29 Aralýk 2021, Çarþamba
saat: 23:06
The future hasn’t aged well.
I rarely want to talk about how I am feeling or how hard things really are. And I just want to say that is has been such a long three or four (honestly? five) years. And there has been grief, trauma, stress, responsibility, duty, sacrifice, isolation. None of this to say it hasn’t been worth it for what and who I’ve gone through it all for. The results have been worth it, and I have done what I’ve set out to do - I’ve continued to create and achieve a previously unknown safety for myself and those I care about. But there’s so much missing. By the time I’m done with everything I have to do, I have no time or energy for anything I want to do. And by the time I’m done with the most urgent tasks, the less urgent ones fall to the wayside (even if they are still important-need-to-get-these-done tasks). I wind up feeling as if I’m feeling unwell more often than I’m feeling well, and that’s not quite true, it’s falling into black-and-white patterns of thinking that I normally don’t fall into. I do feel well often, but I want time. I want space. I want to be able to stretch out in the ways I desire and not just default to a bit of brief fun, if even that, that’ll get me through another day, another week, another month. But I’ve been unable to reach that point. I know it’s not a rarity. I know burnout is incredibly common these days. I don’t believe in believing your experiences are unique or even particularly special or separate from others. They rarely are. And I am taking steps to reclaim the trajectory of my life. And I am lucky to even be able to do that. But I struggle with it too. I feel pangs of guilt because those around me do not always understand the needs that are chronically unmet that I desperately must go out and meet for my own wellbeing. The weight of what depends on me is heavy and I have no breaks from carrying it around, little support to help drag it all along when my arms want to go limp. And I’m used to that. I’ve been solely surviving for so much of life. It isn’t that I do not plan to continue to carry the weight, I just need to redistribute it. I will still do what has to be done - for myself, for others. But I also need to do a little more of what doesn’t.
On a good day you add up to about a quarter of an actual adult human being.
(Long exhale) Could be worse. Not so bad. Better than I expected.
After my uncle died, I exhibited all the traits of sadness without feeling sad. I quite often do not allow myself to feel negative feelings. I cried once - the night I first heard what had happened. It was brief. Several minutes and no more. But all else was apparent sadness. I was sleeping for 10, 11, 12 hours. I could sleep and sleep and sleep. I wasn’t eating well and when I was eating, the food lacked of real purpose or utility. I wasn’t exercising. I was barely moving at all. I hardly spoke to anyone unless I absolutely had to. I thought last weekend I was on my way to being out of it, but I was only a small way out. The past few days have been adding back these smatterings of my life before. And today I added exercise back into the mix. I was just really rather sick of myself and the nothing-y life I had fell into. I didn’t want to do a thing. And now I do.
For the first time this morning all three of my crumpled Kleenex reached the trash can on the other side of the bed. Maybe this will be the day things finally start to turn around.
Personality is this cobbled thing of experience, DNA, socialization, class, trauma. It’s random and malleable and yet somehow, in some ways, something we control. Some people seem to feel wedded and fated to how they think they are (and how they think they are being down to what they’ve done so far) and perhaps for the core itself that’s true, but there’s so much people mistake for who they are that is instead a cope. I’m different than I was a year, two, three. I’m almost unrecognizable to who I was farther back than that, but the feeling of me has remained since childhood. I’ve been lucky to not suffer too often with a fragile sense of self, but maybe that’s only from being able to recognize what was me and what was the cope and what was the trauma at the root that could be burned out. And I think maybe that’s what is has always been and what always will be the point - this journey to get closer to myself with every year. Turning and returning to the core again and once again.
All-purpose advice: wire now, detonate later.
