Tag: stress

The lost meander

high contast black and white, grainy photorealism, parent and child walking together down sunlit street

I think something I have missed over the last year is living slow.

Not that I can say I’ve been living fast, exactly. More like I’ve been running along the knife-edge between adequate accomplishment and exhaustion. Getting the things done I needed to get done when I needed to get them done, and then crashing out while they didn’t need doing. All the while not really seeming to go anywhere all that interesting.

This morning my son and I took a leisurely morning walk to the local shop, and while we meandered through the sunlit streets, I realised how long it had been since I’d felt that peaceful ease of not having anywhere in particular to be for the next while, and just enjoying the slow journey from here to wherever we might go.

There is a lot of rushing around these days, but it’s not all rush. I try to build in parts to our week where we can slow down together, but the only way I can wangle it is if they do double duty – they need to tick off some other kind of purpose; education, enrichment, socialisation…there’s an undercurrent – an ulterior motive – and my body knows it.

We used to meander through the sunlit streets for no particular reason almost every day. And maybe that’s over now, but I hope not. I hope I can add it back in.

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Turbulence

There have been a lot of shiny objects, pressing deadlines, conflicting priorities and disruptive forces these past couple of weeks.

Life is bigger than it has been for years, so it all seems right on track as an external manifestation of the inevitable resistance.

Certainly enough to rattle me. Enough for me to foresee the overheating of the systems. But the plane isn’t going down.

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Lay me down

Lately, I have been waking up in the middle of the night, because my brain has decided that that is a good time to worry about all the things I’ve said and done the previous day, and how I shouldn’t have said or done them, or should have said and done them differently.

That’s not a usual thing for me to do. And it’s really not helping my already precarious sleeping situation.

But it might make sense. My son started school part-time this week, and thus I’ve been spending a lot of time driving around and whiling away aimless, unproductive hours here and there in between my childcare duties. I’ve also spent a lot more time than usual with his dad, with whom I have a festering wound of a relationship, to be quite frank about it. And on top of that (or, more likely, because of it) I’m feeling an increasing pressure to conform to societies expectations; get a respectable full-time job and a home closer to the city. Be more like Daddy.

But I’m not like Daddy.

And I don’t want to be like Daddy. I want to be like Me. The full and glorious, spectacular Me that Daddy never really understood. There’s a lot of noise and distraction in my head right now, and I probably just have to ride out the turbulence. But I’d be doing everyone a disservice if I caved now. Yeah, I want some of the things that Daddy has. And, yeah, I fucking resent him for having them and that’s an issue I’ll just have to keep working on. But compromising myself to try to get them isn’t going to lead me anywhere good.

And it certainly isn’t modelling the values I want to nurture in my son. He doesn’t want me to be like Daddy either; he wants me to be like Me. He might even need me to be like Me, so that he can learn it’s entirely acceptable to be exactly whoever He is.

I need to get real here. I need to be able to withstand the dissonance I’m experiencing right now. Because this is my life. It isn’t anybody else’s. I have the privilege and responsibility of making my decisions. Past traumas, criticism, external judgements, self-doubt; I need to stop paying attention to them. I need to stop giving them power.

My goal has never been a comfortable life. My goal has been an extraordinary one. And every time I bail out and choose comfort, because I’m too scared that the people who say what I should want is a comfortable life are right, I’m failing myself. I can’t keep failing myself. I only get one shot at this. And I’m a fucking good shooter. Why would I shoot for a team other than my own?

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White knuckles

I wrote this on the 27th April and then rode the subway car on into the abyss without a backward glance.

Lately, life has been feeling like riding on a rickety subway car, with no seats and no glass in the windows, along an old derelict tunnel. I’m sort of white knuckling the handrail as I’m shaken incessantly, really quite unsure whether the whole thing is about to crash into a barrier, fall through the floor or maybe just derail and skid along this subterranean passage for a while until it grinds to a slightly mangled, overheated halt. But on it trundles, at an impressive, somewhat alarming speed. Relentlessly. Constantly. Somehow still not there yet.

I don’t totally know why.

I’m in the last leg of my masters, and I’m certainly contending with the fact that I’ve allocated my time poorly up to this point and thus have given myself more of a slog to overcome than would be ideal. But I’ve lived through far more catastrophic levels of procrastination relatively unphased in the past.

Perhaps the pandemic has just frayed my nerves a little too much to cope with self-orchestrated academic crises.

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