post alone, without the Sandman one, is intriguing and powerful, as is the Sandman one. But put the two together and BANG.

  5. just1beth says:

    A bit of a phoenix moment. It feels right to wish you good luck. I love you.

  6. Kerry says:

    Yeah, baby! Congratulations!! xoxo

  7. Kate says:

    Remember having to tell the old hag from your dream to f off? This is like that, right?

    Good for you.

  8. Kristen says:

    You don’t think that clearly when you’re in a crackup. You do what you think you need to do in order to survive.

    Yes, and yes.

    So glad you could let go. I really admire you, because I find it so hard to do that.

    Thank you again for your blog. Shared obsessions are wonderful things. The fact that you can write so well about them is an added pleasure.

    Sending good wishes from Italy.

  9. Emily says:

    Goodness @#$%ing gracious, woman. Sometimes, your writing just leaves me breathless.

  10. red says:

    Kelly – Lesbian Bathhouse: The Sequel??

  11. red says:

    Kate – Yes. It is like that. And thank you, yet again, for telling me to tell her to fuck off. Made a huge difference.

  12. red says:

    beth – i love you too – miss you so much!!

  13. red says:

    Kristen – thank you so much!! I have to say – it is the obsessives who read me who are my favorites. They just “get” it. They might be obsessed about something I have no interest in – but the feeling of obsession is the same.

    So glad that my blog provides something for people.

  14. jackie says:

    you are so brave and wonderful.

  15. red says:

    Emily – thank you, girl!!

  16. red says:

    Jackie – thank you! When you comin’ back to 30 Rock, huh?? With your binder of sheet music?? What the heck is “contemporary” anyway? Did we ever find out??

  17. red says:

    Maybe cousin Kerry would know. Kerry – when an audition notice tells you to bring “contemporary” (but not Rent songs) – what does it mean? Like – Wicked? Drowsy Chaperone?

    Please advise.

  18. Kelly says:

    Hell YES! Count me in. I haven’t made out with a girl since, well, you, and I think its probably damn time! This time I won’t be shy about talking about whatever weird thing I’m reading.

  19. red says:

    Kelly – HAHAHAHAHA!!!

    Seriously: what happened with those characters? I am dying to know!!!

  20. red says:

    Oh, and yes, bring on the weird reading material. I’m game. So long as you casually ask me, after rehearsal, “So, Sheila … do you happen to know anything about Iran’s birth control initiative?” we should be fine.

  21. red says:

    Diana – oh, and yeah, poor Sandman. He had no idea what he had unleashed and why and he felt terrible about it. Totally blindsided. I did get my revenge – I had to wait – but I am patient. it was a year later, but it was a moment of such beauty and perfection (and also cloaked in plausible deniability – the best kind of Revenge) that it still satisfies me when I think about it.

  22. ilyka says:

    I am running out of ways to fangirl over you, Sheila. I’ll just say that I’ve always been jealous of your index cards (when I obsess it’s over something useless, like building houses in Sims 2), but holy crumb, I totally understand why they had to go. Au revoir, Tajikstan!

  23. red says:

    ilyka – Yup!! Tajikstan will just have to get along without me cataloging its every move!

  24. red says:

    Although I have to say: If one good thing has come out of my index card project it is that I am pretty much unbeatable at Trivia Pursuit.

  25. jennchez says:

    just found your blog this A.M. and am loving it! I thought I was the only person under 80 who knew about “Only Angels Have Wings”. Love love love Cary Grant! The last scene in “Notorious” also one of my favs ever. Actually my husband and I just watched it the other night with our 5 year old who we are slowly but surely turning on to the classics. She does a mean rendition of Hernando’s Hideaway! I don’t have the heart to tell her Carol Haney died a long time ago.

    I also had an index card crackup called “The Dead Famous Ones”. Everyone thought I had lost it, it was just something I needed to do at the time to make it through.

    Sorry for the book, just happy to have found this site :)

  26. jennchez says:

    just found your blog this A.M. and am loving it! I thought I was the only person under 80 who knew about “Only Angels Have Wings”. Love love love Cary Grant! The last scene in “Notorious” also one of my favs ever. Actually my husband and I just watched it the other night with our 5 year old who we are slowly but surely turning on to the classics. She does a mean rendition of Hernando’s Hideaway! I don’t have the heart to tell her Carol Haney died a long time ago.

