To say I’m exhausted is a little reductive. It’s probably more accurate to say I feel eroded.
I’ve got a lot on my plate.
The most serious thing is worrying about Haleigh. For the past 18 months or so, she’s been struggling with keeping her bloog sugar levels in a healthy range. This reached a breaking point a little over a year ago, when she passed out one morning and broke her angle diagonally in 2 places (see what I did there?). She did really well for a while, but has been starting to have an alarming number of these hypoglycemic events in the past few months. A lot of it is diet and avoiding carbs overly much, but a lot of it is unpredictable. I used to feel like I had ice in my veins, but every time her blood sugar crashes, I
- Panic.
- Get her to drink some juice or whatever I can find to quickly raise her blood sugar.
- Get mad.
I think I carry a low-level anxiety about it with me at all times, and it’s to the point where the most recent HG event happened because she turned her sensor’s alarm settings down because I was annoying her with how often I’d hear the beeps and ask her what was up. I tried seeing a therapist about it and her advice essentially amounted to “she’ll be fine, you should calm down. It took a lot for me to agree to trying therapy and that one conversation left me feeling really sour about the whole experience. I haven’t been back and I don’t plan to do so.
Work is work – generally chaotic because we’re often dealing with situations out of our control (i.e. the economy) or a co-worker’s lack of planning/foresight. That’s normal and ubiquitous to all b2b jobs, no matter how preventable I think it is but **** is it frustrating. I never would’ve expected I’d be coaching peers on having and maintaining a point of view – having an opinion on things seems like the most natural, tablestakes thing in the world. I keep noticing people outsourcing their cognitive load to others to make decisions and just tell them what to do but like… where has that strategy ever been successful?
I’ve been slowly making two significant lifestyle changes lately. I’m smoking less and working out more. The running sucks and I hate it in the moment. I also feel like a wimp when I’m running intervals or need to slow down and walk for a bit. But I constantly remind myself it’s literally almost been 20 years since I was 19, 9 feet tall, and bulletproof. I need to take it slow and let consistency do the work.
About a month ago, I took a 2-week tolerance break from smoking the devil’s lettuce. It had become a daily, sometimes twice daily practice and honestly a bit of a crutch with how much time we’ve spent cooped up at home these last couple years. A couple weeks ago I ended that tolerance break, but have limited my smoking to a handful of dosage pods between Friday and Sunday (~0.10g each, but ~0.5g for the whole weekend). I’m not sure if I’m actually thinking more clearly or if it’s a placebo effect, but I’m into it. The other small reward is when I do smoke, it hits much harder. I generally like anything that has a numbing effect. There was one episode of Rick & Morty with a line that really spoke to my worldview:
Yeah, that can sound bleak, but hear the positive. Life is chaos. None of us asked to be here or deal with whatever random shit has us down on whatever random day. But we are here. We’re dealing with it.
The mundane things somehow get us through. There’s something poetic and beautiful about that.