When I look back [and really, even when I was in the moment], I was kind of crazy this week.  Real Crazy, like the kind of crazy that got me here in the first place.  For the same reasons.

Reasons like—a stressful presentation on two and a half hours of sleep, a test on about the same amount.  Our seven year anniversary, which I didn’t get to celebrate properly until last night.  And a cracked radiator on the boy’s car, a leftover surprise from his Seasonal Flu Dizziness Driving Adventure [which culminated in him rear-ending another car on his way home from work one evening].  It seemed like every day was designed to take it out of me.  It, I suppose, being my threadbare sanity.

If I were to be completely honest with myself [which I rarely am] and all of you [which I try to be], I would admit that I always exacerbate things by not working on them when I should.  I have a broken sense of urgency, replaced by too large a dose of inevitability.  Yes, it is coming soon, but I will inevitably have it done.  The two don’t connect in the proper time frame.  Or, possibly, I’ve always gotten it done, so there’s no need [so whatever part of my mind that controls that sort of thing says] to do it expediently.

So, I spend my nights before these big events—presentations, tests, the like—alternately catnapping on my couch, pounding caffeinated beverages and feverishly doing work.  It doesn’t bode well on the next day, when I’m worn out and worried that I’m not prepared.

Tuesday was such a day—filled with classes, one of which I was slated to do a presentation on the synthesis of a natural product peptide.  I had done a decent amount of reading and work the night before, but I still stayed up very late.  Chemistry doesn’t come as easily to me as it does to some of my classmates.  It doesn’t come as easily, even, as it once did.  I worked hard to prepare, working through breaks in the day of the presentation to finish.

And finally, it was done.  Over.  I had done well.  I could rest, my most stressful part of the day behind me.  I was looking forward to the end of the day, to seeing friends.  I breathing again.

Then, I picked up a paper and had an unexpectedly shitty grade.  I felt like a child who doesn’t understand the rules—how do you complete something when the rules are ill-defined.  I was confused and upset.

Then, my semi-boss sat down beside me—4:45 PM—looked me in the eye, and said “You’re not progressing as quickly as I would like.”  In response, I floundered around a response, then finally just started crying.  He beat a hasty retreat, said we would talk about it later.  I cried more, harder—cried in that way that I knew I wasn’t really crying about this incident.  Crying because I was tired.  Crying because sometimes the rules are too hard to understand.  Crying because it’s hard, goddammit.  Crying because I’m crazy, sometimes, and that makes me cry too.  Crying because I was embarrassed, mortified—that I’d somehow let him win by getting the best of me, making me look soft.  Crying because I was angry at him for making me feel like I’m proving someone else’s point, that women shouldn’t be in science or high stress jobs because it wears on their delicate souls.

So, I set about getting some digital comfort.  My closest labmate registered her sense of unfairness.  “Nobody makes you cry,” she told me.  My best friend asked if I needed him to do anything.  “Not now,” I answered, comforted by the knowledge that he would, if I ever asked.  I know he would.  Other friends, as they found out about the incident during the week, likewise registered outrage.  Even after it was over, even after I understood more what he was asking.

I remembered a similar incident, when I was in college and an RA.  I was accused—of all things—of having sex in my dorm room.  Which was against the rules—not explicitly, but tacitly, I suppose—for my small Christian college.  That had the same set of feelings, the obvious shame and exhaustion, of course, but also a feeling like I didn’t know the rules.  I hadn’t been having sex in my dorm, on purpose, because I felt like it was possibly inappropriate.  I was sexually active and in a monogamous relationship, but it was long-distance and those carrying-ons were usually, well, carried on elsewhere.  At the time, a couple of my friends who were fellow RAs pledged to quit their jobs if I lost mine.  But when the hatchet fell—and it did—they didn’t carry through.  Hemming and hawing, they found ways to renege.  Saying that they understood the decision.  Saying it wouldn’t change anything if they quit.  That feeling—that they’d pledged something and let me down, it stayed with me.  In a blink of an eye, I can conjure that feeling.  Of course, other friends offered up support, and I obviously made it through that extremely trying time.  But I was let down.  And that time in my life was the first I’d ever seriously questioned my sanity.  With all of the desperate feelings, literal months of crying–it was the first time I ever thought something could be terribly wrong.

But these days, let me tell you—I’ve assembled a crack team, a Sanity Squad that I would put up against any other.  I never question their commitment.  I know that they would go to bat, at risk of their own good standing.  I know that they would approach a man they’ve never met to tell him he was wrong.  I know they would do this for me.

I watch the meticulous ways they take care of me, stand to the side and watch as they open bottle after bottle and then hold out an arm to escort my wobbly ass down some steps.  They buy me meals when I’ve forgotten my wallet, drive my phone to me when I leave it in their car.  I’d do the same for them.  I do the same for them.

These are the people who’ve taught me—literally—about what it means to be a friend.  I’d like to think I learn from them, but most of the time I feel like they are so much better at it than I am.  I don’t know what to do with this type of love, with the intensity of our intimacy, our bowed heads and whispered voices.  They have me caught up in their gravity, or maybe the other way around.  Or maybe we’re all just magnets, caught up in each other.  Maybe it was bound to happen.  Maybe it was meant to be.

In any case, having lost most of the perceived secrets of the universe, I stumbled on this one.  That friends—if you let them, if you work at it, if you reciprocate—are the absolute difference.  The one thing that can turn a bad day on its head.  The one thing that makes you want to keep living, even when you’re giving up.  Some days, the only—ONLY—thing keeping me together.  I have a posse, goddammit.  Everything else—mean bosses, a shitty batch of brain chemicals, memories of lost friendships past—had better fucking beware.