Y2K

A few months ago, I sat down at my desk and found a small votive candle sitting on top of my journal. I’m very particular about my desk when not in use, journal to the side, pens all put away, coaster and tea bag holder neatly aligned, everything in an exact defined place- so the candle, though small, was glaring.

A white star, silver decorations on top, reading “2000”.

I was livid.

“Do you see this shit?” I held the candle aloft and shook it towards my spouse.

“What’s that?”

“Vinnie got me a candle when she was out thrifting earlier, apparently.”

“That’s thoughtful of her! That’s cute.”

“It’s fucking rude, is what it is.” I’m looking at the candle fuming, it is cute, it looks innocuous, I like small candles and things found second hand. And yet I’m still certain that ‘Vinnie’ is short for ‘Vindictive’.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of computers. I’ve told this story before because it epitomizes the anxiety and paranoia I felt as a child. I felt out of control trying to use computers in lab. They didn’t make sense. I didn’t trust them. I cut out weather forecasts predicting lightning and brought them to my teacher begging we didn’t still do computer lab, lightning was going to strike and travel through the wires in the building, and we were all going to get electrocuted and die. I was so terrified of doing something wrong and being punished for it. By God, the universe, teachers, karma, death itself. If I did something wrong, I was going to get sick, die, God would squish me under his thumb after publicly humiliating me, I would get taken away by CPS and never see my sister or grandparents ever again.

A lot of these things I believed because they were what my parents told me, what I gleaned from the brutal stories told in Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night meetings, what I saw in the news while an adult dozed next to me, what I saw in the brutal crime shows I couldn’t differentiate from news as a small child. A lot of these things I believed because when I tried to talk to other adults in my life about my fears, they laughed them off and said it was fine, not understanding. Or, like my computer lab teacher, she cried asking my grandfather why I didn’t like her. Instead of addressing my pathological fear, I was told it was hurting my teacher’s feelings (who I loved and just didn’t want to see electrocuted).

All this to say, I was just shy of seven when Y2K rolled around, and I was terrified. I was beyond certain this was the end of everything good, if I didn’t die, I was definitely going to be feral again. I was relieved my dad had me for new year’s because he had the good sense to be stocked with go bags and boxes on boxes of MREs and he was smart enough to know the government was evil and that city living made people soft.

I sat under the kitchen table (kids learn to brace for earthquakes under their desks, one of the few ‘disasters’ I had lived through before) with everything I could think to gather to prepare and waited.

And the world didn’t end.

Equal to the paranoia I felt as a child, was the shame I felt for feeling it. If I wasn’t wicked, wasn’t bad, did everything right… I wouldn’t have anything to fear. Fear itself was showing an inherent distrust in God, which he vehemently seemed to dislike, as absent and overbearing as my parents. Or else, it was an unconscious admission of guilt. I was afraid of bad things happening to me because surely, I deserved them to, why else would so many bad things have already happened to me? I thought the world was fundamentally fair and just, bad things happening didn’t shake my belief in that, they just solidified my conclusion that I deserved them.

When I saw that stupid candle on my desk, I was furious. Vinnie knew how I felt about Y2K, the end of the world, all that. No one could tell me she didn’t, she was there while I had been writing on that exact subject earlier in the week. She pilots my body parttime for fuck’s sake. She has access to more childhood memories than I do, if anything.

Still, I put the candle off to the side of my desk, present, but not visible unless I looked for it.

My mental health has been awful. Not just the last week, but the last few months, maybe the last few years, or I guess the last few decades.

The last week or so though, I keep seeing the candle out of the corner of my eye. Keep thinking about it. Instead of a taunt at one of my greatest shames, my fear, I saw something else in it all of a sudden.

The world didn’t end.

And say the world does end this January, say I die tomorrow, the machines do come to life and seek vengeance on me the way I was afraid of so long ago…

I still lived 25 wild wonderous and at times beautiful years between then and now. A quarter of a century longer than I thought I would that night.

I don’t think being afraid now is irrational. For me, I think I need to accept that my fear and anxiety is so deeply rooted in my psyche that I will probably be living with it for the rest of my life, whether that be one more year or one hundred.

But the world didn’t end.

And, as long as we’re alive, world turning, etc. & so forth, there’s still going to be good in the world.

I’m doing the best I can, which is very little of late, but I try to do at least a few things each day that make me happy to be alive. Shaking a peacock feather at the cat. Eating my favorite foods. Listening to new music. Stringing garlands of beads and paper hearts and stars to decorate come yule. I feel pathetic. I feel angry. I feel like my ambitions are a farce in an overcrowded void. I feel like I have been ground down since my very conception.

But every day I have continued to exist, there has been at least a sliver of good. A smile. A laugh. An absurdity. something.

but when and if the world (and/or myself) does end, I hope I get the chance to burn that fucking candle first.