We Are All Dying in Our Own Private Vessels

I woke up from a deep sleep with some weird dreams and a case of the Sunday Scaries. I don’t mind my job. I like it in fact. I connect with kids and it brings me joy, but it takes a lot of my time. Sometimes after work, my brain is too fried to write or have any creative ideas. Sometimes my brain is too fried to have enough energy to engage with my own kid or to head to the gym.

I seem to go in waves where I am at the gym daily and then spurts where I am more content hunkered down at home. The seasons are changing and I can feel my homebody ways resurrecting. I love to work out and I love to write. I love my child and work is an extra that I have to do to pay my bills. Would I do it if I didn’t need the money? Probably not, but for now, I will accept that I do and I am making a difference in the lives of children. It is also a social outlet where I tend to isolate and it really does give me a sense of purpose that being on a computer all day would not.

This summer I wasn’t working and I had much more creativity and ideas flowing in my writing. I won a few times over at Elephant Journal for the month of August and had top stories most of the summer. I know that working affects my writing abilities, but here we are.

I get up at 5:30 for work and don’t want to get up any earlier to write at this time, but I have a window after work before my child gets home that works perfectly for now. I love that time.

I am not a night owl and need to get enough sleep to be my best. I am a rester. I love to be snuggled up and my body calm. I know it’s essential for my body to recuperate and for my brain to feel calm. I want a healthy body and I know that stress is not conducive to health. I try to stay even keel and discuss things that are bothering me at once.

I recently wrote an article about how I take a lot of supplements. This is true.

I also wrote one about how I took sex off the table in my marriage as I was overwhelmed by demands in so many areas that I just needed to not feel like I had to do one more thing. Isn’t that a sad way to look at sex? I know once I do it, I’ll be fine, but having a break where it wasn’t expected really was kind of nice. I just have felt reclusive and not like letting anyone too close. I have shared some extremely vulnerable stories of life experiences as of late in my memoir and I felt too exposed. I needed a reprieve.

My husband will be glad to hear I think I am ready to be intimate again after this little hiatus. He is also an extremely private person and sometimes is surprised to learn things about our marriage from my writing. Oops.

I’ve also mentioned lately that I am participating in the writing challenge-NaNoWriMo. It’s not some exclusive club, just a bunch of weirdos writing 50,000 words for the month of November. I am not writing a book as I just did, but I am just practicing writing every day and working up my stamina to get to 1,667 words per day to reach that goal. I have never done anything like this before, besides writing my memoir, but I wasn’t super strict with myself during that time.

I had some weird dreams last night about people from work and people being drunk around me (I am in recovery) and in my dreams, I felt pressured to find meetings and juggle my son and work. I relocated to a new state a few years ago and in my dreams, I was in my old state and was commuting from the West Coast to the Midwest. Anyway, I woke up discombobulated and felt those Sunday Scaries and sometimes wonder about taking a personal day from work, but never do it. I always think about the kids and my co-workers and don’t want to leave them hanging.

I started ragging on myself for never making a proper dinner and always being on my computer. How much load my husband takes off of me and how he helps so much after working way more hours than me. I started thinking I should do better. I should put more effort in at home. I started feeling discouraged that my husband and I never go on dates and that my poor son is bored or lonely and started digging myself into a hole.

The expectations we put on ourselves are incredible. We are expected to do it all, truly. To succeed. To make enough money. To make all the food and do the shopping. To do the laundry, dishes, pet supplies and care, home maintenance, kid entertainment, and so forth. I am honestly so pooped after doing my daily duties I don’t see where I could go have fun outside of the house. Perhaps because of the pandemic or because of my aging body, I have felt like more of a recluse.

I love going out to eat and spending time doing things out of the house, but I usually go alone. I am an only child and even as a teen would go to movies by myself and out to eat. It never bothered me and I found people a distraction from my own thoughts and feelings. I never knew how to act and what to say. I couldn’t imagine shopping with others and still now when I hear others in the dressing room saying, “oh, that’s so cute. You have to get it!!” I feel cringey.

