Senescence & Sensibility

A follow-up post.

So, yeah, the deathaversary of my husband passed without incident. But hoo boy, has it been a week of ridiculous near misses with Extreme Feelings about Seemingly Small Stuff.

On Wednesday, I dumped most of my granola and milk breakfast all over my desk, under the sympathetic but amused eyes of three male coworkers. And there I was…struggling not to cry over spilled milk. Pretty sure I said “DON’T HELP ME, PLEASE,” to one of them.

Naturally the old adage lights up in your brain. Of course you are pre-judging yourself for being upset.

I could probably put together a decent pile of essays about crappy platitudes, but this one is really annoying. Fully, I believe, it’s “no use crying over spilled milk,” likely just a(nother) way to get kids to not feel feelings, which seems like it was really important for a long time. But why not?

We should be careful about obsessing about things we can’t change, I get that. But the fact that there’s so very much that we can’t change feels like a very good reason to cry.

Also, it was MILK. It’s all over EVERYTHING.

Have I mentioned my foray into intermittent fasting? Can I tell you that it’s a lie? I mean, maybe not. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if I were the only person on earth it didn’t work on. What I do know is that I am more disciplined about this than I have been on any other food-related strategy. On at least 6 days a week, I eat everything between 10am and 5pm (or 5:30), which is pretty extreme compared to some. I eat three sad, tiny meals at my desk at work, the picture, if anyone was looking, of an extremely single person with food issues. I’ve been doing this for roughly two months or more. Granola for breakfast, some yogurt and a handful of nuts around 2pm (or he equivalent) and then a salad or other vegetable-forward dinner. I have lost no weight. There are no rewards in life, kids. My blood sugar levels might be improving but to know that for sure, I’d need an engaged healthcare provider, and that doesn’t exist if you’re not actively bleeding or unconscious.

NO SHIT I CAN’T CHANGE MY MENOPAUSAL METABOLISM, THANKS FOR THAT. I can’t change my body image disorder, I can’t change the fact that my husband died a hundred years ago, or that I’ve been alone since then. But I won’t cry, don’t worry!

Anyway, all that to say that the granola is my best meal. I make it myself, it’s important to me. But also, it breaks a 17 hour fast. “But I’m so hungry,” was my first thought. Impossible not to feel a lot of feelings.

Everything is heavier this week, but also, everything is heavier anyway. We’ve all been through it. Exhausted, at the end of our ropes. My younger self would have thought that hard times would get easier as you get older, but this is emphatically not the case. Nothing is the thing alone. It’s the thing plus all the other things that came before. That’s true even without a global plague, a crumbling democracy, and an imperiled earth.

I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. I mean that – I’m truly sorry. I know I’d do better than this.

The bigger question is why aren’t more people crying? Why isn’t everyone? I’d love to say it’s fortitude or resolve, but I’m afraid they don’t even know it spilled, you know?

I haven’t cried in ages; everything is so locked down. I tear up from time to time, but I never manage to tip over. I can’t help but wonder what will finally do the trick, when nothing has for so long. There are so many good reasons, maybe I just can’t choose.

Not that you need a good reason. To be clear, you don’t.

I’m listening to sad songs and remembering this day 14 years ago, when my husband died. I was there with his family when it happened. And we all have to mark the day, there’s no way around it.

He had cancer, but in the end, his lungs filled up and he couldn’t breathe. It was the longest 15 minutes of my life. Part of the horror of Covid for me has been knowing how most of those people died.

I took off from work today, which I always do. This far out, it’s not as if I sit home crying all day (even if I wanted to, see above), but I like to give myself the space to do and feel whatever I like without an audience. Mostly, I just sit and wait for it to be over. To reset my year, which revolves around this day, no matter that it’s been so long or that I’m trying so hard to build something new.

Impossible not to wonder at 14 years going by, gone.

I told very few people why I was taking off so I got a lot of “have a great time!” and “lucky you!” type comments. I mentioned it to one coworker and to my surprise, she hadn’t known about him at all. Which seemed like a shift, if I’m looking for one. My widowhood feels like a defining fact about me. I mean, it is. It’s an immutable truth. But it feels strange that people can know me now and not know about it or him at all.

I used to drop it into conversations. If felt important that they know this thing. At least part of it was self-consciousness. Someone loved me once and for a long time. But now it’s a little embarrassing. Someone loved me once, a long time ago.

My reading choice is almost always romance – for a hundred reasons, but chiefly it’s the happy ending. The assurance of a bow at the end is the only way I seem able to enjoy anything. I’ve realized lately that I emotionally attach to fictional characters in big ways, so it’s self-preservation, really. I can’t invite more grief into my life. I’m afraid of what will happen if the floodgates open. I’m afraid I’ll never stop crying.

