I’m having what I call a high gravity day. I’ve had a high gravity week, really. Every day since Tuesday has been a high gravity day.
A high gravity day is one of those days where I wake up and it takes everything I have to get out of bed and function like a normal person. I’m bloated with anxiety, my little parasites of depression pump through my blood stream, and I border the line of becoming an inanimate object. I really didn’t have days like this until about late fall of 2010. I was at my worst from December of that year until about April or May of 2011. From that point, they’ve been spreading out, anchoring me with lighter objects. Except for this week.
I admit something, right here, that I’ve only told one other person: I know my body isn’t regulating itself correctly anymore. I can’t really say much beyond that, I think it is mild, but I just know it isn’t, there is no way it is. Earlier this year, Robert got checked out at the doctor and all of the test results revealed that his body was producing adrenaline at the wrong points in the day (as a combination of diet and habits), which was a large part of why he would wake all night, sleep all day, and spend each of those ends feeling depressed — OR SOMETHING KIND OF LIKE THAT — I’d wager that this is likely where I am as far as that goes, and not something more complicated, but of course, I don’t know, nor can I, really.
I couldn’t afford to go to the doctor if I needed to, or to any other sort of practitioner right now, and that is just about parallel with my life. I just accept it.
See, today is a high gravity day, and I think perhaps, while my body helps trigger these days, once my brain encompasses itself around the notion, I’m legitimately screwed. Usually, when I have one every 2-3 weeks, I can spend anywhere from an hour to six wounded, then I regather my willpower and energy, if I’m smart, do some praying, then I burst through again and usually carry out the rest of my day, at least able to wear the guise that everything within me is ‘normal’.
Everyone’s lives are riddled holes, glitches, and unanswered questions, mine no different, I just feel more hexed than most of the people I know around me.
The past year or two of my life is just a story of continually failing relationships and friendships. I don’t know, at this point I can only say to no fault but my own, why else would things so reliably breakdown? Yet, the thing is, I consider my relationship skills, if there is such a thing, to be quite good. Very flawed, sure, but I just know that I get my sense of extra-consideration from my mom, so even when I’m being a punk, I usually feel naturally inclined to take consideration for the other person– it does a lot to make up for all my other problems, yet it seems to get me very little gain in terms of my friendships. It gets hard when you have to shuffle who you can turn to, rely on, confide in, trust, and cry for help every 3 months. It gets hard. I know that I’ve some who have been as reliable as a great crag, unmoving, but it is hard to ignore the huge crater.
I don’t know who remembers those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs would find himself in a wicker basket as they stuck swords into it from all angles. Right now, that’s where I feel I am in my life. I am in this awkward position where I don’t know if I should wriggle around and try to make it more advantageous, of if I need to stay entirely still and wait for the last couple blades to be put in place before they start getting removed.
In fact, my entire existence often feels marred with failure. This year is no exception. I ride the wave of apparent success as a means to keep myself spirited, but sometimes that momentum comes off as a total lie. I set out 3 goals for myself while I was around my lowest, last summer. First, go back and finish school. Second, find work. Third, move back out on my own.
I only really found success with one.
Sure, I had a part-time job for a while, but that doesn’t count because it was a means to an end; a way for me to pay the last bit I needed for school, as well as things like gas and food. It never would have helped me do anything such as start an actual career, or what I really want from work: get me out of mom and dad’s house. And today, I have work, and it is a good role for me, but I’m not sure how much longer I can last in a situation where I am not consistently getting paid. We won’t even comment on the third goal.
Even in my goals, the things of which I pile all of my ambition and willpower like an assortment of explosives and set flame with every last joule of energy I have, I fail.
And that takes us back to the basket with the swords. Like a wave nearing shore, the question rises: can I continue to be forward thinking, and stay in the position I am in now, or do I have to go into emergency mode and readjust for now?
I don’t see myself getting out of this tangle now without a large culmination of changes. I need to get out of this house because my entire life is stifled as long as I am in it.
Let me sidestep real fast. When I was going through the thickest of the inferno that my relationship with the ever lovely Ms. Seale (I do mean this, if anyone questions that I do), I fell into a confront – battle – retreat cycle. Confrontation was met with all the mayhem we had to deal with that nobody had any actual control over with. Battling was all the madness that actually had to happen as I did my best to be there for her, and retreating was me slinking away at the very instant the battle phase ended. Like a burned, shriveled mutant, I’d drag my body across the ground and find the deepest, darkest hole the earth could offer me. This often manifested itself in the form of my room. When I lived in Bruin Hills, I’d sprint up the hill from her apartment to my own, breathlessly jaunt with the key and lock until I fell through the opening door, immediately stomping into my room, shutting the door and play computer games. When I lived at Belmont Terrace, it was pretty much the same thing, just sub the hill thing to walking down the steps to my apartment and add in tripping over Jasper, the Alien Dog. When I really needed a hide away, I’d go home. I’d often bring my desktop PC with me, set it up in my room, and as soon as I closed that door I was in my fortress of solitude.
