God, I hate Mondays. Except... it's Tuesday, isn't it? Having a long weekend is wonderful in many ways, but sometimes the returning feels more bitter somehow. Perhaps it is the fact that my company let got of 5% of our workforce, again. This is the fourth round in the past year, and every time it happens, it hits me harder. As if I were in the midst of a corporate Battle Royale. Holding on by the skin of my teeth and hoping I'm not next. Because it is a bad market out there right now. So perhaps work is bringing me down and fraying my nerves. Or perhaps it is sleep deprivation. I slept 4 hours last night and have been groggy all day. Or perhaps it's the cumulative stress of my schedule since school restarted. I start at 4 AM and am on duty, whether it be work, home, or my family from the minute I wake up until 9 at night, when my husband finishes his workday and relieves me of my duties. I keep trying to take what I'm doing and bend it to work better, but the exhaustion and pessimism continue to affect me. It's a bit like a miasma I can't shake, or a self-fulfilling prophecy, where I can't process anything, so I proceed to destroy everything around me.
I guess I ranted a lot, and complained. But I probably needed to write this down. When I am at my worst, most bleak moods, only writing can bring even a small measure of lightness back. Because I struggle to cry out. No... I cry out and hate every second of it because it means my mask has fallen, ans I am gloomy Dreaming in Celadon, scolded for being anything other than perfectly sunny at all times. I try to think of the positive. How I finished knitting and reading I was putting off. How beautiful the cables are in the new socks I'm knitting and how the yarn is deliciously rustic, a tweed fingering merino with the prettiest little flecks of black and cream. How I dove into another surreal world in a Murkami novel. How I felt I was in the night every second I read it. How I joyfully reorganized my stationary, holding all the pretty letter paper and admiring the art of cats, bread, tea. Not everything is bad. But this heaviness in my heart is trying so hard to dominate me and to make me not enjoy my life. The pure physicality of it takes my breath away. My breath feels slow, and my heart beats too fast. My eyes burn and my head throbs. I know I need to get a new job, work out my schedule, but I feel stuck and unsure what else to try. I can't control everything. I don't even want to control everything but I fear sometimes that my pleading for help at home is falling on deaf ears and that there's nothing else I can do but to just push more.
You have power over your mind--not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
– Marcus Aurelius