Offline: My Ceiling Exploded

Putting the Me in Memeforum

Welcome to Offline. Offline is a place where I endear myself to you, beyond my opinions about things on the internet. Offline is where things get personal. It will come out as things happen to me. It will have reports from touching grass and talking to people face-to-face. It’s about experiences that aren’t through a screen. This first edition is free to all subscribers, but in the future will be behind a paywall.

My ceiling exploded. Well, actually, something more complicated and annoying happened, but for the sake of clarity, “my ceiling exploded” gets the point across very well. When I felt the single drop of water on my shoulder that Tuesday night, oh so many weeks ago now, I thought I was about to deal with something slightly annoying but altogether fine. I had a similar but smaller problem last winter. A slow leak was coming from my ceiling, and water was pooling in the paint. It was fixed within a week.

I woke up the next morning to discover the single drip had turned into four pockets of pooled water in the paint on my ceiling that had now opened up onto my floor. I realized that this was not going to have a simple solution. Even then, I thought that meant it would derail my life for maybe a day or two. When my super told me that they couldn’t do anything until the snow melted, I began my journey of unreality.

The common coworker conversation at the time was about the snow in New York and how it wouldn’t melt because it wouldn’t be above freezing for the next 10 days. Nothing could be done until the snow melted, and the snow wasn’t melting. When the snow was melting, it was melting into my apartment through the roof. In order to fix the problem, it had to get worse. Except it couldn’t get it worse until it got warmer. I just had to live with it. If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.

All of these details feel important to convey because they were all I had. I could only discuss the facts of my situation and how they were happening to me. This was the speech I gave to everyone. I had to explain what was happening to me. The more I talked about it, the more erratic I felt. I watched their faces recoil in horror as I described my living situation. I braced as they said they were sorry that was happening to me. I couldn’t handle empathy. Only solutions.

Something I’d like to get better at that I don’t know if I ever will is being able to properly identify a crisis. I feel when a real crisis happens, I am a little slow on the uptake. There is a sense of denial and refusal to recognize how bad something is, especially because most of the time when bad things happen to me, they are not the bad things that happen to other people. This is not the simple problem of a leak or a pipe burst, not that those problems are simple, but when people ask what’s wrong, you can tell them in a few simple words, and there’s a plan of attack. My problem? Ceiling exploded.

Of course, once you realize you’re in a crisis, you then have to see the crisis through until the end. You have to wake up to the fact that everything is going to be difficult now. You are Going Through Something with no end in sight. The resolution will feel like nothing, because when it’s finally over, everything will have been stripped from you. There will be no celebration or big check in the mail. You will not get to ring a bell. You will get a letter in the mail saying you do not owe any money. You will leave the lawyer’s office and maybe get something to eat. You will pay off the credit card bill, and it will feel like you have removed the small, almost imperceptible stone from your shoe. By the time it’s over, really over, and you’ve fully recovered, you will be so far removed from the crisis it will feel like 4 crises ago.

You can’t talk to people about it because then you will remember all the aspects of it you are ignoring. They won’t get it. Or they will get it, and they’ll hold their tongue because they know it gets worse, and you can’t handle that. Day 2 is nothing compared to Day 8, and Day 8 is a walk in the park compared to Day 45. I wrote most of this on day 3, before I knew how bad it was going to get. Before I stayed in a hotel for what ended up being a week, and then got on a plane to go back to Vermont for a weekend. Before the ceiling was fixed, I had to acclimate to actually normal life after pretending things were normal for 2 weeks.

Now that I am sleeping in my own bed again and there is no longer a tarp and buckets on my floor to catch the falling water and debris, I can reflect on the experience and how crazy I felt. I was tired in a way that I felt would never go away. I couldn’t escape the problem because I needed to go back to the apartment every so often to check on the problem. I needed to go to work to establish normalcy, and yet when I was there, I could only focus on my exploded ceiling and the next steps I had to take to remedy that, even though all I could do was wait. My mouth tasted like poison.

I knew intellectually why I was tired. I knew the whole experience was draining and was going to be draining while I was experiencing it, but I don’t know when it got that way. I don’t know when the dread showed up. I don’t know when I accepted how annoying this was and what a total derailment it was. I kind of still think I haven’t.

What is shocking to me in retrospect is that I wanted this to feel like something. I wanted to be sad or depressed about it, but instead I just felt a kind of constant tension. It was about getting to the next thing. The next day. The next reprieve. Except nothing made me feel better. There was no solution to this problem except to wait, but that brought up the question of what am I supposed to do while I wait, and who is going to let me know when the wait is over?

I stayed in a hotel in the financial district from Friday of the week my ceiling exploded until the next Thursday. I dreaded leaving work at the end of the day because that meant I was back to being a person with no responsibility other than to survive while I waited for the city to get warmer. I loved the hotel because I simply love hotels. All the stress and paperwork of life, removed. I brought only what I could carry, and everything else was available at the front desk. It gave me plenty of space and time to walk around, screaming THIS SUCKS!

The worst part of all this is that I was chilling before. I kept telling people I was chilling. I had nothing going on in the short term. I had no goal I was working to complete this year or month that needed immediate action. I was going through nothing. And then suddenly! I was going through something! Something random and unfair with no resolution but to wait and file a report with 311, which has resulted in nothing, by the way. I was preparing to really start my year and get invested in things. Instead, I was thrown from reality.

The longer this dragged on, the more aware I became of my inability to be normal. How many days in a row can you wake up and deal with a crisis that is basically just waiting? I don’t have enough grace and kindness within me to be nice when 400 things are going wrong at once with no end in sight, and yet I still had to try. I went to the DMV in the middle of this whole thing and got yelled at for not checking the box about registering to vote fast enough.

The frustrating part of all of this is that even though the ceiling has now been fixed and I can sleep in my apartment without turning into Julianne Moore in Safe, it’s not over. Now I have to fight with my landlord and readjust to normal life and reflect on the experience. What the hell? Why. The whole thing has been more annoying then truamatic, and yet who knew life could get this annoying without being traumatic? If I’m going to be this annoyed, I expect a little trauma

The only good part about this is that now, when other people talk to me about their apartment woes, I can sagely tell them I’ve been there and lay out what they should do. Empathize with how bad it is. Compare notes about situations and tell them that theirs is worse or mine was just as bad. Then the conversation will end, and they will go back to their shitty situation, and I will return to my normal life. There is hope on the other side. I guess.

What’s the worst thing that ever happened to your apartment? Has your ceiling ever exploded?