My mother (the fount of almost all of my wisdom) told me that when I'm tired, I must divide everything by three: my obligations, my list of chores, my speed at addressing them, my sense of how perfect the job needs to be when I can comfortably leave it, and so forth. Most of all, I must divide by three all my hurt feelings, all anger triggers, all fears, and forget about judgments entirely.
I've been more than tired lately; I've been experiencing vast, unquenchable weariness right down to my bones. Sometimes I sleep well, usually I don't -- waking up around midnight for no particular reason, and again between three and four with horrible anxiety about old, very very old, dilemmas, or imagining new monsters that I have yet to challenge properly but need to face or they will kill me.
And then there's the weeping. I am on the edge of tears pretty much all the time: I cry at commercials; I cry at movies I've already seen many time over; I cry when seeing animal pictures and short videos whether they're describing awful abuse or loving care. I cry with a friend's sorrow or happiness, I cry from sheer exhaustion or frustration or anger or from the touch of a friend's hand on my shoulder.
When I went into psychotherapy a million years ago during a nasty, bruising divorce, my therapist asked me the last time I had cried, and after some thought I guessed that it had been about ten years. We both sat with that for a while in wonder; we all expect that kind of stoic denial from men, of course, but women are supposed to cry and God knows we have plenty of reason to. I certainly did at the time (cold, controlling husband, four small children, panic and near psychotic break), and yet... and yet.
***
It seems that human beings think about things -- a lot -- and then they feel about things, reluctantly or even refusing to acknowledge said feelings all the while. Overthinking is a popular topic for discussion and contemplation these days, and like multitasking it is another place for the devil to lurk. Overthinking is exhausting (I know a lot about that) and very quickly begins to loop back in on itself, tangling up with various bromides leftover from stuffy collegiate philosophy courses, and women's magazines leafed through while a child's eyebrow is being sewn up. There just isn't time nor place to wail and chew scenery when your children are trying to kill each other or your boss is insisting on a ridiculous deadline for a pointless report; let's set the feelings aside and just get the goddamned job done.
Next thing you know it's ten years later and your emotional warehouse is either empty and echoing or so jammed up with unexpressed anger/sorrow/pain/frustration that it threatens to explode.
Or spring an inexorable leak.
***
My current psychotherapy must be working -- there's a slow leak in my front tire (sorry about the switch in metaphors; some days....). Maybe each of us is allotted a particular number of tears in a lifetime, or possibly a particular number of occasions of losing it entirely (screaming, shrieking, wailing, punching couch, taking a hammer to the front lawn -- I had a friend who resorted to that; she claimed it was very successful). Conversely, perhaps we each get a particular number of occasions of catatonia: absolutely unable to move, to lift a leg by the thigh and swing it over the side of the bed, then the other, and then to contemplate actually standing upright on both legs. Impossible.
I am much closer to the end of my life than to its beginning, so I'm running out of time to use up my allotments of emotional release.
If I have to pick, I guess I'll take the slow leak, even though it is alarming to some if they see me in, say, the grocery store, or pausing at a stoplight. They're just going to have to deal with it, because I don't think I can; I've already divided my feelings by three, while carefully avoiding overthinking (unless this blog is exactly that, in which case I've at least dumped the more annoying contents of my left brain).
So, like Paul Simon in "America", I'm just trying to get some rest. When I can't, I'll divide by three, my darling; divide by three.