Being in that room, with myself, with my own devices, while necessary, was something that I increasingly found myself doing. As soon as that door shut, it was an entirely different state of mind I’d enter in. My mind, body, and soul knew that I was very damaged and weak, and this was all I could do to heal up enough to face the next day. Being around people was like surrounding myself with needles, and leaning a degree in any direction would place those needles upon my skin serving a prickly warning that if so much as take a step that my nerves are going to be invaded with a barrage of sharp pain. I conditioned myself to two very large things:
One, that I would habitually spend each day feeling the need to shell up at some point and play Team Fortress 2, Quake, or Civilization for a few hours, even if I didn’t want to. Something in my would just yearn for it like it were water or food.
Two, that my room, and especially my parents house, will trigger this nest mode in my mind and subsequently the rest of me, that I was in “I’m hurting, please let me curl up and bleed a while so I can start scabbing up” mode. That is all this house is to me anymore. It hurts. The place I spent most of my childhood has disappeared to some parallel universe, and replaced with this haunted lookalike.
I can’t function here.
Honestly, I moved back here around May of 2010. I’ve yet to truly unpack since then. My room is often a consolidation of various mess, and I don’t bother to do anything about it because if I am not even going to bother to unpack my life, why would I care if it has any order. It is not like anybody comes to visit me in my nesting shell. It takes days when I am really fed up with everything, with being here, that I slap myself internally and clean it. That, or the promise of someone coming over. I hate it. I don’t like living in such a disorderly state, but it reflects my life and what mental state this place puts me in.
Let me step back in, now. I don’t see myself getting out of this tangle now without a large culmination of changes. I need to get out of this house because my entire life is stifled as long as I am in it. I can’t get out of this house until I am making enough money to afford to. I’m not nearly as effective getting myself in place to make money at my current job because I do a lot of my work from home. I am highly productive out of the house, but when I am home, it is a new struggle to cram into these walls. I can’t always justify going out to do my work because I am in extreme savings mode, and I’d either have to give up the occasional weekend where I cut loose some and just try to enjoy life, or something more. I can’t always leave when I want to anyway because I have to share a vehicle with my parents. I can’t pay for any of these things anyway because I need to pay my loans. I can’t even get that stress out of my head because every time I am about to talk to them, I see that they have already called me 22 times that day, as if I didn’t know about the $40,000 I owe, which just angers me back into a point where I’d rather default in some kind of foolish protest than talk to them.
It goes on.
I need to find a new girl in my life to hold my attention. I can’t find such a person because I am rarely out in this house, or part of the world for that matter. I can’t fully get over the last girl who unintentionally did more than a number on me because I can’t find anything new to distract me. I need to find more new friends to fill in the holes that have developed (naturally) from the other ones. I can’t — you get the drill.
I could write these until the seasons changed, and even for the smallest things. The point is, I don’t feel I can really do anything right now, but I feel like I need to change almost everything, and I can’t change anything without changing everything. And in that regard, almost nothing has changed from a year ago, nothing at all. I have it in writing. If I want to put myself in a deeper hole to climb from, I can go read it (I’ll spare myself today).
And that brings the wicker basket questions. If I stay fully committed to my current job situation, I put myself in a good position long-term. I am already an invaluable asset to the other 3 guys I work with, they give me a lot of autonomy, and responsibilities that make the intern label I have a bit of a joke. And let me note, I am, at the least, partially-committed to this thing no matter what. But it is how long can I keep myself in a position to be all-in on it. Especially at this time now where my responsibilities and time commitment is about to ramp up once again. There is a horizon with this thing where I can now see myself with cash flow, potentially within the next couple weeks, but the question is would that be too late to wait for a ship to come snatch me up from treading.
Half of me says, “sit James, you’ve worked the long-play patiently this long, it is a waste if you squirm out and go raging bull at this point.” The other half is raging bull. He tells me that I need to do everything I can to get out of the house, right now. Immediately find a second job to make sure I can sustain it, and also, to keep me out in the world. Keeping me out in the world means that I am not having to rely purely internally to prop myself up. Yet that takes away a lot of my flexibility for these other things that are currently developing, potentially taking away prime positioning. The thing is… wholly, I need to do both of these things, and I guess that is because half of me says I need to do the other.
And I don’t know.
I told myself that I could hold out for another couple weeks. I’d be much like Wesley from the Princess Bridge, propped up on a lean-to, rapier barely contained in my hand, the mere illusion that I’m still going in this state, but that help would be on the way. And if it didn’t show in that time frame, that’d be my cue to hit the self-destruct button, blow everything to the sky, and make drastic emergency changes.
I just didn’t plan on getting ground down so fast this week. Now that I’ve spent the last couple hours trying to display this in written page, I feel enough is there to propel myself back for today, but what of the next day? And day after? This doesn’t preclude the fact that I already forced myself to remain in bed until 2 pm today because I didn’t want to get up. That already happened.
You know, it’s not that I have the world going against me, I really don’t. It is more that once you remove the core things that I have in my favor, there really is nothing going for me, and hasn’t been for a while. Maybe I have another 38 years of wandering in the desert.
For now, I’ll keep writing about it and telling myself I do it so that I can look back and remember where I came from– when the time comes.
Hey future me, remember those high gravity days? Of course you don’t, you tepid bastard. I envy you.