I’m reading a book now and I’ve been dithering and taking breaks and reading other things, because I was pretty sure something bad was going to happen. (In the book, I mean. I know bad things are going to happen in real life.) To be clear, it would be a bad thing on the way to a guaranteed happy ending. It would be only temporarily bad, that’s the sworn contract in romances. But I couldn’t go on, I was so anxious. Finally, I read the first page of each of the remaining chapters, to get a preview, just so I could move on. I’m this afraid of what’s coming, of what surprises might be in store for these people. Of how much bad there is.

I’m tired of surprises. I delight in almost nothing. This has been true for a while, but it gets worse all the time. I can’t see fireworks without thinking about all the dogs and birds and veterans. I can’t look at the ocean without thinking of that Texas-sized mass of floating plastic. I can’t think about Texas without thinking about women who will die now, women who wouldn’t have had to.

What to do? We answer that probably a hundred or more times a day. What is next? What needs doing? What am I capable of? Does any of it matter?

Right now, on this day, in the US, the answers are bleak. No idea, everything, nothing, no. It is uniquely destabilizing, and I say this as rather an expert on feeling overwhelmed and ineffectual.

Life just got so much worse for all of us. You, your family members, your friends. If you can get pregnant, or if you’ve ever had sex with a person who could get pregnant by you, you are in this fight. This will affect where you go and when, how you conduct yourself in public and online. You will lose people you care about. It’s all of us.

I’ve been plagued since childhood with the idea of the world ending. It’s becoming clear lately that I suffered from a dearth of imagination.

For a small and powerful group, this is all working exactly as intended. They want me to despair. They want us to fold. That’s what we’re up against.

I realize that there’s never been any such thing as a happy ending. We were always going to die alone. But there was a chance, at least, that at the start of a new chapter, things would be okay. We might even get some scenes of pure joy.

There are those that say it has to crumble; it was always built on a faulty foundation. I get that, I do. It’s looking like we’re going to have to pull it down ourselves. The moment calls for more, but I have no practice at this.

And I’ve been resisting the truth of it. I live right now in that disbelieving, slow motion, screeching, “oh, god, we’re going to crash” moment, and it’s exhausting. It feels like there’s no way to avoid the collision. I’m mourning what was (what maybe wasn’t). And soon, I hope, I’ll be able to take stock. Count heads, divvy up the chores. Begin again.

Honestly, the words aren’t exactly flowing. Not sure if it’s [whispers] The Block, or if there’s just nothing to say about the state of the world. I’m officially speechless. We are spiraling, and we have the power to fix it and we won’t. It’s incredibly difficult to stare into this abyss.

I’m told people were always this awful, things were even worse than this, we were just protected by privilege and by the lack of reach that social media affords. But I don’t know.

There seems to be nothing a small and emboldened group of people won’t do to make other people’s lives miserable. And it feels like they are winning because none of the rest of us can understand it, let alone fight it. And because that minority can’t be shamed. We aren’t speaking the same language. They only understand violence.

I read a very clarifying thread recently about how this basically comes down to oppositional defiance. There are people who have decided that no one will tell them what to do, but that they themselves will do the telling. Then they proceed to make the rules for others to follow, and every last one of those rules hurts vastly more people than it helps.

I think that about sums it up.

I exist, uneasily, in a little bubble where everything is basically fine. Or, I should say, I have gotten used to all the ways it’s not so that it all doesn’t feel burdensome. I’m protected, by my comfortable living situation and a secure income. I’m more grateful than I can say about all of that, but I’m guilty and scared too.

You have to put away a lot to go through the motions, and I can feel an erosion of my patience at work. The story I tell myself is unraveling a bit. I haven’t had a good cry in ages, but one is on the horizon, I think.

My cat is dying, the last of the animals I’ve had the privilege to know. Until him, there was always an overlap, some other darling whose fur I could bury my nose in. But he’s the last one. (He’s also the last one who knew my husband. The anniversary of his death is a month away, and I can’t say that’s not a factor in my mood just now.)

There is a lot wrong inside the cat, but with luck and steroids, you (and more importantly, he) can’t tell. He’s over 17 and generally looks like a younger albeit skinny little man. This is incredibly stressful, this death watch. Almost everyone you try to talk to will tell you “you’ll know when it’s time,” but I’ve done this eight other times in my adult life and I know that that point when it’s time, that moment the scale tips, is a moment too late. I don’t want him to feel even a little pain or fear. But I don’t want to miss a minute of his purring, happy company. I don’t want him to miss it. He’s happy; I did and do that for him every day. In a world where nothing you do seems to matter, it’s nice to have this living reminder.

