control freak 🔒
is the kitchen clean? is it?
Welcome, old friends. It’s hard to make a promise and then let your fans down; I am aware I have not stuck to my goal of writing 1x per week. But I hope you all can find it in your hearts to let it go. I have been allowing myself to rest; my new job kicked off last week, and I’ve been scrambling a touch trying to get ready for everything that’s coming up this season. If you’re sitting there refreshing your inbox, impatiently waiting for this to show up, well, you should tell me that and I’ll just start texting you funny quips more often. As usual, thank you for being here. I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving and found something to be grateful for. I know I have (it’s all of you ❤️)
all my love, as usual,
VP
It started with an ashtray.
It was a great idea, really. Nothing beats a great idea. The nail had been hit on the head, the plan had been a lock, the bill was paid on time.
There’s a system called the US Postal Service. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Nothing can throw a wrench into a schedule like the US Postal Service. What was supposed to be a well thought out, perfectly planned, incredibly sentimental gift to my boyfriend, ended up with me running down Orchard to the Pitt Street Post Office on December 27th, to retrieve the box, which had been beaten to hell at that point, to pick up my long lost package.
Nothing makes you feel stupider than staring at a tracking number on your phone, knowing the power the person delivering your package holds. They can make or break your holiday, they can ruin a birthday like that. And yet, we continue to order things on the Internet, unaware of the sheer terror of getting a notification that something is out for an early delivery when you’re sitting at your office a million miles away from your apartment.
In the case of the ashtray, though, I was at my mother’s house, far from my Manhattan walk-up. It was supposed to be delivered well before Christmas, of course, but due to “high-volume” and “bad weather” it was scheduled to arrive on December 24th.
To the average gift-giver, this is a relief! December 24th means you give the gift on Christmas! No harm done!
To ME, this felt like a sick joke.
There were two reasons it felt like the USPS was taunting me. One being it was impossible for me to get to it on that day, as I would not be at my apartment and would instead already be home with family, and two was that I had specifically planned around receiving it before that and giving it to my boyfriend on our Christmas Celebration before we both went our separate ways for the holiday.
So imagine my shame when the day of that Christmas Celebration rolled around, when it came time to woman up and confess, that I, his perfect girlfriend, didn’t have his gift yet. I looked like a huge jerk, with only one other mediocre gift to give him. “It’s coming, it was the post office’s fault,” I cried. But of course, it wasn’t his job to make me feel better for cutting it too close.
Now, even though this had semi-ruined our Christmas Celebration, I still tried to reroute it to a post office closer to where I would be on December 24th, just so it could be in my hands. No dice. I was calling, and calling, enunciating (screaming) tracking numbers over the phone, begging someone, anyone, not to deliver it when I wasn’t home.
The USPS was not having it.
“If our delivery attempts fail, ma’am, it will be at the closest USPS for pickup for 5 business days.”
So I watched, like a loser, the postperson try to deliver this package. I got the notification that of course, the delivery had failed and that it was being taken to the Pitt Street Post Office. This entire situation was, in fact, the pits, and there I was on December 27th, running to Pitt Street. A sick joke.
Of course, it all worked out in the end. Brian got his ashtray. I noticed it on our coffee table the other day and it struck a chord, mostly because I can’t believe it’s that time of year again.
Sure, it’s the holiday season, but it’s also the season of failed delivery attempts, missing packages, anxiety about gift-giving and money and everything in our lives that we cannot control.
Far too often, we are placed in situations where we must rely on others to pass us a baton. Can’t finish a work assignment without the PDF from creative. Need a parent to find a sacred piece of mail at your childhood home because they sent it to your permanent address. Have to just trust that an Uber driver is going to take us to our destinations unscathed. It’s so hard to relinquish control to another person, sometimes someone we don’t even know, to get something else done. It’s so scary to think about how many decisions we make daily that require us to do this. So instead of just allowing it, we hyper-fixate on the things we in our orbit, like the cleanliness of a kitchen and the folded clothes in a dresser. Freak out over the small stuff so ignoring the big stuff feels just a touch more manageable. It’s easier to forget your Uber driver might kidnap you when you’re thinking about how the dishwasher might be loaded the wrong way when you get home.
I used to think I wasn’t like this. If you’re just meeting me for the first time, you might not think I scream “control freak.” My Instagram layout is a mess, I am constantly losing things that tend to be quite important, and there’s typos in these musings quite a lot. In private, though, I can’t lay on my bed in clothes that have touched the outside, Venmo requests are made within 24 hours out of respect, and plans are picked far in advance as to allow the meet up to go off without a hitch. I do not like to leave things up to chance in the most chaotic city in America; I refuse to go out for the night with 10 people and “hope we will find a place we can go.” It’s not happening!!
But, as I grow and change and absorb all kinds of different feelings, the littler ones have been easier to accept. Packages might go missing, I might not sleep on clean sheets every Sunday, and there’s a pretty good chance I forget to bring my lunch to work. Learning to accept these things in my life is making it a tad easier to forget that the bigger ones are looming.
Although, on Saturday, Brian remarked how nice it was outside to which my response was, “the planet is dying, it’s awful.”
Baby steps, right?
Thank you for reading this!!! I appreciate you getting this far. As I dive further into the Substack community and follow more authors, I have decided I want to make this a more robust newsletter. If there’s anything you want to see on here that isn’t about my main concerns with life and all the deep feelings of the human condition and you’re just like, “huh, I would enjoy it if Vic wrote about a movie or a book she liked,” or something along those lines, PLEASE leave a comment. I know that everyone is subscribed to this because they want to support me; please know the feedback is the best gift you could give me this holiday season. Thank you for reading as always and APPRECIATE you getting this far.