I am extremely run down. I’ve been trying to do too much for too long without any real sense of a plan or schedule to any of it. The schedule I have been working on was theoretical and untested until one day it became actual and problematic. I don’t go to the gym. I don’t take care of my heart and overall health issues. I am not writing. I feel incapable of telling stories off the cuff. Most importantly, I don’t feel I have been the best life partner.
I forget things. I drain the romance out of situations. I make life seem unmanageable. I am, in a phrase, bad at the game. These are the truths I struggle to accept. As a writer I ought to be embracing these truths and turning them into story and through that story growing and changing into a better version of myself; evolving vs. devolving.
Instead I am blogging. I am getting by on the brief hits of accomplishment and joy that come from coaching youth sports, or getting asked to coach high school sports, or landing a major meeting with all the force and fluster of a multi-liked comment on instagram. I am measuring success in millimeters because that is as far ahead as I can look in my life. That short sightedness comes across as unpreparedness, and not caring, and lack of romantic vigor, and writers block.
But it isn’t any of those things and all of those things are merely symptoms of a life that isn’t a life so much as an existence the way a drowning man breaks the surface of the water to gasp for air and his lungs, filling with water, take in more of the water with that air and he tries to make a sound and all that comes out is more water and even some of that precious so precious air that he needs to breathe and–
Then he is gone.
I don’t want to be gone or overwhelmed or overscheduled or over writing or over this opportunity I have to treat a really good woman right or over my head with responsibilities I don’t want.
I want to be overjoyed, but right now all I am is over and out.