I rather famously adopted two senior dogs some time back, and when I tried to explain why to baffled onlookers, that’s the reason I came up with. Because I knew I could make their last chapter better than anything they had known before. It was doable, when so much of what we do doesn’t seem to matter much.

I will be creatureless for the first time in perhaps 30 years, and I dread it. I know I should take the opportunity to travel, I should relax and restore my vet-related financial losses. But I don’t know if I can take being in this space without another living thing.

As above, I’ve gotten used to being alone so that it doesn’t feel burdensome. I think about it a lot, I wish and I wonder, but at this point, I can’t imagine sharing my life with a human being. I can’t imagine not sharing this space with at least one animal. Part of me thinks I should do it as an exercise, to see what it feels like, but I would do better trying to figure out why I think I should self-administer a test like that. I think I’ll make it about 5 minutes. I may have already researched local rescue orgs.

I am trying to be productive before a midday social commitment I am no longer interested in doing. This is thoroughly typical of me, and I will push through. I’ll be happy to have done it, if only because it’s a tick in the “I did it anyway” column. But it should be fine, fun, whatever.

I prefer to do my running around on Saturdays and leave today for resting and total solitude. And when there’s a midday thing, I tend to let the whole day be about that and nothing else gets done.

What happened to those slow summer days of my youth?

I get resentful, that’s all. Going to a new place, separated from the parking options by a steep hill, to gather in huge numbers for a foodie festival thing during a spike in subvariants and mass shootings. Ugh. How does anyone do anything?

This is all the usual introvert’s lament. But it’s more now. Everything has a layer of festering awfulness just underneath, doesn’t it? How do we go about the usual things when we know that? What can any of us do?

It’s been forever since I posted here. I’ve labored over what to even talk about. The main things are too big – the crumbling of the republic, death of the earth, war, what have you – but the small things feel even smaller when pitted against all that. I have nothing new to say. I’m baffled, saddened, furious, and ultimately ineffectual.

Personally, I’m doing fine, even great, and that feels so weird and unfair and surreal. Work is still fun, I recently got a great review and a raise. It’s not like every day is a pure joy, or like they’re not basically all variations on the same theme. But it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t rob me. After a lifetime of feeling drained and unhappy and trapped by work, I’m more grateful than I can say.

I have finished the manuscript for a book of essays, one I hope to self-publish within the next year. It’s slow going, but it is going. I’m determined.

That is pretty much everything. Things are basically good in a terrible time. I will go and find parking and make small talk and eat flaming cheese. I will be glad to have done it, and if not, I will be glad to get home again.

In a weird sort of time warp at the moment, preparing to perform my one-person show at the home of a friend, a coworker who is transferring to Europe. We’ll have a small, hotly contested, audience of other colleagues. As it always, always is, the prospect of doing the show feels vastly different from the reality. A good lesson, probably, but I haven’t learned it yet, so let’s not get our hopes up. I want to say I’m pulling open a door I’d shut, but let’s be honest. It will never shut completely.

From a distance, it sounds great. There’s something in me that wants to show these people – all so very good at what they do – that I too have something I’m pretty good at. Something more than creative meeting scheduling and a sunny workplace attitude. But my doubts rush in. I can tell you the precise moment in the script when my brain starts to send the message that I’ve been talking too long, they are bored, this is bad. The aftermath is a lot too, all the ways my various mental disorders make it impossible to hold on to what I know from a distance is good.

The planning has exposed some holes in the relationship with my coworker, too. Nothing I didn’t know before, but I think it’s finally come clear how uneven this is. How much I do for him, how little I get in return. He can be very charming, lots of people are drawn to him. And he’s used to it, he basks. He is my anchor at work, a fount of information and generous about sharing it. He has an easy laugh, which is probably a factor. Making people laugh can be a drug you chase, a false sign that you’re in favor, or whatever. It’s always my goal, so that people will be comfortable, so they’ll like me. My currency. But that doesn’t necessarily follow. I know he cares and considers me a friend, but I also think he’s arrogant and spoiled, and I just don’t mean as much to him as he does to me. Which is not his fault, but it’s always going to sting.

Intermittent reinforcement is a bitch. I should know. By now you’d think so, anyway.

I’m not devastated or anything, just sad about having fallen into this familiar trap. It’s hard when you recognize patterns. When you’re drawn once again to that difficult personality, when your goal is winning favor rather than building bonds. It’s a knee-jerk thing for me, not my fault it happened in the first place, but it will be if I let it go on.

