Just One of Those Days

This is the song on repeat in my head right now.

 

so I crawl underneath my blankets

where I can hide away, I know I can’t take it anymore

’cause I see now it’s just one of those days

 

I know quoting song lyrics is very Mysapce circa 2005…I suppose this means I’m forfeiting my rights as a card-carrying member of the adulthood club.

Ah well…being an adult sucks sometimes anyway.

So, as a preface, everything is fine.  Life is going along just swimmingly.  I just need to talk.

[Unrelated picture…Hobbes has been so, so snuggly since I’ve been pregnant.  He loves to chill on my belly.)

Some days, even for a couple of weeks sometimes, I feel really good.  Everything is just brighter, I enjoy doing things and don’t mind interacting with people.  I’m sometimes impatient and I’m often quite tired, but it doesn’t completely derail me.  I have this sort of optimistic energy bursting out from inside me, and I can handle things.

These are the days or weeks when we do tons of messy art projects, and the times when I scrub down the fridge and vacuum the car and even clean the freaking garbage disposal.

This is when I reorganize the house, or plan an entire homeschool year, and basically feel equipped to tackle any problem.  I even seek out problems, because I am a Badass Problem Solver and that is just how I roll.  I decide I want to have seven kids and homeschool them all while we live on gorgeous acreage in the middle of nature in an Earthship that we built with our bare hands.

[Don’t worry, I only have about 50 more of these.]

And then, overnight, that energy is gone.  Sucked from my body, leaving me an empty, exhausted shell.  What goes up must come down–the physics of life, right?

These are the days when everything seems hard.  The days when no amount of coffee can force me out of the haze.  Things are dimmer, as if there’s a fog obscuring everything and dulling all the colors, all the feelings.  They’re still there; I can just make them out through the mist but I can’t quite touch them.

These are the days when my body is filled with sand–heavy, wet sand.  Just standing is exhausting, and being asked to push a swing or locate a shoe literally makes me want to cry.

I don’t need a break, I don’t need time alone.  I get plenty of that, and it doesn’t help.  Not during these days.  The feeling, the greyness, persists when I’m alone, except now it’s staring me in the face while the minutes tick slowly by.  Nights are long because I don’t even know what to do with myself.  I can’t focus on or engage with anything, so the “read a book or watch tv or call a friend” list is moot.  And yet, I dread going to sleep, because morning, waking up to simultaneous weariness and tension in my body and staring at another day with endless hours to fill, will come too soon.

But nothing is permanent.  The good days don’t last, the bad days don’t last.  I take comfort in knowing I’ll be flying high again.  I just need to wait.  Find a way to pass the days, and wait.

 

 

Just to Feel

No one likes crying.

It’s uncomfortable and humiliating, especially for those of us that are ugly-criers.  The first time I heard the expression, “have a good cry”, I thought it was complete bullshit.  Crying sucks.  We spend a good deal of our lives learning to hold our emotions in, to fight back the tears, because public emotional displays are awkward and make everyone uncomfortable.  (God forbid we be uncomfortable.)

The other day I was reading, late at night, and the scene I was on stirred up something inside me that hurt.  A lot.  I closed the book and lay there, staring into the dark, with a sharp ache in my chest and tears in my eyes.  And then I gave in.

I cried and cried, just feeling the pain and the hurt and whatever else was buried in there, and I didn’t even attempt to wipe the warm tears that washed over my face and soaked into my pillow.  I just experienced it.  The ache in my chest grew and I felt the sharp stabbing in my stomach.  I cried harder and harder, as all of these emotions that I didn’t really understand overcame me.

And then, after a while, I was done.

The aching didn’t consume me.  I didn’t cry forever.  It faded eventually, and I was just okay.  Sad, emotionally worn, a little empty–but okay.

I dried the wetness on my face, picked my book back up, and continued reading until I fell asleep.

Sometimes it’s good just to feel.