7 friends in the midst of crisis or major life changes and stress
3 immediate family members in the same
1 job that demanded more than I expected in the past several weeks
3 days in the past 2 months that weren’t scheduled
1 day in the next 3 weeks that isn’t scheduled
2 long car tips in the next 3 weeks
1 big decision coming up soon: to move or not to move, that is the question
I’m ready to get off this ride now. Thanks.
Work decided to rise up and clobber me the last couple of weeks, and especially this week. Wall-to-wall meetings and classes and appointments mean that simply looking at my calendar induces claustrophobia, and yet I have to keep looking at it to make sure I get to the right things at the right times. Cruel world.
I would like to cope with this by getting home, kicking back, hanging out with friends in person or online, reading, writing, playing with the cat… all the normal things I do to relax. My body, though, has other ideas. Apparently I am now on a strict 8:30 bedtime, and like any good 2-year-old, things fall swiftly apart after that point. Of course, it never feels like my fault at the time. It feels like the merciless jabs inflicted by a relentless bully of a life. It feels like I’ll never catch up, never be healthy, never have a family of my own, alienate my friends…
But really I just need to pay attention, realize I’m tired, and go to bed even if it does feel ridiculously early and like I’ve had no time to do more than eat dinner. Apparently 11 hours of sleep at a stretch is the key to sanity, at least for now. Maybe I’ll even remember that at 8:30 tonight when I’m getting off of work. Maybe I’ll just go straight to bed when I get home. Maybe.
I wish I’d remembered that last night.
As I went through my evening routine, I suddenly became grateful for a particular habit and order in my medicine cabinet. I brush my teeth (tooth brush and tooth paste all conveniently right in the middle of the medicine cabinet), floss (which is kept as inconveniently as possible right where I want to put my toothbrush, so that I remember it), use a little mouth wash (left side of the cabinet), take out my contacts (solution and case kept in the right side of the cabinet), and then go to bed (which is not kept in the medicine cabinet, just in case that was unclear).
Tonight I realized that it’s probably a good idea to keep the mouth wash as far from the contact solution as possible. Mixing the two up could be disastrous.
Each of the three acupuncture treatment rooms has its own black boom box, each with its own CD of soothing music. After each initial interview, Mae sets that CD playing while she places the needles, turns out the lights, and leaves me to lie still for twenty minutes. And I lie there.
Today, as I lay there reminding myself to relax those pesky places that prefer to stay tense, listening to the voices from my day play on endless loop in my mind’s ear, and wondering if this would be the day when I’d lose the battle and actually fall asleep during my treatment, I realized for the first time that the room I’m in determines the music I hear.
In one room, a rippling piano anchors the new age-y strains. In that room I find myself consciously relaxing sets of muscles in the same way that we’d relax in the last minutes of a yoga class. It seems that if I move my hands to either side of the treatment table I’ll feel the grooved hardwood floors of the yoga studio, and I find myself thinking that a sheet is a much nicer surface to lie on than a yoga mat.
In another room, a different piano picks its way delicately through the calmer classics. In that room, with that familiar music, the treatment table feels more like my parents’ couch on a summer evening as the cares of the day melt into the quiet question, “how shall I spend my evening?” With no urgency to come to a decision, I sink into the weave of the upholstery, feel the cording press into the small of my back, and wonder idly if I should lie still or expend the effort to turn onto my stomach.
The third room amuses me. In this room chamber music from the classical and romantic periods have been laced with nature sounds. The effect is very much like attending a concert in an arboretum (except for the one track when “Air on the G String” seems to have been performed on a sea-facing cliff). And for the most part, the effect can be relaxing as long as I work a little at imaging myself as the sort of person that would get invited to a chamber orchestra concert in an arboretum… and a sea-facing cliff. But then, just as I have the effect firmly in mind and can almost feel the organza of my garden party dress tickling my legs in the breeze, a goose honks. Geese are not relaxing or melodious. Geese would wander through the garden party nibbling the ribbons from our dresses, biting those who refused them hors d’oeuvres, and leaving piles of dung to decorate the bottoms of our shoes.
Tonight I spent time in the garden party room. The improbabilty of my place in such an environment turned out to be a welcome distraction from my internal narrative, which was bent on explaining to me that a goodly number of my current friends have only known the sick version of me. Sobering thought. Sobering, that is, until you realize that by this time in the garden party, there’s no way your shoes could have escaped all the goose dung.
I’d planned a Day of Sloth for Saturday as part of my patience-regenerating regimen. So when I woke up Saturday morning I watched TV, read, wrote, and generally embarked on my mission to do as much of Nothing At All as possible. And things were going pretty well until one of my good friends got her heart broken right there in front of me.
In the afternoon I met a friend at the coffee shop so that she could write and I could read, only together rather than in our separate houses.
Back at home, things started falling apart….
First came the surprise nap that left me more tired when I woke up than I had been when I fell asleep. It felt like I’d been transported back to the dark days of early November when I’d lose days on end to mind-numbing fatigue. And I wasn’t hungry when I woke up, but I’m used to not being hungry when I get that tired, so I ate a little anyway.
Several hours later I learned just how bad an idea that had been, but we’ll skip lightly over that miserable portion of the night.
Which brings us to this morning. Most of the day was a miserable blur of naps, watching Hulu shows, and sipping water. At one point I called home and wound up crying at my mom and using histrionic phrases like “I feel like I’ll never be healthy again” and “I can’t do this any more.” Poor Mom. (The moral of the story? Don’t answer the phone if I call you today. Really. It won’t be pretty.)
But things seem to be improving. I’ve eaten a biscuit and drunk some lemon tea with honey. Making tea still takes just about every bit of energy that I have, but hey! I can drink tea! And by tomorrow, I have to be able to teach.
Surely this was rock bottom, right? It’s gotta be about time to start heading upwards. Stay tuned for posts about the strange and quirky things that happen around me and that I will soon have the capacity to notice again. I promise.