Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Under

I don’t want to write. For like two years that was all I could write, I’ve got like three spiral notebooks that say “I don’t want to write” or “I hate writing” on every page, then it got a little easier, today it’s a little harder.

This past few days everything is a little harder. I’m having a little bout of depression. I have decided that it’s a little bout. I like to control things by naming them.

These days, everything is kind of hard. Like, not can’t get up hard, just hard enough. Just uninspiring enough. Just oceanwater resistance enough.

I spilled some birdseed on my bathroom floor, and it’s been there for days saying “what is wrong with you, there is birdseed on the bathroom floor.” The near perfectness of the new house and the less than perfectness of the moved in items and person is overwhelming. The number of skirts in my closet is overwhelming. The prospect of blow drying my hair is overwhelming. My student’s lack of a pen is overwhelming. And those are just the things that are by no other means overwhelming.

When I feel like this, the hardest thing is people. The hardest people are normal people, saying their normal shit. “How are you?” “How was your trip?” “How’s the new house?” God, how I loathe these questions. On a healthy day I take it as a personal challenge to respond to them honestly. Days like today the only honest response would be to punch the person in the face.
What the fuck is the way to answer that anyway? The answer is bundled up in the question. Obviously I’m fine, it was good and it’s good. You already know the answer so why are we participating in this exercise which makes my eyeballs want to get out of my face?

I do not know how to present to the people I love when I am like this. Being depressed makes me feel like I am a teenager and then everything feels like terrible teenager behavior. I feel petty and verbose and irritating and like a big burdensome pain in the ass. I am very aware of the fact that I am not engaged in making everything OK for everyone else. Then I want to hide under a blanket.

I assume this is here to remind me not to be smug. So I will try to remember not to be smug. I am pretty smug, a lot of the time. There but for the grace of god, most of the time.

I wrote this much. I think that is enough.

1 comment:

  1. You are enough. It is more than ok that you are not engaged in making everything OK for everyone else. Because you are enough, as you are, whenever you are and however you are. Even hiding under a blanket.

    <3

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