It's interesting how tension in your life builds up and builds up, and can sometimes get to the snapping point before you realize it. It reminds me a lot of guitar strings - the tension in the strings is what causes them to play this gorgeous music, but if you wind one of them too tightly it will snap without much warning, and sometimes cut the hell out of your hand in the process. (Sidenote: I can change the strings on my guitar thanks to my good friend and colleague Dave, who is one of the most versatile musicians I know.) (Sidenote 2: Please don't ask me how my guitar skills are faring - that is for a later BiB entry.)
Today I am not pleased with myself much at all, and I am a ball of thrumming tension. I am at that point where the weight of everything I have to do in my life this week, this month, this year has all dropped on my shoulders like a ton of bricks and I can't wrap my head around how to make it better. I am frustrated at myself and at other people and I am taking out on everyone in biting comments and stubborn procrastination.
We all have those moments where the whole world seems too big to handle and no easy solutions are forthcoming. Where all you want to do is book a flight to Anywhere Else and let everything fall down behind you while you catch your breath. We don't do that, of course. We wake up, and go to work, and fulfill obligations and buy Christmas gifts and clean house and write papers and feed babies and pay bills and walk the dog. We do this because no one else can do this for us. We do this because this is our life, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.
Now, I'm not saying that it's not good to step out of a situation that makes you feel like that broken guitar string all the time. Sometimes a routine is a routine because we can't see another way, even if there might be something better. Sometimes letting a ball drop is not a bad thing.
But mostly it's just a rough patch, a coming together of a ton of tiny things into one ball of OH GOD WHAT NOW on your shoulders. And my goal this week is to try to take a step back and see all of these tiny things as their individual components as opposed to the tangled mass it feels like. I need to pull them apart and sort them into deadlines and doable action items, look at them one at a time and see that each of them is something I can totally handle.
This is going to be a hard one.
In the meantime, I should apologize to some people for being a terrible friend this week.
(This entry brought to you by the letters O, M, G and the sentence "my grad school application is due when???")
*smooooosh*
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