    I also had an index card crackup called “The Dead Famous Ones”. Everyone thought I had lost it, it was just something I needed to do at the time to make it through.

    Sorry for the book, just happy to have found this site :)

  27. jennchez says:

    sorry for the double post.

  28. red says:

    Jennchez – no worries!

    I don’t have the heart to tell her Carol Haney died a long time ago. Oh, bless her heart!!

    Glad you found my blog – and glad to hear I’m not the only one with a version of index card mania!

  29. reba says:

    I’d been wondering about the index cards since you mentioned them in a previous post. But the notebooks…those reminded me of something I once read about (blatant attempt to upgrade by association, here) Longfellow. His wife, as you may know, died from burns sustained when an ember from their home fireplace set her dress on fire. Longfellow was in the house when it happened and was himself burned quite badly trying to save her. For months and months after her death, he stopped writing in his journal. Or rather, he stopped writing journal *entries*”: every day, he’d open the journal and draw a little cross on the page for that date. ‘Hello, I have nothing to say, but I am still here.’ When I went to study the original journals still exist, I got the librarian to make a copy of one of those not-quite-blank pages.
    Then I took it home, and pasted it in a notebook.

  30. red says:

    reba – wow!! I did not know that!

    That is so moving to me.

  31. red says:

    Reba – I can’t stop thinking about Longfellow. Can you recommend a good biography? I am a huge fan of his poetry (as every April 18th my blog can attest) – but I’d love to know more. I visited many of his old haunts in Maine which was really nice.

  32. Jordan says:

    I’m probably going to sound like a jerk but you could have sold those index cards off your site. And if you felt weird about taking the money for them you could have given it to a charity of your choice.
    I think the hours of your time you poured into them would have made them interesting to somebody.I like the way otherwise useless items take on a curious or sentimental value simply from the story behind them.

  33. amelie says:

    brava, sheila!
    may your obsessions and thirsts for knowledge of all sorts reign on here ^_^
    still lovin’ it,
    rae d’amelie

  34. red says:

    Jordan – No, you don’t sound like a jerk. You just show that you didn’t understand one word of my post if that is your comment. I’ll leave it at that.

  35. red says:

    Back on topic:

    I think one of the reasons I related so strongly to the un-named narrator in Mating (by Norman Rush), as well as Jan, the narrator of The Goldbug Variations (by the great Richard Powers) – is that they are both obsessive collators and catalogers … and at first it does them good – hell, it’s part of their jobs – librarian, anthropologist – but it eventually becomes personal – for both … this obsessive drive to catalog and capture…. Mating in particular is brilliant about that very particular and very specific “compulsion” (although I don’t like labeling it as such). Let’s just call it a need. Some of us have a need to capture … we are the obsessive diary-keepers and journallers … we need to write, capture – or, like Longfellow (that anecdote still kills me) check in with an empty book every day even if you have nothing to say (or are rendered mute by grief and loss). You would have to pay me to stop doing some version of a journal. I have kept a journal since I could hold a pencil. who the hell knows why. I don’t go back and read over them – too painful, most of the time … but I don’t get rid of them either.

    But those stacks of index cards needed to go.

  36. Jayne says:

    Good for you, Sheila. I love you.

  37. red says:

    Jayne – I am remembering from long ago that you had a similar cathartic moment. ?? With journals, and … somehow eating grapes was also involved? Why do I remember these things??

    It’s very important sometimes to just get rid of that dead weight and start fresh.

  38. Jayne says:

    Sheila – I knew you’d remember that. Yeah, a similar moment. 22 volumes of diaries that I just – I don’t know – I couldn’t have them around. I kind of wish I had saved some of them – the earlier ones, but at the same time, they’re gone. They were the past, and I didn’t want that with me in any form at all. So – yes, the grapes! hahahaha – I sat at home one day, watching soaps, eating grapes, and, one by one, shredding the pages of those 22 books. I later burned them in the fireplace. Very cathartic. It was time. So I get why you threw the world away. Although I hear there were protests in the former Yugoslavia.

