* I started the sleeve for the "A Cardigan for John*" Tuesday while doing my exam, I guess I feel a little more enthusiastic about it again. I give another exam tomorrow so I'll work on it then. I have buttons - bought on spec - for it but I'm not sure I love them, they might be a little to girly for the style of the sweater.
* I'm also still picking away at afghan squares. It seems likely I WILL have enough of the black for the 17 squares I need - I'm working on number 11 right now.
* Lots of stress dreams. It's been warm here and I've resisted turning on the AC, partly because I feel like I should get the company out to check it over first to be sure it doesn't need a tune up, but also because it feels too early to put it on. Last night I dreamed worry-dreams about having to bring the soil samples back up from the muffle furnace - it's about a 50 yard walk, uphill, over uneven pavement, and if you trip and spill the samples you've ruined a student's project. I got them up okay, but I dreamed about it last night and that made me tense.
I don't sleep well when I'm too warm.
I'm going to try changing the sheets on the bed tonight to see if it helps; it's been a week or so, and sometimes I may carry in pollen or mold spores on my hair or something and maybe I have a build up of allergens. Or even just the "Dumbo's feather" of "I have clean sheets so I should sleep better" might help.
*Also just not having a great evening - I'm tired, as I always am midweek, am staring down the longest teaching day (And AAUW meeting tomorrow night). And tonight I read the news that apparently Fauci finally stated what I guess I should have suspected all along: we're not going to reach herd immunity, ever. We're not getting rid of this. It's going to continue to be a threat for as long as I live. And with low vaccine uptake here it feels riskier to me. I'm vaccinated, but still, breakthrough infections are a thing, and there are still a few people around me with immune conditions. And maybe I have to teach in a mask forever if I want to maximally protect students who might be concerned? And just plan on boosters forever every six months, and have to constantly monitor in case a bad new immune-escape variant comes out?
And I want to lie down on the floor and throw a tantrum. It's like I've been living this two years waiting and hoping for my life to be able to begin again, and now....nope, it can't. My life has changed much for the worse in the past 2 years. The ONLY consolation, the ONLY good thing that's been added has been biweekly Zoom knitting but I also know that won't go on forever. But there are a lot of other things I lost and I assume now I will never make another "local" friend.
Also people various places were just being - or as I felt - needlessly fighty and unpleasant and I don't know how to interact with people any more I guess. Were people always like this? And I just never noticed? Or have people gotten worse? Or did I over-romanticise what people were like during the period of isolation.
I don't know. It's just hard. I wish I had something big and good that I could look forward to but it feels like it's just more of the same - mostly getting pecked to death by ducks.
* I also find myself thinking again of the people I've loved that I lost, and how my heart has been (figuratively) shattered to pieces five or six times in the past few years, and every time a few pieces of it get lost, and I feel like I don't have enough pieces left to put a complete heart back together again - and I have no way of getting NEW pieces, so I feel like I"m just walking around with part of a heart and it hurts a lot. And I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to fix things outside me any more and make them better, and I've NEVER been good at fixing things inside of me.
I also find I've lost a lot of my intrinsic motivation for things; a lot of what keeps me going now is not "I want to do this" but "there would be bad consequences if I didn't do this" and I find more and more I need some kind of outside validation - which is harder to get now. I wonder if the ability to self-validate is something you can run out of - or if so-called former gifted kids* never really develop that because they so often get validated by parents and teachers. And I don't know how to find that intrinsic motivation or self-validation again.
(*I don't think I ever actually was; I think I was just a compliant kid who worked harder than the other kids at stuff, so I LOOKED "gifted" by comparison)
* Oh, things will probably be better tomorrow. I am probably just over tired (what is the saying? "If you feel like you hate everyone, you need to eat, and if you feel like everyone hates you, you need to sleep"?). But it is harder to find consolation and comfort now than it once was, when I was younger and less battered by life. And I also know some of this is just the knock-on trauma of the past few years, starting with my dad's death (and maybe even before, maybe even when Steve died) and I read something today about how sometimes when you've had a series of deaths/losses in your life, the later-coming ones, even if they are objectively "smaller" (someone you didn't know as well or care as deeply about), you feel it harder because of kind of a cumulative effect and yes, I think it's true I've lost an uncommonly large number of people in the past 2 1/2 to 3 years. And that's even without the pandemic, and the budget problems at work, and my worries about having to do a really hairy new prep for next spring, and worries about geopolitics and the world in general.....it's just a lot, and I have no one that I can just lean my head on and have them tell me it's going to be okay (even if I might in my heart not believe them about things going to be okay). It's really hard just going it alone in this life, and it feels a lot harder right NOW than it ever did before.
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