I have been having some extremely busy weekends, and one of the things I come to at the end of the week is how exhausted I get mentally. The worst part is when I fall off the cliff after everything is done. There’s a whole run up, like when you sprint up a whole flight of stairs, and as the horizon appears you come to and end. At that moment, you feel completely breathless; it feels like you should have kept on climbing more stairs, at least you would have more to conquer. But your legs are dead, so are your lungs, and there are no more stairs to go.
I spent a lot of this day sitting in my chair reflecting. An un-quantifiable amount of time, but deeply necessary for the mental knots I have to unwind. The knot is huge.
The knot in my head feels so thick, laffy taffy like. I want to think fast, but instead of chewing fast like a Haribo gummy, my teeth are stuck together. My mind can’t peel itself off, and I need to sit here and pick at it slowly. I was actually literally picking out prawn shells from my fried shrimp at dinner. One of the little bits stuck at my gums. That’s another frustrating ick; having something small bothering you all the day long. Knots and prawn shells, my brain in analogies getting even more knotty.
So I write away on my 3-5 different journals, hoping to have some miraculous moment of clarity. Instead, I have more undone tasks, because I have been clearly missing texts and emails for the past week. It’ll improve a little in the coming week because I have a lot of more thinking work to do this week. Means sitting down, means phone and email are a lot more visible and in front of my eyes.
—
But life isn’t a thorny path, when you have the gadgets and nick-knacks all around you. A fountain pen here, a sticker there. One of the days, I might even have a new pair of shoes on my feet, who knows! I know, because I already wore them for a breaking in walk about tonight.
Being trapped to a chair, and forced to think through plans over and over again isn’t so bad.
There’s worst things to be doing, like sitting in the heat and trying to cleanly slice up a RISO zine without dripping sweat on it. By far, the silliest and most difficult thing I’ve done all year. I went back up to the studio to cut my zines. That’s my work, and that’s part of what needs to get done.
But deeply boring journaling work came to remind me today to update something here. It’s been some time since I wrote something to face the outside world, and perhaps this is a good reminder to write with interesting text structures. I am truly getting bored with telling myself the sequence of events of the day. It is mundane and utterly reflective in its factual reflection, and the wonders it does for my memory. Truly.
Leave a Reply