Painting.

[icebluenothing]

Saturday we started painting.

Got up early and headed over to borrow a pressure sprayer from Sandra and Kelly, friends of Cheryl and Bill who, actually, quite remind me of Cheryl and Bill themselves; Sandra small and bright and funny and creative and talkative, Kelly quiet and sardonic and just as amusing. They were loaning us the pressure sprayer for free, but first Sandra had to lead us through the house they've had for just six months and solicit our opinion on every single bit of redecoration, both planned and already accomplished: what did we think of these rugs? Too dark? How about this wall -- should it be repainted? What color? Would that go with the curtains? Should they take out the closet in the upstairs guest room? How about the entire wall? Cheryl, I think was a little put out at the time this took, although amused, but I was charmed and delighted at the chance to play interior decorator.

Kelly showed us how the paint sprayer worked, and it seemed both straightforward enough and slightly esoteric. We loaded it and the extension ladder into my truck and headed back here.

Bill gave me money to run out and buy myself a new pair of shoes, so I wouldn't get paint all over my good ones. The ones I ended up buying were really too nice to take home and ruin, but they were still the cheapest ones I could find.

I got kitted up in a set of disposable coveralls, a respirator mask, protective goggles, gloves, and a painter's hat. The overall resulting effect was somewhere between NASA and the Special Olympics. Once we figured out how to start the sprayer, I started spraying primer for the base coat.

This was not working well. The painting itself was going well enough, more or less, after a couple of false starts -- but the coveralls, which were slightly too small, meant I couldn't stand up straight comfortably or bend over much at all; the goggles restricted my vision; and the respirator really freaked me out. I have an intense fear of suffocation (I don't even like to have a blanket up over my head), and having this thing clamped tight over my nose and mouth meant I could breathe tolerably well -- but I couldn't convince myself of that.

Along with the physical factors, I also had my inner demons, with their voiceover monologue track of "oh my god what the fuck are you doing you don't know how to paint a house you're going to fuck everything up and cheryl will be mad and send you home and you won't get paid" cranked up to screaming pitch.

So, basically, I was moments away from an anxiety attack at any given point.

Cheryl asked me at one point early on if I was ready to go up on the extension ladder; I could only answer with a firm "No." I couldn't even explain, but the angle of the ladder looked strange and wrong, it flexed too much, didn't look like it would support me; my fear of heights had kicked in as well. I soon found, to their surprise, that I could actually just aim upwards and spray as high as I needed to, so the ladder wasn't an issue.

Cheryl was quite worried about me when she checked in with me; she'd ask if I was doing okay, and I would admit that I wasn't, and she'd ask more specific questions and I would nod or shake my head and try not to completely lose it. Once she asked one question too many and I tried so hard to be quiet and one small whimpering sound slipped loose from the back of my throat and I was horribly ashamed of myself in that moment.

She was good to me; she made it clear I didn't have to keep doing this if I didn't want to, and then left me to it.

I kept going. I've dealt with fear and insecurity before; it's not a good enough reason to stop. The whole idea of coming down here for a month scared me, and that was reason enough to do it.

I kept going, and did take a break eventually. Cheryl left it entirely up to me whether I kept going that night, or left the rest of the primer for the next day. Or, frankly, whether I wanted to go back to doing this at all, or if they'd need to make other arrangements.

I decided to keep going, but that I couldn't deal with the physical restraints anymore. The mask was necessary, the goggles equally so, but the coveralls had to go -- I could strip down to my cutoffs, and if I got paint on those, so be it. The painter's hat had to go, too -- it had fallen off at one point, and I'd been amazed at how much less claustrophobic I'd felt; the combined effect of all that headgear had been like a diving helmet. No more hat. If my hair became irretrievably covered in paint, I could always shave it off.

I finished the primer, no trouble. These changes made all the difference. The stormfront of my anxiety passed by.

We'd been going to have leftovers, but Cheryl thought I deserved better for all my trauma and trouble, so she baked a chicken and made pasta and pesto. I drove to the store while she was cooking and bought us a baguette and some German chocolate brownies, and I felt strangely elated, a little high even, having flown right in the face of my fear and come through the other side, accomplishing what I set out to accomplish. I felt like I could take on the world.

The next day I put on the (*shudder*) bright yellow paint they wanted, and all went well. No more anxiety attacks. There were a few problems with the paint sprayer shutting itself off every now and then -- overheating, maybe? -- but it just gave me an excuse to take breaks. Cheryl thought originally the yellow would take two coats, but it was looking so good we ended up just having me do one, and then we tore the paper off the doors and windows. I noticed afterward that there were a lot of spots that are going to need to be touched up by hand, and thought we were maybe premature in undoing the paper; this thought depressed me so much, and I was so exhausted from the work, that I slid down into a rather miserable state, but dinner cheered me up some, and I called it an early night.

The only thing I had to do today was go buy more paint -- which didn't take too long once I got to Home Depot, but finding my way there got me spectacularly lost -- and buy fixings for dinner and then prepare it. I'd offered to do this latter task since Cheryl taught five 80-minute classes today and was going to be exhausted. I made chicken fajitas, which are ridiculously simple to prepare, but always a crowd-pleaser.

Huh. I painted a house.