I am tired.
I miss the days when life was simple. I miss college. I miss Grove City in the fall, I miss my professors and my classes and my friends, I miss knowing exactly what each day would hold and yet knowing nothing about what each day would hold. I miss the expectation of new and wonderful truths to learn, the interaction with ideas, the walk from my dorm to class, the slightly different smell of the stony Western Pennsylvania air every morning. I miss days with plenty of gaps in them, time to wander the wooded spots of campus. I miss cutting class just because I felt like it, to take a nap or plunge down the shallow gorge of Wolf Creek to disappear among the trees and listen to the pines talking to each other in a language I could almost understand. I miss the delight of discovery.
I hate the dull humdrum unchanging pointless routine of my life now. I hate feeling like nothing I do matters.
And I'm tired of the force of will I exert every single morning just to get out of bed and face the day. Every single day I choose, again, to persist. Most of the time it seems that there is no reason to do so, except that I've done it so many times before, and the alternative holds no more pleasure than the present choice to keep moving. So I keep moving.
I'm tired. I feel dull and stupid and close to tears, I don't know where my sense of humor went, I can't concentrate on anything for longer than a minute or two (at best). Probably today's little crash came because of the enormous amount of energy I put forth yesterday.
Right. Here was yesterday:
I cantored for the first time in my hometown parish (in the Catholic church -- I can't speak for other liturgical churches, perhaps it's the same there too -- a cantor is the person who leads the singing, which is woven throughout the Mass. I would stake a lot of money on the assertion that "cantor" comes from the Latin "to chant," since before Vatican II chanting is basically all that was done in church. Chanting still holds supreme in the psalmody -- the response psalm -- which is also my favorite part of the Mass to sing). And naturally, because it was my first time cantoring and I had basically no idea what I was doing in specific to that parish, the little procedures being different from parish to parish, the regular music director wasn't there, and a substitute filled in instead. To further complicate matters, the priest was gone too and we had a visiting priest subbing for him. I took comfort in the fact that no one knew what the bleep was going on, so any mistakes I made wouldn't stick out.
It went really well, all things considered -- things like my not having practiced until half an hour before I arrived at the church; my ungodly awful cramps; the worsening of the depression over the weekend; the hideous adrenaline surge (which my body still isn't processing well, or something) from singing in front of the church, particularly the psalm, so that my hands were visibly shaking when I left the lecturn. The little old nun who was subbing in for the music director asked me if I were a music student at one of the schools in Erie (gratifying); when I told her, "Oh...no, I've never been trained," she said, "You can't mean it" (even more gratifying). She also told me that I did a "lovely" job with the ad lib chanting that the psalmody requires. A very helpful young man who apparently also cantors, and who gave me hastily whispered This Is How Things Go If You Have Questions tips, told me after the Mass that an older gentleman leaned over and asked him, "Who is that pretty young lady up there with the beautiful voice?" And as I was gathering up my things after the service, an elderly gent approached me and told me, "You have the voice of an angel."
So all in all, it went pretty well. Music is one of the few things in which I take pleasure when I'm under the dark like this, and I'm glad I was able to go through with it. There's a strong streak of the performer in me which feels really genuine when I sing in front of people, and church music is a good vehicle for my voice.
At the same time, it cost me a lot of effort. I'm not physically managing stress as well as I normally do, and little efforts require enormous exertions of energy, from internal cisterns which have gone all but dry. And after Mass, tired and wired though I was from getting through the service, I jumped into a car and met up with one of my former coworkers from the bookstore and headed to Ohio for the local Renaissance Faire, and didn't return home until 10:30. I really like Steph (who, it turns out, is an NT on the Kiersey temperament scale -- a Rational -- which pretty much automatically means we get along), and she's an easy person to hang out with, so I didn't feel uncomfortable when halfway through the afternoon my brain shut down and I had to grab something caffeinated just to organize cohesive sentences.
I was puzzled by it at the time, but after this morning, when all I felt like doing was dissolving into a little heap of weeping bones, looking back I realize that that was when I dredged up almost the very last of my social reserves to get through the remainder of the day. I had a good time, I enjoyed myself, and now that I'm learning to look for patterns of communication as I interact with others, I recognized with gladness that the easy exchange in conversing with Steph came from the abstractness of our thinking and speaking; but still, I was absolutely worn out.
It's a strange conundrum. On the one hand, I don’t particularly care to be alone, because it’s easier to sense The Nothing devouring at the edges of my consciousness; on the other hand, it’s difficult being with people because I’m not quite up to the demands of interacting with them on what I consider a normal level (in other words, I’m not up to keeping up the shield of Smile and Everything’s Fine; but even more than that, it’s honestly hard to pay attention to the conversation and respond in complete thoughts). Scylla and Charybdis. Which to choose?
Probably sleep.
But I did do one thing this weekend of which I’m proud: I transferred all the photographs from my old phone to my computer. It took six hours on Saturday afternoon, but it did completely absorb my attention, and the completion of that project now allows me to close my old cell service account (having switched, of course, when I bought my new phone). It may not be the most important thing on my list, but it was something that needed doing, and I did it of my own volition. I am proud of myself for that.
I keep telling myself that everything’s going to be okay. I want to be okay. I want to believe that everything’s going to be okay.
I’m just really, really tired. And yet, that I keep making the choice to persist, that any other choice really isn't a question, means that underneath all of this blahness and bleakness the core of my being is holding to a core of hope that goes beyond feeling merely hopeful (which I don't) and really believes something -- "being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see." And it doesn't feel comforting, exactly, but it does comfort. My soul waits for the Lord. Which means that I hope. Which means that everything's going to be okay, even though it isn't okay, right now -- and so, in a paradoxical, block-time kind of way, everything is okay, right now, even when it isn't, because it's going to be okay, which means that in some way it's already okay.
Again, it doesn't feel comforting. But it does kind of steady me a little. Which is nice, because I can't hold on to any objective sense of time, and everything feels weird and blurry, and I'll blink and the clock says an hour has gone by and I look at my hands and wonder if I went into some kind of time warp, or if I'm really that zoned, and is it really noticeable?
I want Simon. And my big comfy bed. And my nice cool sheets. And the blinds drawn. And either birdsong or thunderstorms.
Well. At least the few hours that need to pass until I get those things should disappear before I know it.
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