Trying to swim through this project is like trying to swim through concrete. It isn’t really working out the way I wanted. I don’t feel confident in the work. I don’t feel terribly confident in much lately, and I cannot reason why. It could be me being burned out or overwhelmed, some combination of the two or what have you. I feel like my life has kicked me in the gut, threw a few haymakers to my face and I’m trying to crawl away from the fight with my soul intact. I’m not sure that is going to happen.
I’m spent. I’m detached from the work. I’m misaligned–I’m too far left on the keyboard and all the words are coming out funkt. I haven’t gotten around to how to break free of it. I think I am stuck in it still, firing through the morass of the thing; wading through the wet concrete. Yesterday I said I was done writing. Today I’m trying to write my way out of it. The Lady Talis says this happens every so often. She says I get right when I get scheduled; explaining the problem away with a Virgo’s sense of structure. I don’t know that she’s wrong. She rarely is on such things. That is why she’s the Lady Talis. Still, reality being what it is, I don’t have a schedule. I don’t have a plan. All I have is this knot of feelings moving through me, raising my blood pressure and threatening to shut me down.
I need to start at the beginning. I need to break it down into the components of what is driving me to pieces. It isn’t just the Dad stuff and the frustration of environment. It is the writing issues; the writing failures. It is rounding towards the end of a semester; shuffling towards the end of a career. I rediscovered the fact that I can retire as early as a few months from now. I’d get half of what I’d get if I just waited till 29. My last born graduates in 27 though. Two years here in the sauce longer than I planned. Right at the tip of the next presidency.
That is another thing going on. The Trump win was/is a waking nightmare. I’ve pushed myself away from the reality of what this country is trying to become. I don’t know how long I can do that. Just today Texas voted to make the bible part of their curriculum. So much for separation of Church and state. Other states will follow, and this myth of being a country that supports multiple faiths will shift unkindly to a country that tolerates a handful of additional faiths–the ones where there is enough lobbying power to continue them. How long before the Mormons officially turn Utah into a Mormon state? What about Judaism?
What about self? That is the thing lost in all of this–the center. It isn’t holding for me and that is burrowing through the layers of my soul and forcing me to realize that something has to change. Something has to be different. I don’t know where that is supposed to start.