Writing When I Should Be Sleeping
I'm sitting here in a state of strung-out exhaustion, and my eyes have that warm-sticky-numb feeling they get after they've been dilated at the optometrist's, and everything around me has taken on a kind of skewed unreality rarely seen outside of dreams, with shadows where there should be none and tiny flickering things not-quite seen at the edges of my vision.
I should go to bed. But instead I'm thinking about resentment. Someone confessed to me awhile back that they sometimes get so angry at their spouse, because the spouse will be sitting there innocently watching TV or going out for drinks or any of a million little leisure activities that are unremarkable until the bar eats your life...whereas my friend has to study, and the whole situation seems unbearably unfair.
This post isn't really about that person. It's about all the other people who are thinking the same thing and feeling the same way. It's about me, because God, I know that feeling: not so much right now, because hey, things aren't so bad right now, but I know it because I lived it for a huge part of my first year of law school. I would think, how dare anyone have it easier than me? How dare they suggest that their own troubles are greater than mine, when they so clearly aren't?
And I know it because I've lived it on the other end, when someone resents the fact that your life isn't steeped in the same misery that chokes their every breath. Where a simple question like, "What did you do today?" is almost buried under the weight of all the things that go unsaid, the barely cloaked hostility and narrowed gaze just waiting for the opportunity to seize triumphantly on the evidence that you're not as unhappy as they are and so they win and you lose.
I think there's loss enough for everyone to share.
And I know because, forgive the repetition but it's important, I HAVE BEEN THERE, I know how nothing anybody says, how no amount of rationalization or cold slap in the face of reality, can help when you feel this way. It's something that goes right to your primitive core and bypasses all notions of logic.
Still...yet...even so...the fact is that the people who love us don't want that for us. They take no pleasure in our pain, and they don't ask it of us. We made our own choices, for ourselves, even if the reasons behind our choices involved the best interests of others. The burden of responsibility -- and blame -- rests firmly on our own shoulders.
Lucky for us those same people who love us forgive our excesses after the storm has passed.
