Emotional Neo

One time, in college, I burst out laughing when my boyfriend caught on fire in the kitchen. His sleeve was too close to a flame and as his arm lit up I stood back and laughed while he flailed around until my roommate came in and helped put him out.

My husband (previously flammable boyfriend) has said in a zombie apocalypse he knows I'm turning and he'll have to take care of zombie me and feed me people or something and that the whole thing makes him kind of angry. (Yes, we've had this actual conversation.) I tend to agree that I probably wouldn't be one of the ones to make it. I don't have any real physical survival skills.

What I do have are emotional survival skills. I am good in an emotional crisis. I compartmentalize. I can separate emotions from fact. I can be reasonable in unreasonable times. It's what makes me a good producer. It doesn't upset me to look at worse case scenarios. Instead I get the kind of tunnel vision Robert Downey Jr. had in Sherlock Holmes - I see the outcomes and can choose the best actions. This is something that kicks in like instinct.

I am also completely neurotic. Like a flawed Batman-like super hero. I can show up and save the day but then go back to my bat cave and not deal with the emotional baggage that got me to wearing a mask and hiding in a cave with bats to begin with. But maybe it's just true that it can be easier to deal with other people's shit than it can be to deal with our own.

Maybe I'm an emotional crisis junkie. Instead of getting worked up into a tizzy when true crisis (not manufactured hysteria) hits I am overcome with a sense of calm and slip into a zen state. Not that I seek out emotional instability (I live in Los Angeles after all, it's hard to avoid it). it's just that sometimes I feel like I can handle a crisis better than I can handle every day life.