I feel a detachment from the outside world, which dresses itself in an indecisive grey-blue sky. I want it to thunder, with a torrent of rain. Life has gotten dusty.
I dress myself in an equivocal mood: I want to stand in the deluge; I want to rest inside.
Wow, when was the last time I wrote here? I think it’s been a few days. I’ve been busy scheduling internship visits and going on internship visits and recovering from internship visits — in other words, summer as usual.
I’m struggling to write. This might be because I skipped to the last chapter of my book, hoping it would be an easy write, and it has been anything but. Maybe I need to go back to a hard chapter and start setting up for the final battle. There’s a few chapters of setup there to happen. Maybe it’s those doubts about writing creeping up again.
I’m not going to get out of those doubts any way but to start writing again. Even this short entry is writing, and I can do this again and again until I get out of the rut.
I want to feel effervescent, like Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: Spring. Effervescent means bubbly, but not in the sense of a bubble bath with its larger, comforting bubbles. Effervescence is fine, tiny bubbles, fizzy bubbles, sharp on the tongue when drinking sparkling water. Where bigger bubbles sing like whales (if they could), effervescence tinkles like fairy bells and giggles.
Today is not an effervescent day. It has been gloomy all day, with a tendency toward light rain. I am not effervescent today, not even bubbly. I’m cold coffee looking for ice so I can chill. If Vivaldi composed this day, it would be the Fifth Season: Blah. The opposite of effervescent.
I don’t know how to make myself feel effervescent, or maybe I do. The right company can make me feel effervescent. A crush can definitely make me feel effervescent. Enough hilarity would make me feel effervescent. (As a nerd, I have some go-tos for this: Galaxy Quest, Middleman, Shinesman, Young Frankenstein). Hypomania makes me effervescent right until I’m clutching my hair and yelling “Make it stop!”, so I don’t want to go there. I definitely prefer the other methods.
Right now, in the middle of a rainy work day, I’m going to have to settle with not being effervescent. That cold coffee isn’t bad with a little cream and ice.
Feeling uninspired today, I decided I would try the prompts that are now packaged as part of WordPress. And as you can see from the above, I got a doozy.
I’m all about big audacious goals, showy goals, big reward goals. Intoxicating goals. Probably comes from being one of those honor students who got external validation in the form of praise and trophies.
There’s one little improvement that would increase my quality of life, but thinking about the improvement itself makes me want to sit in the middle of my living room and cry.
It’s cleaning my house.
My house is about what you’d expect with two bookish types working full-time who hate housework. I have writing as my pressing hobby; Richard just hates housework.
Our house is cluttered. Despite the fact that this house is over twice as big as the one we moved out of eleven years ago, it’s just as cluttered. We just got more stuff to fill the space.
I feel like my writing would be better if I didn’t have to look at so much stuff and move it aside so I can sit down. Having a clean house would feel like a holiday!
I have to start somewhere, and there’s just so much stuff and I can’t throw any of it away. Maybe if I (and/or Richard) pick one room at a time and have a sorting basket nearby. Think of places to put the clutter, places that make sense. Don’t put the clutter in yet another pile to be sorted eventually. Proceed to the next room, which hopefully doesn’t have new clutter piles from the last room cleaned. Phew!
It looks like maybe cleaning the house isn’t a “small improvement” after all.
I mean that title metaphorically, not in the coffee sense.
I have become sleepy lately (extending the metaphor). No Big Audacious Goals, just work and writing on a novel I’m afraid is sleepwalking across the countryside. No exciting plans this summer. No tempting opportunities. Nothing that gives my soul a psychic jolt of caffeine (this extended metaphor is getting silly).
I know I should be able to wake myself up, but inertia is so difficult to break. Which is why I need an assist from the Universe. I want this to be a good morning wake up, not a wake-up call in the colloquial sense, or a wake up and smell the coffee. A good gentle shake, or a cat plopping on my chest. Or fireworks, I’d take fireworks. Or someone yelling from the doorway.
In the meantime, I will see if I can make myself that metaphorical coffee.
I will hit 60 in a couple of months. It’s been hard to listen to music, because I keep gravitating to the music I listened to when I was younger, and I get a flood of memories that distract me from the moment. Sixty is a lot of years to remember, and remembering makes me feel old and dizzy.
I’ve read cocooning in the music one is familiar with is a tendency that starts in middle age. Or maybe it’s a Boomer thing. Today I’ve broken the habit and play music I’m not familiar with, because I have cushioned myself in the familiar. Singer-Songwriter music from the ’10s instead of the ’70s. No more dredging through my childhood.
Perhaps this is a key to not letting the big milestone crush me. For I feel like it will crush me, like I will wake up the morning of my birthday and the weight of all those memories will obliterate me. I was born before Kennedy was shot, an event my students don’t even recognize, much less identify with. September 11? They don’t identify at all.
