September Is Trying To Kill Me
When I first sat down to write this post I was torn. There was one part of my brain that wanted to stay within the confines of my ordinarily sarcastic tone that has, in some ways, become my brand on this blog. The other part, though, just didn’t have the energy to fake those feelings.
Initial drafts were filled with parenthetical quips and flippant jokes at my own expense, trying to root out what I really wanted to say. In one of my classes, we discussed something called the theory of three why’s. Essentially, you ask yourself why three times and each successive question helps narrow down what you truly want to say/do. Let’s try it:
Why do you want to talk about your ridiculously busy month?
Because it was really busy and stressful and I want to vent to someone about it.
Why do you want to vent to someone about it?
Because I want them to understand where I’m coming from and validate my feelings.
Why do you need other people to understand and validate your feelings?
Because without outside input, I feel alone in these emotions; like I’m the only one who feels empty on the inside.
There it is.
I’ve written before that I know I’m not alone in these feelings. I can consciously acknowledge that but conscious acknowledgment is not the same as actual acknowledgment. I can say that I want to finish this draft as much as I want but if something subconscious is blocking me from doing so? Forget about it, which is what I did.
After reading a Jenny Lawson blog post on “the quiet and terrible danger of September,” I, too, realized that September was trying to kill me. Not in the literal sense of course but the amount of stress that was slowly attacking my system like a virus was enough to knock me off my feet.
Stress is a silent killer. I didn’t even realize how exhausted I was until I started noticing familiar patterns. It was harder to get out of bed in the morning and more difficult to sleep at night. My mind began silently attacking me with spontaneous bouts of anxiety and intrusive thoughts. I started avoiding phone calls and text messages (more than I usually do) and stayed completely off of social media. I felt irritable and snappy over things that wouldn’t ordinarily touch me and, much too late, I realized I was falling into another bout of stress-induced depression.
Unfortunately, you can’t backtrack out of depression. It’s not an ongoing meeting that you accidentally walk into and then politely go, “Oh, I’m sorry! Wrong room.” No, it’s the type of meeting that you feel so awkward for intruding in on that you naturally just slip into a chair into the back because you would feel bad for the person talking if you left early. You don’t want to be there but the circumstances make you feel like you have to.
So you sit and wait for a moment of pause, an opportunity to escape, but it never comes.
I can’t necessarily blame my state of mind on a date on the calendar but I think I will just because I can. So I repeat, September is trying to kill me. It’s all I can say to stay sane. Otherwise, I would drown in everything else that is currently orbiting my world.
Some part of me wonders what triggered this state but then the other part of me knows that I just don’t want to think about it so I pretend I don’t know the reason. But I do.
My September has gone a little bit like this:
I quit my internship a few days after it began (more on that later).
I started working more regular hours at the bakery.
I began my grad program.
I started assisting my mother with homeschooling my younger sister.
I’ve started a program that is supposed to help develop structures in your brain (which I have slowly started ignoring because…overwhelmed).
I started helping my mother with more household chores: washing the dishes, making dinner, and painting the occasional trim.
I began working out every single morning at 5:45am.
I’ve completely taken dairy, gluten, and sugar out of my diet which means I have to make every single meal.
Oh, and we almost had to move across state lines again.
Including this list here isn’t a tool to force sympathy, because frankly not all of the stuff on this list is bad. Actually, most of it is pretty positive now that I’m looking at it but it’s still a lot. And it got me thinking, because what doesn’t at this point.
At first glance, I thought all of this pent-up stress was from the potential threat of moving to another state. I mean, for one, that would be my fourth move across state lines in less than two years which seems a little excessive even for me. For two, I’m very familiar with the loss that accompanies moving. So, at the beginning of September and throughout, it struck me as odd that I would be as upset as I was at the thought of moving.
Then I realized, though I hadn’t been physically moving from place to place throughout the month of September, my mind had been moving from different states of being at a rapid pace. From the outside looking in, I was just getting back into the routine of a regular life but my mind was short-circuiting at the thought.
My definition of moving from one state to the next in this context is the shift your mind makes when you simultaneously end one state of being and take on another. For example, quitting one job and starting another or the end of one relationship to the forming of another. You are in the process of both unlearning and relearning, trying to adjust as quickly as you can. Here’s what struck me about this idea.
When you move from one state of being to the next it is the lack of familiarity that shocks your system. Your simultaneous gain, temporarily, masks the loss. Time moves so swiftly in these moments that we barely have enough time to process what we’ve had for breakfast (if we’ve even remembered to have any) let alone the monumental events that have taken place.
So though you may not necessarily be able to relate to my life of moving physically over 20 times, you’ve most certainly felt this shift in being. The process may be simultaneous, and you may not notice at the start, but eventually, the change will catch up to you and sneak into your mind in the most unlikely ways.
Intrusive thoughts become an unwelcome imaginary friend. Images cycle through on a rotation too frequent and sometimes not frequent enough. Some days all you want is to remember the feeling you felt in those moments—the joy, the pain, all of it—and, on others, you can’t close your eyes quick enough. You don’t want to remember when it all went up in smoke; nor do you want to remember what it felt like.
It’s emotional phantom limb syndrome. Some things that felt so natural to you, a second nature that you didn’t even realize you had, are gone but you still find yourself turning down the wrong street in a different city. Looking for documents to scan when you no longer work in an office. Reaching for the phone to call someone when you realize they’re no longer there.
I flex these muscles unconsciously. I’m continually assailed by the memories only to realize that I’m no longer there.
“It’s missing,” my brain says, “where did it go?”
I feel a tug, try to reach for it, and I am reminded that I am no longer there.
I am no longer there.
I am-
Though I so desperately wish for this period of mourning to pass, for the feelings to fade, I cannot will such a thing into existence or out of existence. I’m relegated to ride the waves; feeling relief at the peaks and desperate in the valleys. Eventually, the storm will fade and everything will be shelved away neatly and tied with a ribbon on a shelf labeled “Do not open” in my brain but until then I will have to deal with my phantom limbs and imaginary friends.
I will have to be ok that pieces of me are missing and they will never come back, for better or worse. Change, no matter how positive, is still change. Change always comes with a price, and though it’s not good to dwell, it’s ok to mourn what you will have or have let go of.
I think I’d like to take a nap now.
Let’s hope October wants to give me a hug.