DECONSTRUCTION JOURNALS 12

I have begun to observe a certain behavior of mine.

When I was in college, tumblr.com was all the rage for young creative types, yet I refused to create an account for a long time because, “I would spend too much time on it.” I didn’t play video games either for this reason. I thought it made me self-possessed and mature.

The year I finally caved and started a Tumblr blog, I was already living with guilt and paranoia that God would ask me to give up art and writing because I loved it too much. I had been taught to see passions as idolatrous, in competition with God and therefore a selfish, short-sighted threat to my spiritual life.

Tumblr exposed me to many different viewpoints. Young people like me, doing what they loved and figuring themselves out together. Passively absorbing the stories of other peoples’ lived experiences created the first cracks that eventually led to my departure from Christian fundamentalism. Not to mention, seeing everyone’s art and writing brought me joy.

So I suppose in that regard, yes, Tumblr was dangerous. I did spend way too much time on it. But my online presence, my art as well as personal growth, improved dramatically because of it. I was enrolled in a challenging major at university, and still passed all my classes, as well as wrote the first draft of a 700-page novel.

Ten years later, I still find myself deliberately restricting access to things I know I will love, mostly in the form of media. Some part of me is afraid I will become obsessed with it. That it will take up too much room in my mind and the frustration and imposter syndrome will drive me to quit art and writing completely. That I will spend all my very scarce work time watching, reading, daydreaming.

It sounds strange, writing it out. This subtle pit in my stomach. This unspoken, unhinged method of restriction and control.

I’ve been putting self-care on my goals list each week, and manage it at least one day out of the seven. Sometimes it’s cooking myself dinner, writing for fun on projects I’m not officially working on at the moment, shutting down all to-do lists for a night. Last month, it was watching a show I had been keeping on my radar like a kid at the candy window. I was afraid I would love it, and I was correct. I binged it all in one night, stayed up long past my bedtime on a weeknight. I felt like I was nineteen again, watching cartoons online after a busy week. I’m still thinking about it quite a bit. I’ve already rewatched some of my favorite episodes.

The soundtrack is gorgeous. A fascinating blend of genres, surreal and emotional, heavily incorporating piano and organ, which, as a child of traditional church musicians, speaks to a deep place in me that I still love and hold sacred. Listening to the score at my day job carried my spirits through an extremely busy workweek. I still crashed hard at the end of it, expected of yet another marathon of overwork and sleep deprivation choosing thirteen-hour work days over giving up on my passions, but the next day I felt less hungover, overwhelmed, and depressed. I was able to be more present with my partner on our weekly Saturday outing. I’m more inspired than ever to work on my creative projects.

I’m reminded of other works of art over the last year that I let myself experience and love, the ways they have comforted me, bolstered my nerves, let me process emotions I struggled to access on my own, how they have influenced my current work in beautiful and exciting ways.

I have been slowly learning to incorporate enrichment in my daily life. Intuitive eating, bicycling, journaling, birdwatching, music…I often feel like I am forced to forget these things in favor of the survival mechanisms tearing away at me. I watch myself showing up less and less for things antithetical to my health and wholeness. I’m not only resentful of continuing to indulge these things, but I can’t manage to make myself align with them anymore, even for short periods of time.

I suddenly find myself at a crossroads. I would have liked to make some of the steepest changes on my horizon this year when I felt more secure financially, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that either I very soon take myself out of the game voluntarily, or my body will do it for me. Swiftly and unceremoniously.

I think I was able to keep it at bay for so long by pushing it behind this fear of change I developed over the last year. But I’m moving in with my partner soon, which has forced me to begin orienting toward a whole cascade of change. Each new notice submitted, logistics planned, ad posted, my control over my own misery slips more and more out of place.

I don’t know what the next few months will bring, but I’m trying really hard to land on my feet.

DECONSTRUCTION JOURNALS IX

How do I push back against the hopeless darkness of depression and burnout when I’ve been scalded deep by toxic positivity?

How do I embrace the joy, love, and support in each day when emotionally, I’m stuck in a snapshot of time when my last shreds of safety were crushed and betrayed?

I have grown a lot of good in my life since those days, but I struggle to trust any of it. I’m always on some level waiting for it to be a trick, or to be ripped away the second I allow myself to become vulnerable. I fail to notice good omens, and take the bad days as confirmation that I’m lost to the dark.

Acknowledging that my internal and external realities are inconsistent is useful on good days. But most of the time, it rings a perverse harmony with the manipulation and thought-policing of my past.

