One night last week, my computer mouse suddenly stopped working. It wasn’t the slow decline which signals a dying battery, but rather a sudden shift from working perfectly to not working at all; the light underneath was still bright, and no amount of turning it on or off and fiddling with the receiver made any difference. But because it was a cheap “Amazon basics” mouse that was already several years old, I wasn’t too surprised, and I knew that Grace’s old mouse was a higher-quality one she’d used for over a decade without any problems, so I decided to “Watergate” it (as she used to say) for my own use. It worked perfectly the first day, and it made me feel good to use something of hers that way. But after I turned it off for a while to do some chores, it wouldn’t turn back on again; changing the battery didn’t help, so I fiddled with the switch a bit because it’s very small and the positional difference between “on” and “off” is very slight, so I figured it wasn’t actually on. But that didn’t help either, and within a few minutes I started becoming frantic, trying everything I could to get it to work and then descending quickly into tears when it seemed as though I had somehow broken it. For over an hour I sat in front of the computer, constantly crying and cycling between trying the same things I’d already tried, apologizing to Grace for breaking her mouse, and staring at the thing in my hand while sobbing uncontrollably. I felt like a fool, crying like a toddler over a broken toy, but even in the middle of it I knew what was really going on: over the past four months my survival instincts have kicked in, suppressing the overwhelming grief so I could function somewhat normally. But the pain isn’t really gone, and will piggyback on other strong emotions (in this case, frustration) to produce a disproportionate reaction to what should have been a minor stimulus. I’ve been this way my whole life: able to keep my head in crises, while crying my eyes out in sad movies because all the pain of a difficult life comes gushing out like a firehouse in circumstances where my brain knows it’s safe to break down (as opposed to situations where high performance is required).
Eventually, I collected myself, finished my work, and had dinner, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the damned mouse, and eventually it occurred to me that perhaps this mouse wasn’t like most I’ve owned in that there were warning signs of a weakening battery; perhaps this one just stopped suddenly when the battery gave out. And it had been sitting on Grace’s desk since January, after all; maybe the new battery was actually dead as well. So I went digging around for another AA battery and found two in another drawer; lo and behold, that was the problem, and the mouse was working perfectly again. So my black mood passed, and I told myself that I would be better off for having had a good cry. But all the same, I’m going to try to avoid possible emotional triggers for a while; with my allergies acting up again, I don’t really want to make myself more congested than my antihistamines can handle.
