Read Online I Can Barely Take Care of Myself by Jen Kirkman - Free Book Online Page A

me to the parking lot. She told me to relax and sit the field trip out. Mrs. Williams whispered with the busdriver and I spent the rest of the field trip napping on the front seat of a parked bus.
    I had no idea that what I’d just suffered was a panic attack—a simple fight-or-flight response that happens to your body and brain when adrenalinetakes over. I thought what I experienced were two separate incidents: I was concerned about the fake pilgrims and my real teacher ignoring the fact that nuclear war was imminent, and coincidentally on that very same day, during my confrontation with a fake pilgrim, I happened to have mysterious heart palpitations and chest pains.
    Once my mom got wind of this we went straight to the emergencyroom. I did a stress test—you know, those things that forty-year-old men do on a treadmill with all of those stickers on your chest like E.T. had on in the scene where he was dying. The ER doctor diagnosed me with “stress.” That seemed about right to me. I didn’t realize I was nine years old. I felt like I was forty. I was stressed. I was worried about nuclear war. I was worried about my sisterwho was getting a divorce and my other sister, who was just starting college but her grades weren’t that good. I was worried about my parents, who had been fighting a lot. I had to keep the entire family together! If stress was all that I had—I was pretty damn lucky! I called my sister Violet in her college dorm at UMass Amherst. I told her the good news: “I didn’t have a heart attack. I’m juststressed!” She said, “You’re nine. You shouldn’t have stress. If you’re stressed now, you’re going to be a nervous wreck when you’re a grown-up.” She didn’t hang up the phone but let it swing back and forth from the pay phone cradle. I heard her run down the hall with her friends, laughing and screaming all the way. Our lives were so different.
    I didn’t realize until years later at a cocktailparty that The Day After did not affect everyone of my generation the way it did me. Some people were like, “That movie was so stupid. Did you see that dumb part where everyone turns into a skeleton? My friends and I were laughing.” I visited Shannon and her family last Christmas. She bounced her adorable son on her knee and remembered, “Jen,you were always obsessed with the world ending. Itwas so funny. You used to cut up pictures of Bruce Willis and put them in your shoe because you wanted to be with him when you died. Who thinks about death at age nine, let alone Bruce Willis?”
    I was just really glad in that moment that Shannon’s kid had her for a mother and not me.
    A YEAR BEFORE all of this Day After drama, I’d written my last will and testament on a cocktail napkin duringa three-hour flight from Boston to Orlando, Florida. I developed a fear of flying the first time I stepped foot on a plane.
    My parents and I boarded the now defunct Eastern Airlines plane via an external set of stairs. I felt just like one of the Beatles—except I was not exiting a plane to a hysterical, crying bunch of fans, I was entering a plane with a hysterically crying mother who had justrealized how afraid she was to fly. My mom made her way to our seats in coach. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the cockpit. This was, of course, before 9/11/2001. This was just barely after 9/11/1981. You could smoke cigarettes and listen to a Richard Pryor album in the cockpit if you wanted to back in those days. The stewardesses (not yet flight attendants) ushered us intothe tiny, low-ceilinged pod. My dad said, “My daughter is apprehensive about flying but I wanted to show her how safe it is!” I hadn’t really been apprehensive about flying—but now I was. What if the pilot pressed the wrong button? Would we be ejected from our seats? What if the copilot started goofing around and pulling levers willy-nilly—would the plane take a nosedive? The pilot and copilotshook my hand. They