| Sunday... what have I done today? The number of useful things I've accomplished includes (1) doing dishes (2) making the bed (3) cooking hamburgers for the Borg and (4) putting Sydney to bed. A grand total of four activities by which to justify my existence. |
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| But, it's Sunday, right? All other normal workaday people (and Christians) are supposed to be resting today anyway, so I guess I'm off the hook for now. The trouble is, most of my days are like this now, Sunday or not. Do I care? Sometimes, yes, I worry about what this is doing for my psyche - the too much time on my hands analogy. Other days, I just feel that nagging sense of leftover guilt permanently recorded by my mother into the tracks of my biological disc player. You know, the voice that says, "What are you doing with your life?". And still other days, I can almost defend what I'm doing by telling myself that I deserve this, I've worked really hard (too hard) for the last three years, and my body and spirit needs a break from the demands of an obsessive overachieving mind. |
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| I think today my care-meter is registering at category number one... what the hell will happen to my will to succeed at anything if I keep living purely to please myself in the moment? Oh, it's so tempting to defend this philosophically by saying that living for the moment is the only way to be true to oneself... to live according to a plan is merely an automatic response to Christian capitalistic programming. And besides, if I keep living for all my tomorrows instead of my todays, won't I forget to appreciate what I have now? And what if I get hit by a bus in one of those tomorrows and I never had a chance to enjoy my life, be in love, live for my physical cravings, be introspective and intellectual for my own pleasure? Sounds like a pretty good philosophy to me. |
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| However, I know I'm just polarizing my choices...I can only either be the ant or the grasshopper, and nothing in between. That's just not true, no matter how hard I try to convince myself. I just don't know how to live without extremes... either do nothing at all (or rather as little as possible) or kill myself doing everything to the max. |
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| See, once upon a time (not that long ago, I'm only 27), I was Ms. I Can Get That Done Better Than Just About Anybody. I love the picture that my life painted for others... I was a single parent living on social assistance (with a stiff upper lip), going to university on student loans, getting a GPA most students never approach, tutoring and editing papers for free for my friends, volunteering my social time for political interests on and off campus, campaigning for council president or helping others with their campaigns, serving as single parent representative for the university, speaking at events like the Montreal Massacre memorial service, looking after my friends' children, maintaining a relationship so dysfunctional that no idiot ever deserved it, and still managing to spend countless hours on the phone or at my kitchen table listening to crisis after crisis of my growing list of "friends". Isn't that a cover story for Ms. magazine or what? I did everything with as little help as humanly possible so that I could be above reproach... absolutely no one could call me lazy, ambitionless, unintelligent, stagnant, passive, or fearful. And no one did, except of course my so-called partner, who couldn't handle my looking anywhere nearly more productive or sucessful than he was. |
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| All that was well and good, of course... I had all the right people being "proud" of me, and as a bonus I never had the time or the energy to stop and examine what was going on in my own life, let alone in my own head (now there's a dangerous attitude for a blossoming psychologist). This was just fine by me... life is a hell of a lot easier when you can think everything and feel nothing (after all, who can feel when you're either running or sleeping?). |
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| So this is where the big "trauma" or "crisis" or "revelation" is supposed to enter the story, right? She's superwoman, so she's supposed to eventually fail or be swept off her feet and forget it all (if she belongs to popular fiction, that is). Okay, I confess, I'm typical, that's why I am here now with the time and inclination to write all this down. So what happened? I don't know what kind of diagnosis I could have heard had I looked for one - chronic fatigue, post traumatic stress disorder, nervous breakdown, acute depression and anxiety... pick one, it doesn't matter which. It all amounts to the same result: I was completely emotionally and physically comatose. All of a sudden one day I could not get out of bed anymore. And for that matter, even if I could, I couldn't think of a reason anymore why I should bother. This pretty much came as a shock to someone who had spent her whole life hearing, "you are so together, I don't know what I would do without you, you're like a rock". All of a sudden the doctor became the patient, so to speak. |
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| One problem was, the doctor didn't have the foggiest clue how to be a patient. I had absolutely no idea how to ask for help or even what to ask for, let alone who from. You's think that twenty thousand dollars worth of an education in psychology would have given me the first clue, but guess again! To make a long story short, the only thing that got me back out of bed (I don't mean to make it sound like I was always there... I did manage to get out long enough to screw up my final exams or to get drunk) was a prescription for Prozac. For the first time in my life, I found God, and it came in little green and yellow capsules for fifty bucks a month. |
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| -lysergia, october 1997 |
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