The depression is familiar. But if I allow myself to feel the things I push away, I’m afraid to find out what chaos it could unleash in my life. I might immediately quit my job without a backup plan, leave my support network in the city and move back in with my parents, give up on every dream I ever had.

But maybe I need that.

Maybe the dismantling of my life would nullify the ways I am genetically resistant to peace.

+++

A/N: I’m angry today. Wish healing weren’t so complicated.

Burnout

A little girl is staring up at me. Her eyes are big and blue. She has heavy brown bangs and buckteeth.

She’s clutching 40 pages of a story she wrote and typed out herself.

That girl looks back at me when I catch my reflection in the mirror. I feel her waiting. The depths of that naive, full-throttle eagerness, throbbing in my head.

Somewhere deep, now.

As I sit at my desk, terrified, trying to convince myself I’m all right and on track, I feel the tug at my sleeve.

“Why are you stopping?” she asks. “Are you going to give up? Is that what happens to our story, in the end?”

She thought she’d grow up to be tough and brave. Hoping for something like a downright prodigy, a blazing success story.

But right now, she just has me. Trying. Choking on an intoxicating mix of burnout and intimidation.

It’s windy on the cliff’s edge, even if it’s somewhere I desperately want to be.

I’ve curled up into a ball. It’s not time to jump yet, with every possibility of turning back. And 8-year-old me is not understanding.

She’s angry and scared that I’ve even thought of turning back.

How dare you be finite, she screams. How dare you be weak and fragile.

Why are you like this? Why are you weaker than I was before? Why are you so old and tired within so few years? Why does your breath stick in your throat and your hands tremble when faced with everything you’ve ever wanted? It’s so close now. It’s yours to reach out and take hold of. So why do you sit there, useless and blank?

I thought you wanted this.

Could I have been wrong?

Could we have been wrong…

+++

A/N: I’m leaving for San Francisco in a few days. Burnout is still in full swing. I’m as overwhelmed by the prospect of picking back up as I was weeks ago, but now I must be busy and keep my appointments.

 

 

Stress is gray

Undergraduate senioritis is so much worse than high school senioritis.

I’ve been carrying around a can of Red Bull for four weeks. But I haven’t yet found circumstances dire enough to willfully consume this failsafe. I feel like whatever I need to be able to pull through the remainder of this semester, caffeine and taurine’s not going to cut it.

I have been drinking a lot of coffee, though. But more as comfort food.

I’m not so much sleep deprived as utterly and completely burnt out. At this point, I think I’m too far gone for any stimulant, direct or indirect, to be able to remedy that.

It’s time to get psychological, I think.

When I think of doing homework, my insides shrivel up and it feels like every bit of life housed in every one of my body’s cells is opposed to the concept of fulfilling my academic duties. But it’s just homework! What’s the big deal? Learning is good. I like learning.

But this semester’s been hard, and these days, I really can’t be bothered to care enough.

The scary thing is, I felt the burnout last semester, but my reluctance to devote time to academics stemmed mostly from an acute need to further my creative pursuits. This semester, I still have the need, but the motivation to do anything is declining fast.

Bedtime is my favorite time now. That has never been the case up until this point. Two weeks ago, I legitimately woke up in the morning and thought, disillusioned, that I would have to go the entire day before I could crawl back into bed again. Which was quite unnerving to me.

I don’t want to do homework, but I find myself not wanting to do anything else either. Not writing, or drawing, just nothing. That and the very definition of my existence does not compute. What happened to “I’ll sleep when I’m dead?” What happened to actively pursuing coffee dates with friends? What happened to spending time outside or making time for people? Playing video games and practicing backflips when the weather’s nice or drawing cartoons until the sun comes up?

Gradually, I see the world of “boring adults” in a different light.

Prolonged stress. This is what it does to us.

If I could use a color to describe myself right now, gray is the color I would name. Without hesitation, without deliberation.

Gray.The color of stress, of fatigue, of burnout.

I find myself wasting a lot of time, sitting still for hours on end doing nothing of consequence, never fully fixing my mind on anything for a particular span of time. I think I need to keep better tabs on myself. Not create a meticulous schedule for myself per se, but make sure I’m engaged or that I’ve deliberately disengaged instead of dismally floated off into a stupor, or cycled through social medias three times in a 10 minute span.

