Whitt Sheumaker

February 2022

I watched When Harry Met Sally in full for the first time this February. As much as I want to talk every little thing I loved about that movie — Billy Crystal crushing one-liners that would seem lazy from anyone else’s lips, Meg Ryan emoting more with her face than most could manage for a full performance — to me, February felt less like the month of love and more like a month of mystery.

I’m an introverted extrovert, but when cold, rainy weather combined with a weighty workload, I became a full recluse. I only started to figure out why in the first week of March, with the help of the world’s greatest detective, The Batman. Something about Robert Pattinson’s performance as the caped crusader — a skinny man with shaggy hair, soundtracked by Nirvana in the rare moments he leaves his room — struck a chord in me. In writing this, I solved my own mystery.

February 14th was Valentine’s Day, and I marked it as such twice on my Google Calendar. A foreboding fear had hung over me for the first weeks of the month: a fear that I would forget to buy my girlfriend a gift. I didn’t, and never have in our past four years, so the fear felt unfounded. It crept out in moments of high stress — as I was washing the dishes while thinking about what time to go to bed and wondering how an unholy cacophony of three separate songs got stuck in my head — my heart would drop. Each time I tried to put my finger to the pulse, all I could hear was my heartbeat. Romantic, right?

If not already obnoxiously apparent in my writing, I have attention deficit disorder, and this month, Walgreens ran out of Adderall. I figured this out when I ran inside said Walgreens on Valentine’s afternoon to pick up a Notes app list of four items: Ferrero Rocher, a bright red gift bag, and my prescriptions of Celexa and Adderall. I left with three of the four, before booking it to Barnes and Noble to buy a complete Lord of the Rings compilation to fill the bright red bag.

That evening, everything went swell; we exchanged gifts and we watched The Grand Budapest Hotel. She loved the book and has read a shocking amount of it already. My creeping fear was indeed unfounded, and I cracked the case a few weeks later, after I took the Enneagram Test. I’m a Type 3, the Achiever, who went unmedicated for most of the month of love. My girlfriend’s gift to me was a couple’s pedicure appointment that finally moved me out of my mental pit and into the first moment of peace I’d had all February. It’s people that make your heart beat that help you remember to breathe as well.

March & April 2022

A close friend confessed something to me recently. “When I first met you,” he began, harkening back to the beginning of his freshman year, “I was like, ‘Why is this kid so stressed out all the time?’” I chuckled. I used to be wary when someone called me “kid,” probably because of flashbacks to a condescending flag football coach (or any number of childhood authority figures) who belittled me so much that I still think about it to this day. I was often told, “Don’t talk back.” And I was often bothered by being told that. Don’t talk back? Don’t have a conversation? Don’t I deserve to understand? The Oxford English Dictionary defines “back-talk” as the following: “To talk back to a person, esp. in an insolent manner.” I never intended insolence; I was a child, and I didn’t even know what the word meant. Even asking what back-talk meant would be considered back-talk.

Why is this kid so stressed out all the time? Because the second he starts to feel overwhelmed, he still feels like he’s being belittled by the world. Halfway through each of my high school semesters, I would remember the organizational scheme I’d established at the start of the year and wonder when it had spontaneously combusted along the way. Then, I would quickly convince myself that I didn’t have time to think about the answer. Don’t talk back. Keep chugging along. It’s time to play catch-up, kid. I’d always assumed that when you became an adult you understood everything; you got some sort of special glasses that allowed you to see the world in a new way and make sense of it. But, unless my package was lost in the mail, no such optical upgrade exists.

“Why is this kid so stressed out all the time?” My friend wondered this at age eighteen, just starting his first semester of college. “Now,” he continued his confession at age nineteen, finishing his second semester, “I understand you.” I chuckled, and I didn’t mind being called “kid.” Maybe that’s the true mark of adulthood, understanding that everyone is a kid. “Astronomers have determined that our universe is 13.7 billion years old,” according to press.princeton.edu — the first result of my Google search. From age one, to age twenty-one, to age one hundred, we’re all kinda kids. And that’s okay. Our bodies will never be able to catch up with the cosmos. But our minds will always be able to choose what we do with that knowledge. Why is this kid so stressed out all the time? Because he’s a kid, and that’s okay. So, here’s to what I couldn’t catch up with. Here’s to choosing to do our best with what we’re given.