Some weekends hit harder than others. This has been one of those harder-hitting weekends. It started on Saturday. It being a general malaise, a heaviness of spirit, a defeated and deflated feeling towards an overwhelming (yet small and inconsequential) world. When it hits, I feel it in the slump of my shoulders. I feel it in the long exhale that slides into a sigh. When I’m feeling this way, I find it difficult to read or write. When I’m feeling this way, I find it difficult to direct my attention/effort/energy towards anything remotely helpful or useful. In these moods, I don’t really want to do much of anything – mostly because this sense of feeling overwhelmed morphs into a sense of paralysis. I don’t know where to start with anything, and there’s no sense of urgency. I can get groceries tomorrow. I can vacuum, later. I can look for jobs after dinner, etc. etc. I’ll try to tell myself to take a step – one step in any direction. That works about fifty percent of the time.
When these feelings hit, I tend to do two opposing things. First, and often, I tend to sit with the feelings and stare them in the face. I try to examine them from multiple angles. What is the actual physical sensation that I’m feeling and where, emotionally, is this coming from? Am I dwelling on the past? Am I fretting about the future? Is this about a sense of purpose, obligation, disappointment? The other thing I try to do, the opposing thing, is to distract myself and/or pull myself out of the funk. Getting together with friends helps. Doing some things around the house can help. Getting lost in a project can help. But like all distractions – those are temporary reprieves, and sometimes the heavy inertia prevents me from engaging in the very things that might alleviate the heavy inertia.
I’ve been struggling to pinpoint where this weekend’s funk is coming from. Or more accurately, it seems to be coming from multiple places. The future is, and has been, weighing on me almost as much as the past. By the end of the month, I expect to be unemployed. By August, I expect to be in my car making my way westward. That’s about all I “know.” And no matter how hard I try to gain some clarity around these things, clarity eludes me.
I know the funk started when I revisited “the dog issue.” From there, it spiraled into small bouts of second-guessing and self-doubt. It spiraled into a treatise on why people leave good or joyful things behind. It spiraled into thinking I should get rid of all of my stuff. It spiraled into trying to understand why we shun those things too easily attained or freely given (love, friendship, status) in favor of “challenges.” Are we secretly trying to win the approval(s) that have been denied us in our past? It spiraled into a contemplation on, “would all of this be more bearable, more enjoyable if…?”
“The dog issue” is the guilt I feel over giving him up. He hasn’t been adopted yet, and if I go through with it, I’m going to have to turn him over in the next few weeks. Notice that I used the word if. For a lot of different reasons, I don’t think I can take him with me. But there’s enough doubt in my mind for me to spend a lot of worried time considering the alternatives. Could I get him to wear a muzzle on walks in the city? If I got a job that paid well, could I afford to hire help and afford a bigger place (one that allows big dogs)? I’ll then flip my thinking to not wanting to be tied down the way I am. I’m currently trying to plan a trip to Philly and my usual sitters are unavailable. This happens far more often than I would like, and while not insurmountable, getting a new sitter is always a process that involves small doses of anxiety coupled with having to meet and trust someone new. And despite these annoyances (or perhaps because of them), I’ll look at my dog and think, “we can do this. You and me bud.” At times it’s almost as if I see us as a long shot and I want us to win… to beat the odds.
I know a lot of my hesitation about the dog is my ego and my projection. My mind says, “but he needs me,” “but he’ll be sad,” “but he might get bounced from home to home and be traumatized and scared.” The ego tells me I’m the one who rescued him, I’m the one with whom he is most comfortable. I’m the one who knows how to take care of him. In projecting, I begin to think how I’d hate to be passed off to strangers and feel like nobody wants me. I imagine his sad eyes as though they won’t see joy again. It’s taken him two years to get to a point where he barks at me with excitement because he wants to play or where his tail wags almost every time he sees me. He wasn’t always like this. He was much more skeptical, cautious, and reserved. And now I feel like I could be sending him back into that state of insecurity. Now, when he does cute things or is happy to meet a stranger, I’ll say to myself, “see, he’s a really good dog and this situation is very workable. I should find a way to make it work.”
