I’m a crank. I feel old and cranky. I feel like I’m in a rut. Last night, I spent at least fifteen minutes telling myself, over and over again, “I’m in a rut.” I was repeating the phrase in my head as a possible declarative opening – an opening to what… I’m not sure. Short, to the point, uninteresting, and with nowhere else to go. Every night this past week I’ve sat with my computer open wanting to write and getting nowhere. I might have written a few lines of crappy poetry – as opposed to my usual few lines of semi-crappy poetry. I feel entirely, utterly, completely uninspired. This happens when I am out of practice. This happens when I don’t have sufficient inputs – either I haven’t been reading or haven’t been present in the outside world. This happens when I find myself mindlessly scrolling social media to fill the time – which oddly reinforces the behavior. When I’m uninspired, I find myself scrolling more. The more I fight it, by trying to write or read or paint, the more I find myself reaching for easy distractions and feeling guilty about my lack of discipline. I tried to go easy on myself. I tried to practice gratitude. I found myself rejecting everything. Like I said, I’m a crank.
Texting with my friend Stacy the other night, she suggested we do more fun things during our video chats and spend less time talking about work, etc. This made me realize, or re-realize, that I have a tendency to rely on one person as my outlet for everything… and when I’m in a funk, I have to imagine that it’s a bit of a downer. I’ve never been good at building, let alone maintaining, the types of friendships that other people seem to have. I think a lot of men (who aren’t bros) struggle with this. I’m not one to spend a lot of time (by which I mean any time) talking on the the phone with my friends or texting with them. I’m more of an in-person friend, and I tend to dial all of that back when I’m in a relationship. Back in Yardley, when I wasn’t in a relationship of some sort, I would go out with some of my friends every couple of weeks. I also spent a bit of time going out on my own – blues Mondays and Tuesdays and my local pub on the weekends. When I moved to Memphis, I made a few new friends that I’d hang out with once in a while, and again, I did plenty of exploring on my own. In Memphis, I very intentionally spent a lot of time by myself – hoping to learn to provide for myself those things I had usually turned to a partner for. I did this mostly through writing and reading. But with the pandemic and the move back to PA and the new job, pretty much all of that has stopped or gotten out of balance.
Try as I might, it’s been hard to find that groove. Last weekend, I spent Saturday running errands and walked downtown to a coffee shop and bookstore. I spent an hour talking with a guy, a grad student, from Bangladesh. I read a bunch of poems, but couldn’t find a book to settle on and buy. On Sunday, I did a nine-mile hike with a serious climb. Under normal, non-funk, circumstances, those things would have felt more restorative than they did. But for some reason, they were just ehhh and before I knew it, it was Monday.
And this is the cycle. I feel like I’m looking for more than just ehhh which is promptly followed by self-criticism for not practicing gratitude, for not recognizing the more than ehhh that surrounds me. Then I try to find times in my life when I felt differently… times when the world felt more on fire with possibility and wonder… times that were more inspiring. Which again sends me back to gratitude and trying to find inspiration within and being in the present moment… and maybe, just maybe, being less of a crank.