Crisis? What Crisis?

My coworker was having a rough day at work because that's the kind of stuff of which dreams are made.

The pressure had clearly gotten to her by the time she whirled around and said, "Emma! You have to teach me how to deal with stress. You're always so calm and collected."

I would have laughed if I hadn't been so dumbstruck.

Who the hell did she think she was talking to!? I actually looked around the room to make sure the school hadn't hired another Emma because I hate it when other people have the same name that I didn't choose for myself.

"Well, shit," I thought, "Now I have to tell her the truth."

I tried to explain to her that I'm not naturally the laid-back, patient, happy-go-lucky Stepford teacher she sees at work. There's some real rage boiling beneath my top knot.

Didn't she remember the time I walked into the workroom and yelled, "Fuck!" in front of my new boss?

But she did make a good point. I am eerily calm at work even on my worst days.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Spain

2. a special repression technique that I have been developing since childhood

The first reason might seem pretty obvious, but there's more to it than that. As someone who has had everything handed to her in life, I didn't experience any real struggles until I went to Spain and even those were by choice. Finding a job, a place to live, friends, doctors, dealing with communication barriers, teaching myself how to teach a language to people spread all over a foreign city and basically not knowing what the fuck was going on at any given moment for a year straight wasn't easy.

But it also wasn't that hard. Having actual challenges taught me to recognize when something really wasn't a problem. If I'm not going to die, it's not a problem. Something like that. Also, Spain is chill as shit, and I even lived in what is known as the most uptight region.

Child's play compared to the United States of Anal Retention.

Which leads me to this other thing that really creeps me out. When I was a kid, I didn't hold anything in. The bad feeling entered, I exercised it out pea soup style, and I was totally fine seconds later. That doesn't work well in a classroom environment mostly because I would be vomiting (screaming) a constant stream of soup into students' faces for an entire hour and ten minutes. Then I'd have a ten minute break. Then I'd vomit for an hour and ten minutes. Then a generous thirty minute lunch hour...vomit...and so it goes on like this my entire career.

Instead, I prefer to absorb stress into my body and have it manifest itself in other ways. I don't even feel it. It's awesome.

I just get really sick once every other year, snap at Jaime for touching my ear or have nightmares that I'm going to miss my flight, and I'm running through the terminal trying to find my gate, and no one will fucking help me. Like I said, it's awesome.

But I didn't tell her all that. I just told her to move to Spain. Crisis? What crisis? It's fine.

Me when I'm teaching how to do a works cited page.