  39. red says:

    Jayne – hahahahaha

    The craziest thing about the cards is that I would have special index cards for “breaking news” – which, obviously, became completely overwhelming – how do you keep up with breaking news on a daily basis as just one person??

    So then in February 2003, I had to add to my “Yugoslavia card”: “Yugoslavia has ceased to exist.”

    There goes THAT.

  40. red says:

    Oh, and yes – wow, with that whole journal story of yours … I totally understand the sense of regret you might have now – there are letters I threw out from Tonio that I wish I had now – but in the moment, for my own sanity, IT ALL HAD TO GO.

  41. reba says:

    Sorry–I didn’t see your comment about the biographies (tracking function: how novel!). There’s no Longfellow bio that I really love–the older ones tend to be hero-worship-y and the newer ones are exhaustingly exhaustive. Charles Calhoun, though, wrote a pretty decent 1-volume a few years ago. “Longfellow: a rediscovered life,” according to Amazon. IIRC, it focuses less on the poetry, but still good.
    I feel morally obligated to mention “Longfellow Redux,” even though it’s more lit.crit. than biography. Full disclosure: the author was my college professor. He summarized the circumstances of Fanny Appleton Longfellow’s death as a prelude to a lesson on L’s sonnet on the subject (sonnet unpublished in his lifetime: you don’t just sell the index cards). Then, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary lecture comparing said sonnet to some imagery in Dante (L. pursued Fanny for 7 years before she agreed to marry him: there was definitely some Dante/Beatrice vibes there), my professor stopped and said, in a truly horrified voice, ‘the fire happened *in their home.* He was *right there.* My God, can you imagine the screaming?’

    With an intro like that…well, when it came time for the class research paper, what else could I write on?

  42. red says:

    Reba – wow. Sounds like a marvelous professor – I just got goosebumps. I had no idea about Longfellow’s wife – I might check out Longfellow Redux – thank you so much.

  43. R. says:

    ok, not to belabor the point, but there’s actually a possibility that the well-known story about Fanny’s death (that her dress caught fire while she was melting wax to seal a packet containing locks of her children’s hair…an old-fashioned custom even in the 1860s)was a bit of a cover-up. A version of events recorded by Richard Henry Dana’s son indicates that one of the children may have accidentally started the fire. Longfellow never talked about it much, but I like to think he endorsed the official story so as not to make the child in question feel worse about it than she already did. (Mrs. L. died in July; the next Christmas the children received ‘presents marked as from their mother.’)

    all right, no more morbid poet stories, I promise…it’s just rare that I get to indulge my own obsessions;)

  44. red says:

    Curiouser and curiouser … I knew none of this. It’s such a tragic story.

    Please indulge your obsession – I find it totally fascinating.

  45. Brendan says:

    hey sheil,

    i just caught up with this after being up in the mountains…

    made me cry! love the photo! and your memory is so good that you still have every factoid!

    love,
    bren

  46. Rose says:

    How terrifying and wonderful! It puts an image in my mind of someone jumping out of a plane. I wish I could be brave enough to lose some of my own security blankets. Things that were once comforting, but now are just cluttering up my life (and my mind!).

  47. Mark says:

    Although I agree with and understand the motivation and symbolism, I find it impossible to believe you will ever be ready to “throw away the world” (in ANY context).

    After following and reading your link to the proverbial straw (for the first time), all I can say is “wow” and “I understand”. The ability you possess, to capture, analyze and then assymilate in written form is simply outstanding. What a gift! I can only assume that “that” is just one of the things “He” could see so clearly and was so attracted to.

    Lastly, just let me say that a passion such as that will never go away and can not be forgotten no matter how hard you (i.e. read “me”) try. The day after tomorrow I am picking up a friend I haven’t seen for almost 9 years. We were together only once and gave up the relationship for all the “right reasons” (in spite of our feelings for one another). I don’t have the ability you have for expressing myself in words, but I assure you, I do have the ability to share those same feelings.

    Again… Wow!

  48. red says:

    Mark – thanks so much for sharing a bit of yourself and for your kind words about what I wrote. It is true what you say – that such things never go away forever.

    Have a wonderful time with your friend!

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