So whonely

I guess this blog is inching towards being defunct. But it isn’t yet. Now that life is regaining some sort of shape after a particularly, acutely crazy year, I am wondering how that is going to translate into what I write and what I spend my bits and prices of time on.

And frankly I’m wondering what happens to me. What with one thing and another in terms of having young kids, aged parents, no friends in this new town yet - no friends in spitting distance - over the last few days, it’s came home to me that there’s no one to take care of me anymore. Everything and everyone around me wants a piece of the Spliffe. No one is handing out pieces.

This came home to me the other night during a date evening with the F-word, wherein we were having a lovely time, and at a certain point, after a little liquid courage and a lot of deliberation, I told him one of those deep dark suspicion things that you even forget half the time that you’ve got because it’s SO deep and dark, and so fundamentally challenging to who you are and who your loved ones are that you almost have to make an effort to remember. (Nothing criminal. Nothing dangerous. No panicking, thank you.) He responded with about 30 seconds of titillated shock. That’s about it. And then back to talking about the bitch at work, basically.

Admittedly his work is rife with bullshit, and a big problem. But to have had all of this deliberation and doubt about sharing this idea or this feeling with him, this thing that’s been weighing on me for the last four years or so, wondering what will change by me saying it out loud, and then 30 seconds later back to his work bullshit - which at a certain point just feels like a variation on the work bullshit he’s been complaining about for the last 13 years - 10 minutes later back to his family bullshit, the same bullshit I’ve been handholding through for the 20 years we've known each other . . .  and this - Thing - of mine down the memory hole like I’d never said it - I don’t know, man. I mean I can’t even talk to him about what happened and how I feel because if he forgot what I told him, he can’t be trusted to know it. Does that make sense? If this Thing is so inconsequential in his eyes that he could get back to his Bitch at Work schtick 30 seconds later then he just shouldn’t know about this Thing and I don’t want to remind him of it.

Anyways, the F-word is what he is. His problems are what they are, and they’re real. But that moment made me realize how alone I am with my own problems. That’s who I am, and where I am. And I’m not sure how I’m dealing with that.

I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND

I'm starting to suspect I have no inner life. Not in the way that I used to. My brain is just not being what it was; it's like my imagination has lost its attention span, or like some sort of fantastical muscle I took for granted has atrophied.

There is this combination of me spending too much time with trivialities on my phone instead of giving my thoughts space, and of being a combination of super-tired and super-preoccupied for seven years because of the children. Those things play into each other. The children don't give me much time to think, so instead I read about 19th century female spies or whatever trivia on my phone, which means I definitely don't have time to think, so I just look at more trivia on my phone, and then fall asleep before my brain has had a chance to explore its own inner life in the way it used to. It's a nasty situation. But there you are. It's also acute. The kids are getting less and less tiresome. Things won't be like this forever.

At the moment though, that's combined with being jumpy and twitchy as we summit this sort of fulcrum-point I feel like we're at as a family, financially and practically, of moving into a new place and calmer, less-worrisome shores . . . a good place, but one that I guess I'm a little petrified is either illusory or out of our reach in some way I haven't yet understood.

For reasons specific to this year - the move, the changes, and the fallout of having used an absolutely terrible financial advisor and of having to use contractors I don't trust as a foreign stranger in a city . . .  because of them, even though money isn't a problem (in the sense that we're not desperate for its lack), it's squatting on my brain, this dread of being ripped off or of ceding control for a second and letting someone else's incompetence cost me . . . oppressing me, in a way very similar to seasonal affective disorder; I had to realize rather than intuit that money was the problem. When you have SAD you feel the depression, not the weather.

Anyways. Again, fairly acute . . . I hope. I hope! Because with all this acute stuff, this not sleeping, these worries, these money paranoias, the constant triaging crisis of trying to be a decent mother to two young kids, and carrying around the world's best distraction device in my pocket . . . I feel like I have no inner life and I don't know if I can get it back. I don't know if I can have a brain-case that's not full of fretting, washing-dressing-cleaning-sleeping routines, interesting kitten gifs, and a dull, pounding, endless exhaustion. The endless rose garden it used to be up there is looking pretty concreted-over.

Concrete is what it feels like, really; like one of those valley rivers in an old mill town outgrowing its usefulness to the Philistine money-grubbing developers around it, getting concreted over for some shitty housing blocks and commuter roads. And I'm starting to be afraid I'm not going to be able to get planning permission to demolish all that shit and rehabilitate the river, even if I manage to manage all this acute stuff better, or move past it. Maybe I'm too old, or too tired, or too corrupt.  And we all know what happens to concreted urban rivers, right? Or maybe we don't, because other people spend less time on their phones than I do. Well, they get shitty and smelly and dangerous.

Well. One can only try. And delete the Facebook app from one's phone.