Nail polish? How does that even . . .
No, really. Just stick with me on this one.
It’s been a tough six months for me. Real Life has kicked my butt bad. As a result, my anxiety reared its ugly head again, I’ve gone back on medication, and I’m dealing with all the consequences as best I can.
I also haven’t been writing.
That’s the worst part for me.
Backstory: If you’ve followed my sporadic and disjointed miss-adventures on this blog, you may or may not know I work in Alberta’s battered Oil & Gas industry. Five years ago, it was the hip thing, to work in O&G—something to be proud of. I’d tell people I work in O&G and I’d get nods of approval and wide-eyes of wonder. Fast-forward to today. When I tell people I work in O&G, I get a wince and an “Ooooh”—like the kind of Ooooh you hear when a guy gets nailed in the crotch by a skateboard. Although my company is surviving the economic downturn, we’re doing so using less-than-admirable tactics.
At work, we acquired a new company, we’ll call it Company X. This was just the start of breaking down my walls that let anxiety back into my life. At the same time, the company decided to replace our ERP system (the system that basically runs the company), decommission Company X’s ERP that ran their company, combine workforces, combine decades of data, and re-train a workforce 3,000-people strong.
We had 2 months to do this.
Come November, I sat in my Doc’s office in tears. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t speak without stuttering. Every waking moment was filled with horrific realizations that I forgot to send an email, and uncontrollable panic attacks that I had an 8am meeting. Meanwhile, all our timelines were slipping, our vendors gave us greenhorn resources fresh out of college, and we kept hearing word everyday that yet another aspect of the business was changing.
On the other end of the spectrum, I was providing work references for three former team members who had been out of work for at least eight months—one of them going on two years—and I kept repeating to myself “Be thankful you still have a job. Be thankful you still have a job.”
It’s a terrible position to be in, both mentally and physically.
The New Year rolled around. The new ERP went in with enough sparks to challenge the Shaw Holiday Log for cozy warm television supremacy. We re-trained a workforce on a system that kept crashing and freezing because we didn’t have the time nor the manpower to shore up its resources. We transferred data piece by agonizing piece over weeks and weeks of “Okay, try it now” scenarios that took far too long to correct. All the while, we were scrutinized. “Why is this taking so long?” “Why are you running into so many difficulties?”
All I heard was: “Why aren’t you doing your job, Rissa?”
After the New Year, we were assured things would calm down. And they did . . . for about a week because we had a change freeze in effect. During that week alone, me and my team had time to breath and we had time to properly put out a few fires.
And then the next declaration came down: replace our document management solution and our integration system that took six months and four programmers to build.
Time frame for that? End of March. It was Jan 16. We had a single programmer.
Another trip to the Doc. Another prescription.
“Be thankful you still have a job.”
Since September of 2018, I’ve been medicated.
To add to that, my body weight has dropped by almost 20 percent. My BMI was a dangerous 17.5. I suffered heart palpitations. I suffered more ocular migraines. I suffered digestive issues.
“You’ve got to do something,” Doc tells me. “Nothing is worth your health.”
I’ve been with this company for over ten years, and I’ve pulled it’s bum out of the fryer several times already. I wasn’t about to give up. I’d done it before, I’d do it again—pull that miraculous solution out of my bum.
But that thought led me to a panic attack so severe I was in the washroom throwing up what little food I could get in my stomach from dinner. I shook from head to toe. My heart was in my throat beating as hard as it could.
I drug myself to bed and collapsed. On a whim, I rolled over, grabbed my tablet, and hit the first icon I could find. YouTube.
My recommended feed showed me the typical fare—Game of Thrones breakdowns, KPop videos, and . . . a nail art video?
The thumbnail looked neat, some sort of rain drop effect but using nail polish. I clicked on the video and became instantly hooked. I watched that video two and three times over, took notes of all the items she used, and went straight to Amazon to buy UV nail polish and a curing lamp.
Simply Nailogical is a YouTube channel run by a plucky girl from Ontario, Canada with a trucker mouth and two adorable cats. I watched her videos every chance I got, especially when the weight of the world tried to pull me down.
A few more stressful days at work went by, but what kept me going was waiting for that little pink UV lamp I ordered from Amazon to arrive on my doorstep.
And one day, it came! On a Friday! I’d have a whole weekend of painting my nails. Such a mundane and girlish thing to do, but I so looked forward to doing that and only that while I monitored my work email and doused the fires as needed.
All weekend long, I painted my nails. I also painted my toe nails. I soaked off the UV gel and painted them again! And again!
And ya know what, I didn’t have a single twinge of anxiety all weekend.
Monday rolled around and I (literally) had shiny new nails I couldn’t wait to show off. And show off I did.
The next weekend came along, I soaked off all the gel and tried out some nail art techniques.
Another week of calmness passed, even though work tried its damnedest to beat the sh*t out of me.
Another weekend, another manicure, another week anxiety free.
At my next follow-up with the Doc, I was ecstatic to tell her the good news that my anxiety was under control. I flashed my gorgeous (then) snow-scene nails at her and told her my story. Not only was she quite impressed—anxiety is a hard thing to beat on your own—she also loved my manicure. Although I walked out with another renewal for my prescription, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. And this time it wasn’t a freight train coming for me.
Such a mundane and silly thing to be proud of, but you know what, that manicure represents something so much more than a girlish obsession with painting my nails. Each nail art design was another step forward . . . another step away from the anxiety that had been crippling me since September.
All thanks to a YouTube channel and a few bottles of nail polish.
So Cristine-without-the-H, thank you. I think you saved me from my anxiety.
-Rissa
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