I feel like my current way of doing things is slowly killing me. If I’m avoiding something, I should deliberately avoid it and do something that will keep my mind off it and recharge my courage a bit instead of letting the looming obligation constantly suck energy out of me. When I decide to work on it, I’ll work on it.

But I do wonder if I have the energy to do this. To simply not sometimes, instead of fill the fatigue with noise.

Perhaps I can pull it off.

I know this state is temporary, because I’m peace-ing out in three weeks and moving on to new things.

Until then, the remainder of this semester stretches before me like endless nails on a chalkboard. But perhaps I can find gratification in work completed instead of endless distraction.

I want to be excited and optimistic, make the most of the countdown.

But I’m not making much out of anything right now. Only making myself sad.

And I’m not usually willing to accept things as is, so I think there has to be a way to fix that.

Still, if all else fails, I’ll be free in three weeks.

Ventilation

I always wanted to be a prodigy. I easily took to things, and if I liked it, I practiced it obsessively.  My phases were rife with flares of thwarted, perfectionistic fury–until I achieved proficiency, at least. I wanted to be the youngest, the reliable, the extraordinary. Not the best, necessarily, but undeniably impressive.

Yet I always seemed to come late to things. Gymnastics, for example. I cared little for the sport until the 2004 summer Olympics. After a single night, something arose from within me, and I knew this was going to become a key passion. Something that would mark the rest of my childhood, perhaps even my entire life.

But I couldn’t enroll in classes right away. My friend did, though, and whatever she taught me, I practiced constantly, relentlessly. Finally, at 12, I was able to start recreational classes. In a fortuitous string of events, I was admitted onto the level 4 team. The typical profile of level 4 gymnasts was 8-10 years old, and under 5 feet tall. I was 15 and 5’5″. I can only imagine what my coaches must have been thinking when they decided to give me a shot. I struggled and fought my way through conditioning. I had such a long way to go to build the muscle necessary to support my adolescent frame, while the younger kids were downright feathers. But despite any pain, frustration, and countless ripped blisters, back problems, and aching muscles, I loved it. And I progressed quickly. In two and a half years, I was training to compete level 8–though the demands of my senior year of high school and college preparation drove me to step out of the sport earlier than I had planned.

Gymnastics wasn’t the only late-manifesting obsession. My interest in drawing became preoccupation when I was a sophomore in college. It not only rose to prominence as a main hobby, but completely changed my career focus. I spent the summer after that year drawing from noon to 5am every day, with the exception of the month I studied abroad in Costa Rica. Sometimes I look back on that time and think to myself. I’m insane.

Science and writing are the two exceptions to this trend. I’ve always been a science nerd, and I’ve been writing fiction since I could piece together words.

Essentially, I need a forte, something to be really good at, along with a network of subsidiary proficiencies. I need to have something constructive available to constantly channel this persistent, nagging drive to pursue and create–a drive which has led me to writing, drawing, crocheting, unicycling, gymnastics, book-binding, biology, Spanish…among other things. My overarching journey of self-betterment and spirituality interfaces with and informs this need as well, but it seems to have its own distinct category.

And sometimes–these days especially–I wonder if my life would be less stressful if I wasn’t trying to pursue so much. In fact, I know it would be.

But my key pursuits are like ram ventilation: I have to keep moving to breathe. Like a shark. (Maybe I’m a shark.) And school has always imposed itself as an appreciated/hated mandatory reality, so it doesn’t quite count for me.

This need to find something to work toward and live for is not uncommon. Perhaps this is something sharks and the human spirit itself have in common. We can’t stay still. Except, with humans, our ram ventilation can get misdirected and land us into very deep trouble, or we run into trouble trying to quell the feelings of suffocation of having stopped. Some humans never learned the necessity of continual movement. Some came to a deliberate halt.

Some, like me, can feel the pace accelerating to a speed far beyond what we are perhaps capable of handling. But we try anyway. We angle ourselves directly into the flow and let the current buffet us. And it’s too much–so much that, interestingly enough, we can’t even breathe sometimes. Moving forward in such a torrent can strain and weaken us until we start to break under the pressure and pain of holding on.

We know we can technically step out of it, find out what it actually feels like to have everything stop. Sometimes suffocating in the cessation looks more appealing than continuing forward.

But we don’t remove ourselves. We stay in the current. In the pain. In the overwhelming hydroelectricity.

Because, despite the pain, it’s still worth it.

Because this is breathing, dangit, and we feel alive.

We feel alive.