And nothing really has changed, I’m just a little more clear-eyed. I can still care about him in the same way, I just won’t show it the way I have been. It helps that he’s leaving. He’s already assured us, after all, that he’s terrible at keeping in touch. (“But if you reach out, I’ll respond.”)

I can talk myself into being okay with uneven relationships, and turn tiny little gestures into meaningful proof of a person’s regard for me. But it’s just crumbs. They don’t nourish or sustain anything, and I can do without them.

I’m part of a friend trio at work, and the third is a much better friend. She knows how to do all the friend stuff, and not just some of it. Sadly, she too is moving on, she already gave her notice. And honestly, there are no other prospects at work for bond building. I’m pretty picky about who I spend time with, a true introvert. I may have just gotten even pickier. Maybe it’s my age, but I can’t waste my time, and I’m fine alone. People can be so much work. (And then they leave.)

This show is a lot of work too. Funny how I can make parallels out of anything, but it takes so much out of me to do it, and for what? To make people laugh, to hear evidence of their regard, ephemeral though it is. It still feels like I’m gathering crumbs. Begging for favor. Hoping for a return I can’t possibly get. I can’t for the life of me tell if it’s worth it.

Ordinarily, I love a new leaf turning over. Love the symbolic reset. But we were so hopeful this time last year, so sure the worst was behind us, it’s a little hard to find that same level of hope right now. I don’t relish the idea of being kicked in the teeth again.

But that’s okay. If I’m more cautious about what this year will bring as far as the world goes, I’ll be very happy to be pleasantly surprised. That’s the upside to low expectations. And it’s here whether we’re ready or not.

I spent five days on the east coast with family and I’m resting up now before work starts again tomorrow. It was a good break and a great visit home, but goodness, I am not a good traveler. Just dehydrated and tired and constantly worried about home and the cat. (Both just fine.) I used an app to basically borrow a person’s car for the week, saving about $150 in cash and adding a $10,000 in anxiety. I managed to lose my phone – for the first time ever – in Newark Airport of all places, and that was an adventure I don’t need to repeat. Grateful for kindly airline luggage personnel who managed to offset literally everyone else I had to deal with for those 90 minutes. Not one part of that counted as hardship, however. I am safe, my family is healthy, and we were together in a house with a tree up for the first time in years. It’s been years since the last time I was with them at the holidays.

So now here is the new year. I am determined, as is my recent habit, to make this year look different from last. Some project, some something. I plan to self-publish my book of essays, so that will be the main thing. And I hope to travel to the UK in July/August, which will be the other big one. And I need to figure out my blood sugar, a perennial goal. I am about to renew the lease on my apartment, but I think that next year’s big thing might be a move to someplace I like more and that serves me better.

Feeling a bit low, considering how little I have to complain about. But that is likely more to do with the state of the world than anything specific to me. I want the things I mentioned to happen already, but that’s all for me to do. And I suppose there’s some survivor guilt in here. Life is so hard for so many right now. Trying to figure out how I might help make that better and feeling overwhelmed, as usual.

I am off to polish the manuscript a bit and maybe nap on the couch as I have the last few days since I got back. Tomorrow I’m back to work, and if I’m not looking forward to it, I’m not dreading it either, so that is a step up from virtually all the other jobs I’ve had.

Wishing you a surprisingly good new year. I hope it exceeds all our expectations.

They are using big words to describe the 5-10 inches of rain we’re expecting here. Words like bombogenesis. And atmospheric river, that’s a fun phrase. All of it a bit…apocalyptic. But what isn’t these days?

I was looking forward to a rainy weekend. Such a rare pleasure to be indoors and have nowhere to be. To have a hot cup of tea while you watch nature do her thing. Of course, nature is awfully angry these days, and with good reason. You have to put so much away to enjoy anything.

I’m closing in on the editable draft of the book I’m…assembling, is the word I want to use. I say I’m just putting a collection together, but I’m doing a lot of new writing. I don’t know what I’m avoiding with the careful language I use to describe it, but probably the usual stuff. I’m not a writer, mind you, I just wrote a bunch of stuff. No big deal.

Work is very busy right now. I still enjoy it and I’m still surprised by how much. There are absolutely the usual, ubiquitous workplace irritations, but happily they can’t seem to tip my scales. I genuinely like and respect the people I report to, and I am happy to help my coworkers get their work done. I am most definitely on the bottom rung (again), but as I’ve said, they pay me better than I’ve ever been paid for that. It has dawned on me lately that at least one of the reasons I stayed so low at my various jobs – always settling at the bottom somehow – was to keep myself out of the line of fire. I am, simply, never in the crosshairs, never in danger. I can exist without any of the anxiety that virtually everyone else is to varying degrees affected by.

