it isn’t the holidays yet
but I work in a leisurely branch of finance and everyone has cleared out by mid-December, so these things have to be celebrated early. Last night I stayed up baking cookies (sort of, more like trail mix with a cookie dough binding) and tracking down companies that are comparable to a Nordic paper distributor and shipping supply company. I went to sleep around 3:30 and woke up around five for a 5:30 AM call that I shouldn’t have done, because I ended up just nodding off in the middle. And then it was 7:30 and then suddenly it was 8:30 and I was late for a call and then it turned out we were pushing it back fifteen minutes anyways, so I was just on time to make myself tea and sit in another generally useless call.
After the call I mentioned my generally bad decisions and how I was probably not in a state to take that call (the 5:30 AM one) and my coworker, not surprisingly, interpreted that completely wrong, so we sat there and talked about my life for a bit. Which was fine. It was fine. He thinks I’ll get into grad school, and that I’m smart, which I am assured is a thing people generally seem to think of me even though I say mostly stupid things most days. I don’t get it entirely, but I think I am making it function with the postulates that it’s not my job to judge myself for other people and that if people want to be nice to me, I might as well accept.
And then I went to go buy a gift bag and wrap up my secret santa gift. I tried Tedeschi (frankly, a completely useless store) and then just went to Walgreens and stood in front of the gift bags and bawled for like a minute, because in my experience you can get away for treating things like a to-do list for so long but in the end sometimes your tasks are things that meant something once and now mean something... different. So: Walgreens, gift bag, tissues, packing, lunch (more movie talk. I cannot do movie talk.), lawsuit articles for an hour, gift exchange. Someone gave me Notes from Underground, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which I did not expect but am unsurprised and rather pleased about.
And then I scheduled some meetings and tried to do some work and tried and failed to postpone some work and then wrangled some people into some meetings and complained a lot and then gave up on working and read about cancer, mostly by accident, because honestly there is just a lot of stuff on the internet about cancer. I still have work I need to get together this weekend, which is great, because I also have essays that really need to be written. And sleep. I should sleep. And I’m just sitting here and crying and feeling useless, because I am quite frankly not producing any volume of work product really despite being really fucking busy because I think I broke my work ethic during that prolonged break around summer and it never healed. (Things that have worked for me recently: spending all my time wrangling calendars and bugging people, refusing to do things until it turns out we no longer want to do them anyways.)
I need to bug B about bugging his mother again about therapy, again, I think, or just reach out with the resources from my PCP, because crying most days is exhausting and inconvenient. I replaced the lights in my apartment, which I think has helped; I am trying my best to exercise and sleep, I am engaging in a ridiculous amount of retail therapy and actually really like my new clothes. I am trying to do things that make me happy, but it’s not enough to stand against the combined forces of family time and PMS. It is probably not good that I keep texting B how much I suck and it is definitely not useful to spend every day at 4PM curled up on the floor sobbing.
The balance is always tough. I don’t want to not be upset. I was worried for weeks (up until that first period, ha) that I wasn’t sad enough. And there’s nothing wrong with crying, I do believe that, but I might be at a point where it’s an indulgence. And then some days I’m just that fucking sad, and then I stand there and make myself sadder, snot streaming out of my nose while walking through Downtown fucking Crossing, because I want to be a person who remembers and maybe because I enjoy my own pain, I don’t know.
It’s been eleven weeks, six hours, and sixteen minutes since my mother died. I think I’m not okay and I can’t figure out how I can or whether I should be.
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
kaledo-art