I think the key is moving forward, to save the golden oldies for meditative afternoons when I don’t mind dredging through my past. This is not that time. This time is for something new. The playlist is different, but I’m getting into it. Maybe I won’t get crushed by my past when the time comes.
I just found a prompt on Loomly the other day (Loomly is a social media manager like Hootsuite except more user friendly and much cheaper) that suggested, just as I’ve seen suggested on TikTok, that ‘everything is content’. One should present what one is doing to the millions, thousands, or (in my case) dozens of followers on social media.
I have problems with this. First, not everything someone does is ‘on message’. People expect a theme to one’s presence. On TikTok, @alexisnicole usually forages and makes amazing recipes with her wild crafting. @bdylanhollis cooks vintage recipes with often hilarious results. @dontcrossagayman tells his everyman hero stories about his interventions with bigots and creeps. They stay on message.
Second, not everything someone says should be out there. I have chronic bipolar depression. I know I can occasionally say “I’ve been dealing with depression,” but what I can’t do is go through a stream of consciousness about what it feels like to be depressed. That’s too much. I can’t ask my readers to be my therapist.
I must admit I struggle with content. I seem like I write all over the place, from reviews of apps to snippets of poetry to progress reports on my writing to my own personal experiences. If I have a message, it’s “This is what it’s like for me as a writer.” Part thunderstorms, part computer programs, part coffee, part cats, part violets. I hope it works, because I’m trying to stick to the good content.
I am just coming out of a depression. I don’t remember going into it, instead easing into it as if it were just a change of season.
I reminded myself that I was not feeling depressed. There was no self-flagellation, no remorse, no desolation. That was the big lie — that my reclusive behavior, my flat affect, and my resignation to being (in my eyes) a failure wasn’t depression.
Telling my colleagues that I was fine if they asked me if anything was wrong (and they asked me at least three times) was another lie. I am known in my workplace as being bipolar, and thus I feel I have to be on my best behavior lest they think I was going to the hospital again. I told my colleagues again and again that I was doing great, and maybe I even believed it because the temporary bubble of positive attention (that I felt I didn’t deserve) buoyed me. But then I fell back into the grey of my life this last winter.
It’s only now that my mood has risen with the Spring that I discovered how low I had fallen. I have depressive tendencies in Winter, but I didn’t expect to have fallen to the place I was this winter. The scale said I’d gained weight; I didn’t pay attention to my looks. I did very little. Too many times, I accepted negative self-talk as the truth about myself.
What could I have done differently? First, I could have caught the mood change sooner. I need to find some signs of the doldrums before they become depression. Second, I could have been more honest with myself and others, and maybe I would have accepted a medication change. Third, I could have been better to myself, but only after the first two were in place.
Bipolar Disorder is a weird disease, seeking balance in a body that wants to go to extremes. In fact, I am watching now to make sure I don’t tip in the other direction toward hypomania with its endless elation and debilitating restlessness. This is my life, and it’s not that bad. Maybe the biggest lie is the stigma I surround myself with that isolates me.
Some people spend years in Zen meditation to reach what the professor has attained at the end of a school year: An empty mind.
My brain is empty. I am no longer looking forward to the end of the year — it’s just there. Next week I will sit in office hours looking at my gradebook and giving exams. I will grade the exams. And then I will be done with the semester and … nothing. My mind will consider “What’s for lunch” an unsolvable calculus. My only emotion will be relief. If I even have an emotion; many times I just sleep for 23 hours straight.
I’ll have a week of numbness to get over the oncoming train, which is the end of the college school year. Not so much mindfulness as mindlessness.
And then there will be summer semester and 20-some interns to supervise. But at least my days are more relaxing most of the time.
I can’t wait till the school year is over. Have I mentioned that I can’t wait?
The students and I have made this journey for the year, broken into two semesters, and we’re tired. The semesters culminate in final projects and exams, and none of us are at our best. I remind myself of grace and the fact that I was once a student, and not one a teacher would ask for.
I have 75 students in classes and about 6 interns each semester. We all have our issues that weigh on us. Some of my students have issues with depression or anxiety or other mental health concerns. Many work at least part-time besides going to classes. Some have learning differences and need accommodations. A few have family issues that pull at them. People have died in their lives — some too young. All of this at the same time as an educational experience.
This summer, I will supervise somewhere between 14 and 20 students. But it’s a different experience. Summer is more relaxed for me because I lead the internships mostly from home over the computer. I don’t have a lot of exhausting face-to-face time (as an introvert, this is so big) and no meetings. I think it’s more relaxing for my students as well, as their performance anxiety is less in an internship where they’re learning by doing. My students are still working at regular jobs, sometimes even full-time, so they’re still under stress.
I can’t wait till summer, and it turns out I don’t have to wait long. I have the rest of this week, and then next week is finals. I’ll have a bunch of grading, and then I will be done. I will turn in grades Monday the 8th and then start my interns with a presentation on Wednesday.
Wish me luck.
Words Like Me 