Dear Internet,
It’s just shy of 8PM and I’m already for bed. Tomorrow I have to open the library and man the reference desk at the unreasonable hour of 730AM. To be sure, however, I’ll need to be partially awake for that to take place and I’m already plotting my caffeine consumption. I am going to need it.
I was in a dark place this morning when I got to work, made darker still by some work dealings that I blew off because if I had taken them seriously, I would have slit someone’s throat. Sometimes people are just obnoxious, but fighting me on a one time change is just ridiculous. Did the world end? No. Now go the fuck away.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon, after my tepid lunch of stale pasta salad and food I ravaged from the vending machines, working on stats.
While I got incredibly engrossed in my stat doing, I noticed the heaviness on my chest and the sense of foreboding that was plaguing me in the morning had almost dissipated. The existential crisis of this morning seemed to just leave a taste of what it was – but I find at times I can’t shake it completely. It usually begins with a Talking Headsesque series of questions (How did I get here? This is not my beautiful wife!) and then leaps into me making tally sticks of what I did have (husband who loves me, a good job, good income, a beautiful home, a cabin in a desired area, anything I could possibly desire) and even then, making notes of what I have — all very good things mind you — didn’t seem enough.
I am hungry for more.
But more what – – ahh, that is the question I can never answer. At least, not sounding like an insane person.
Over the years I’ve come across people who were similar to me and whose lives for a brief moment, joined mine in parallel. Then they move on, and I move on, and later I find that the lives they lead are the lives I want to lead. I have never known abject jealousy before until this happened. And I didn’t know, don’t know, how to handle it.
I know it’s healthy to look up to someone(s) and be inspired by them, and I feel that I’m inspired all the time by many people. But these 2-3 others, whose lives I don’t want to be inspired by, I want to have their lives. I can’t shake this demon off my back because I would truly like to enjoy them for their products, not be a creeper plotting to SWF them.
[Though, to be fair, one of them has liberally lifted some ideas/concepts of mine that were published publicly on this site years and years ago for their (now published) fiction. So thanks. I guess.]
But that isn’t really it either, this wanting the life of someone else because in my mind’s eye, I’m more than the sum of my parts. I’m more then these adjectives or these people’s lives that I covet so far from the body. But I can’t shake the feeling that I should be doing more, doing a lot more, and that the doing more isn’t here. It’s somewhere else. And it’s with or without my husband (depending on the time of day when the crisis hits).
Fight or flight.
Pattern for my entire life. I had thought, assumed even, that once I got the degrees, and the boy, and the job, and the house, and everything I worked for, my life would settle into some kind of happy state of domesticity.
I feel like I was wrong.
I kept telling Dr. P. that something big was going to need to happen and then I realised that in order for that something to happen, I’d have to make it happen myself. Then I start to feel strangled, as if I can’t function in some capacity whether emotional or physical. The heavy weight sits on my chest and demands to be petted.
Then I hide in my bedroom until the next day comes and I start all over again. I look at time frames and see self-promises made weeks, months, years ago remain broken and unfulfilled. I am nothing, in the cosmic sense, and it doesn’t seem to all matter. The only freedom is the flight in my brain when the drugs hit me with a left hook to soothe me down.
Then I wake and start all over again.
x0x0,
Lisa (Day #39)
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