I am typing this on my phone from the laundry room of my new building, because I have a confession: this is the first time I’ve ever done laundry anywhere that isn’t my parents’ house, even though I moved out of their home nearly two years ago.
Naturally, I meant to start doing laundry in the basement of my old building. But the thought of going someplace new, learning a new set of protocols and rules, brought my anxiety to a zenith, as it often does. The same forces were exacted which also prevent me far too often from visiting cafés I’ve never been to before or attending shows that are new to me: how will I navigate them, and what will people think if I navigate them badly? And so weeks passed, and then months, and then more than a year, with me curtly avoiding the laundry room and instead trundling my clothes and sheets back and forth across the city every week or two to wash them in my parents’ machine.
This week I was lucky enough to move in with an anxiety-savvy roommate who asked me, without being clued in to any of this, if I’d like her to show me the laundry room. She took me there, pointed out the card-loading machine and the tricky washers and the best dryers, and my heart felt soothed. This was all I’d needed all along and I hadn’t known how to ask for it. Doing my first load of laundry here today has filled me with a familiar sense of power: the feeling of overcoming a fear, of stepping an old neurosis and saying, “No more.”
I am well used to this feeling, because in the year and a half I’ve been dating my partner, he has ushered me through many such growth experiences, using the magic of kink. I have attended new improv shows by myself at his behest; I have worn things that felt to me overly loud and attention-grabbing; I have spoken and sang on stages even as my knees knocked together from fright. I was brave before I ever met him, but he’s made me braver, because when he instructs me to make a leap, I know two things: I want to do it, and I’m capable of doing it. I will do it for him.