But it’s not just the dog. Moving, especially to a smaller place (which is about all I can afford on no salary), means I’m going to have to get rid of things. For me, purging can bring a sense of relief, but it’s more likely going to send me stumbling through those broken-glass covered alleys of the bittersweet. I probably don’t need to keep the Christmas tree stand, but getting rid of it somehow carries the weight of never celebrating Christmas again (or at least never celebrating it the way I used to celebrate it). Of course, that’s not necessarily true. I can always buy another tree stand if I find myself wanting to put up a tree… but getting rid of it now acknowledges a type of anticipated loss. In this process, nearly every object represents the loss of the past and/or the loss of some imagined future. In this respect, I’m still dealing with some of what I felt when I moved away in the first place.
But it’s not just the physical objects that weigh me down. A few times in the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded or told that I’m appreciated… I’ve been reminded that there are quite a few people here who would rather I stay here and quite a few people back in Philly who would like to see me move back to there. I’ve made some good friends here. I have family and good former colleagues back in the Philadelphia area. But for some reason, those assets don’t seem to line up in the asset column the way one would expect them to. It’s almost as if in an effort to rebuild the self, it becomes more advantageous or desirable to strut my new self in front of new people, to build new relationships, to risk failure away from the judging eyes of those who’ve known me the longest. With familiarity comes baggage. With familiarity comes patterns that are hard to break. Perhaps the friends I’ve made here work so well because those relationships don’t have any of the baggage or patterns of the friendships back home? In some respects, I suspect I wouldn’t have pushed myself to build new friendships in the comfort of my old life.
That said, I am extremely cautious about falling prey to the delusions of starting over. Our problems (and joys) tend to follow us wherever we go. I believe reinventing the self and constantly seeking out new people is often related to finding (and maybe needing) external sources of validation. To some extent, I think we worry that other people will see us as clearly as we think we see ourselves – and so we seek out new eyes with different perceptions. We try to forever live in the honeymoon phase of every city, job, and relationship because we’ve grown tired of our own bullshit and assume everyone else has too. This “awareness” is one reason I struggle with leaving as much as I do. I’ve been on the receiving end of abandonment and tend to stick around just to prove that someone is willing to stick around. Only in these past few years have I started to give myself permission to leave, and even then, it’s a serious emotional struggle. One with a lot of heavy sighs.
The other night, I went to a friend’s house to drink beer and shoot pool. The friend said he’s been trying to figure out a way for me to stay. By which he meant that he was trying to think if he knew anyone my age that I’d be interested in dating. He then suggest maybe, just maybe I’ll go out west, meet someone, and they’ll want to leave the coast and the two of us will come back. His thinking, and he’s not far off, is that I’d probably find this life I’ve built much more enjoyable if I were with someone. On many occasions, I’ve given thought to slightly different versions of that scenario. I imagine that I can write from just about anywhere. I believe I can make friends just about anywhere. I think I can do good work at most jobs just about anywhere. I think I could extract the joys out of life just about anywhere. And yes, regardless of where I am, I suspect that committed partner thing helps balance the scales when the other things aren’t going so well. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d feel this heaviness if I had another soul to pour myself into. Which seems like a not great reason to meet someone. “Yeah, you’re cute and all, and maybe even fun to hang out with, but really, I only keep you around because it distracts me from the crushing depression I might otherwise feel.”
I have no idea what I’m going to find “out there.” I suspect in many ways, it won’t be that different than what I’ve found elsewhere. The ex who left used to tell me I’d fit in in California, and ever since then I’ve wanted to find out. I recently read a quote from the poet Diane Seuss. She was talking about her time in New York and she said, “I didn’t get much good writing done, but I lived in ways that I’m still writing about.” I may not find the girl or the job or the friends, but I’m pretty sure I’ll live in ways that will push me and challenge me and provide rich experiences. I just wish I could take some of my current life with me.
Some weekends hit harder than others. This has been one of those weekends. The heaviness comes in waves and all of my usual distractions feel wholly insufficient. In these moments, I long for a new type of consistency, a few other passions. In these moments, I usually try to find words that are better than my own:
All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky. That’s what I want now, and I think it’s what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We’ll become too set to change. If we don’t take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.
-Kazuo Ishiguro