It was subconscious, but it makes perfect sense. There’s a trade, of course. I am not particularly challenged by what I do, for one. But I can still contribute, I can still show up, I can behave like a rational adult. Be consistent, funny, helpful, encouraging, open, and so on. I can, maybe, relieve some of that stress.

And I can also, you know, spend a weekend doing what I like. Brewing tea and waiting for rain, writing (or “assembling,” if I can’t quite get there) under no pressure at all, except for the challenges I’ve created for myself, on my terms. It’s an okay trade, honestly.

I’m writing a lot, just not here. This used to be almost the only place I wrote anything at all, and I’m very, very glad that I kept that habit up over the years. I’m in the process of compiling a bunch of writings into what I hope will be a book, and I’m grateful to my former self for starting this obscure blog project and keeping up with it.

It’s easy to think nothing gets done – and in my case, certainly, nothing big gets done in much of a hurry. But small, incremental movement does indeed add up. And it’s not just about having written things down occasionally, it’s about the careful, detailed chronicling of things that I almost certainly would have forgotten about. I’ve mentioned this before, but if I go back even five posts, I’ll learn something surprising about how I was feeling when I wrote that, something I wouldn’t have necessarily recalled ever again.

I do have disordered thinking, so maybe that’s part of it, ruminating obsessively for time and then moving on to something new. I would not have thought I could forget the ins and outs of how I was feeling, but retaining the nuances is probably hard no matter how your brain works.

So this is just more “magic of writing things down” talk, but there is magic there. It never fails to amaze me.

Up early-ish on a Saturday and staring down a big week, with things fun (old friend in town) and not-so-fun (colonoscopy) on the horizon.

Work is going well. The occasional down days remind me how good things generally are. Feeling settled in that part of my life bleeds over to others. Partly this is because of the paycheck, and partly (mostly) it’s not having to spend so much mental energy on work and job stuff.

I have been writing a great deal. I’ve never said that before in my life. But I am. Not like it’s a ton, but I’ve established a daily practice and that has done wonders for me. It sometimes backfires – I am writing every morning before work, and sometimes those are hard things to carry around all day. But the overall progress feels amazing. I can actually see a book coming together, however slowly.

The morning writing has also improved my evenings and weekends in ways I didn’t anticipate. I can treat them as the restorative time they are instead of beating myself up the whole time.

I guess this is all about how to talk to a weird brain.

Can’t say enough how glad I am that I moved. Obviously, it’s a lot of improvements and that wasn’t the sole thing, but with distance and time I can see just how depressed I was in LA. I mean, I knew I was, but a lot of the frustration I was feeling and the behavior I was reporting had more to do with that than I realized. I should be clear that I also didn’t know it was a solvable problem. It seemed to me that I would always have to fight the same-sized monster, and I’m finding that it’s much, much smaller and less scary. Maybe I just have a better arsenal. Anyhoo.

This doesn’t make for interesting posts, so it’s been a while. There’s plenty I could complain about (and I did in the last post) but that particular fire has died down, and I’m trying to be careful. There are ways that work and the people there disappoint and frustrate me, but a) I’m operating from slightly higher ground, moodwise, and 2) I don’t want to eff this up. I don’t want to let the usual office bullshit ruin what I know to be the best job I ever had. People always exhort you to be grateful. I am, more than I can say, and I’m not going to help poison the well. I watch people sabotage their own good fortune all the time – I am a wise old crone in a sea of young people who have never known job insecurity. I want to shake them, but we are not alike. Not at all.

That sometimes gives me pause. It’s hard to find like-minded people on a good day, and I am new in town and older than most of my coworkers and not – no surprise – all that inclined to be social in the ways those people like to be social. That has not changed. I need, in the end, very little from other people. And that’s fine, even if I wrestle with and mourn why that is. It’s at this point hard-wired. Moving wasn’t a miracle cure. Happy hour small talk still doesn’t interest me.

But it’s okay, more okay than it’s maybe ever been. The writing is shoring me up. I have joined a weekly writing group that is helping me in the same way the shows I used to do helped me – it keeps me accountable knowing I will need to share something, the reaction to my work encourages me to keep working, and the work of the other folks inspires me too.

For today, there are many errands awaiting. I do have a colonoscopy next Friday and so of course I’m dealing with anxiety around all the poop prep. I need to grocery shop with that in mind and get all the household stuff done before picking up my oldest friend in the world at the airport and delivering her to her brother’s house about an hour away, after which we’ll get our first sleepover in years. It will be a balm and help strengthen me for the coming week, and I am grateful.