When I moved to the Midwest it was to be closer to my husband’s family who are from a small town. It is very small there, like where everyone knows your name. I thought I might be okay there, but quickly realized I needed to be closer to the city where there is diversity, restaurants, museums, events, airports, and just life happening. I felt dead in that small town and could no longer talk about the weather and the same things over and over. In fact, I feel quite traumatized by spending a year in a small midwestern town after growing up and living 40 years in Seattle suburbs. It was shockingly different and I hated it. Plus, my first Minnesota winter hit me like a ton of bricks. It was cold and windy and the jobs paid less. It was like going back in time.

After one year, we were able to move closer to the cities (St. Paul, Minneapolis) and I am much happier here. I love the blue skies and the people are definitely nice. Some would say Minnesota nice (which is passive-aggressive) but I can handle that too. I don’t care much for going back to the small town and am beginning to make some friends after being here for a short time before the pandemic came through.

When I woke I was also thinking of the next few weekends where my son will have basketball tournaments that I will miss because of prior engagements. I felt guilty and was obsessing about finding a way to make it to all the things that day. How to be present in more places.

Isn’t that how we are? We wish we had more arms to do more multitasking. We wish we could give all of our attention to all of the priorities in our lives. Then we feel worn and beat down when we fail someone in some way. Usually ourselves.

We end up with physical, mental, and emotional health problems as self-care falls to the wayside under our heavy obligations. We push our workouts and yoga to the side while we care for others and are too damn tired to get off the couch.

How can we make our own self-care a priority?

I am learning that sometimes our life situations seem so hopeless that we in turn feel helpless and run to more of the same. The drinks after work, the Netflix binge sessions, the booty calls, the donuts and coffee on the way to work in the morning, or the cookies and sugary specialty drinks after work to keep us going, to take the edge off, or just to feel different and give us something to look forward to. We feel deserving of a treat because of the hard laborious jobs we do. We deserve something sweet because we are working our tails off and keeping everyone else above water. While we are barely afloat ourselves.

I am also learning that the solution is to stop all of the above and dive in deep. Quit avoiding those things that keep us up at night. Start talking and sharing and praying. We feel alone, but the truth is we are not alone. We isolate ourselves thinking we are different when really most of us have the same insecurities, inhibitions, and fears. We are all drowning in our own private vessels. We are trying to save our faces while our asses are falling off.

We want to be okay. We desperately don’t want to need help or feel needy. “We’ve got this,” we say in our daily pep talk. We can keep going. We can keep trudging, after all our families need us to show up. Who would do it all if we didn’t?

The generations before us haven’t dealt with the endless emails and texts, the constant streaming of info, the responsibilities 24/7...this work-to-live mentality where our jobs take 50-70 hours from us a week. We struggle to make ends meet and our lives are devoted to our livelihoods with a little leftover. We work 24/7 and do it again and again, but don’t forget to smile for Instagram in our color-coordinated outfits so no one will know we are dying inside.

We must stop the madness. Who is making it stinking rich off of our habits and addictions? The huge companies banking off of our misery. The Starbucks, the Netflix, the Amazon. What if we changed our crutches and made food at home, changed our way of life so that the pharmaceutical companies could stop banking off of our poor health. What if we exercised to blow off steam instead of crashing on the couch with crumbs on our shirts? What if we just quit. We gave up our addictions to alcohol and wine o’clock, to sugar, to fast food. We opt out of this death march to the end.

But where will I find my enjoyment?

Trust me, we don’t need those things to live, but we can’t see it until we quit and they are in our rearview mirror.

Addiction is powerful and our addiction to food and sugar won’t put us on death row most likely, but it will put us into the morgue earlier than we expect. We can’t pretend like the taste of something sweet is worth the health problems that will inevitably come later in life. The diabetes, heart disease, and cancer that are caused by our own unhealthy habits.

I hear people say they want to change, but don’t know how to get there. It’s really as simple as making the decision and reaching out for help. We don’t have to do it alone, but we do have to do it. We are the only ones that can change our own lives. We have to be stronger than our addictions or they will kill us. We can’t let them win. We can no longer be brainwashed with the masses of people stuck in that drive-thru line. There is freedom to be found on the other side.

I am not saying go on a diet. I am saying heal the stuff you are stuffing with the treats. Get to the root of these afflictions so that you can fill that hole with anything other than food, alcohol, sugar or zoning out.

We all have things we don’t want to look at, but the only way out is through. We can’t find freedom from our crutches while we are still relying on them to walk.