It’s a Saturday and I’ve been up since sometime after 5:00 a.m. I laid in bed a while listening to the wind howl and watching the snow blow sideways and then up and then in swirls.
The last 6 months have, I don’t know, done me in? In that time:
- My mother-in-law died.
- I moved (again), to a different state and town (again).
- I got reorged at work after (more) layoffs and got a different boss (again).
- I traveled multiple times (again), despite having no energy to do so.
Those are the major dots on the map, if you will. But in between all of that I’ve been slowly falling into a sort of overloaded paralysis that is punctuated by constant aches and pains, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, despair, anger, hopelessness. There are so many words out there that I could choose, and it feels like every single one would apply.
I made a decision to take time off at Christmas for a deeper rest, because it seemed like I would be rendered fully disabled if I didn’t. But respites don’t really work when you have to jump right back into fire when the time is up. And respites don’t really work when it feels like your life is snowballing on all fronts, and like everything is continuing to get worse and less manageable rather than diminishing in intensity. That there is nothing at all you can control about what’s swirling around you. Kind of like the snowstorm this morning.
I think maybe part of what I’m thinking about is how the broader culture is impacting my already stressful life. On the one hand, I recognize daily how fortunate I am in so many ways. I have a lot of good, and a lot to be grateful for. On the other hand, my life really is just not going well on multiple fronts and it’s partly because of the systems around me. They simply do not support wellness during life’s tougher moments. And what I’m witnessing is the slow destruction, again (this happened in 2019), of both my physical and emotional health. I have yet to find a way out.
I’ve said for the last year or so that I desperately need a few months off to sleep. But unfortunately our society is not built for that. It’s not built for the rhythms of being a human – the activity and the rest, the seasons, the emotions, the relationships, the births and deaths, the changing decades and changing form. It’s built for capitalism, at least in the spot where I find myself on this planet. America values productivity, market dominance, money. Humans come last on America’s list. They are a means to an end an nothing more.
To that end, I have witnessed many wealthy C-suiters over the course of my career decide to “take some time to rest and recharge.” But people like me don’t have that luxury. People like me have bills due every month that must be paid, expensive medications that require health insurance, a rapidly approaching post-midlife era that must somehow be funded, and the knowledge that perhaps we’ll never get to do what we’d hoped to do with our lives.
March on, they say. March on.