So something happened this week that has brought everything in my life to a screeching halt.
I got fucking sick again.
Only three weeks following the ten day crud affair we brought back from Virginia, I lay down in bed on Monday night and felt a wave of complete awfulness engulf me.
I had been struggling with a sore throat all day, and I drank a lot of tea and tried to ignore it (after all, the baby is super into growling right now, and more is there to do than growl back at him, so i figured I'd just hurt my voice), but no.
It was the strangest thing. I'd been running around all day trying to take care of the baby's weird stomach fussiness, plus he had a pimple (A PIMPLE) on his eyeball, and mailing bills and trying so very hard not to let the news and facebook and all the current media shit get me down, and I just hadn't had time to even think about whether I was really not feeling well. And then I lay down on my back, babesauce all snurdled into the crook of my arm, and I felt like I was being shoved into the bottom of a burlap sack of sickness and the top was being tied closed over my head.
My eyes began to water and my nose began to run simultaneously.
A headache descended over my temples.
Chills began to shake my body uncontrollably (I don't get fevers when I get sick, I get the opposite, don't believe come check my thermometer, in the midst of the worst of this I was 96.3).
And that horrible white noise feeling of sickness seeped throughout my limbs. YOU know what I'm talking about, it's that incapacitating indescribable awfulness. I call it "The Bees". It feels like my head is full of bees. My body is full of bees. There's a thrumming, buzzing, dizzying awfulness, and it's basically like all my blood has been replaced by bees.
Lying there, I thought, well, it's good it's happening now. I'll just get a good night's sleep and battle off this bullshit.
But sleep was nowhere to be found.
Instead my brain began to race with anxious thoughts.
I don't think I need to describe them. The started with current events, global crisis, my meager existence and feeling like I'm not good to humankind because I can't fix this.
Then we were off and running.
From there we went to my own fears of failure as a mother and as a writer and my delight at how having submitted over a dozen and a half pitches, blogs, stories, and poems to various publications and online forums not a single one has been accepted.
This line of thought of course led me to the fear of going broke, going bankrupt, losing everything and then having no recourse when the inevitable need to flee the country arrived.
Circle back to fears about global crisis, powerlessness etc...
And then as it was basically just pulling out all the stops, my brain started simultaneously picking my relationship with my husband apart WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY BROADCASTING THE ENTIRE MOVIE OF THE RING ON THE INSIDE WALL OF MY EYELIDS.
For those of you who don't know, I am terrible at scary movies. I love the cheesy ones, the classic ones, even the clever ones of today, but the really scary, disturbing, unsettling ones bother me for years. Case and point: The Ring. I saw it ONE BLOODY TIME when I was 20 years old. I have proceeded to have nightmares about it for the last FOURTEEN FUCKING YEARS, PEOPLE.
In fact, I'd been blissfully not troubled by images of a pale ass goth bitch in a threadbare nighty clawing her way out of my television for a couple of years now, and then some FUCKER in hollywood figured the series needed a reboot and I began seeing exactly that image on my goddamn youtube page every time I opened it up. Hey movie people: SHOWING PTSD INDUCING FUCKING IMAGES ON HOMEPAGES IS NOT COOL.
But I digress.
So yeah.
I didn't sleep. Not one wink on Monday night.
And I woke up Tuesday with a full blown disaster of a cold.
The thing is, I haven't been anywhere since last week.
I've been busy taking care of the baby, while he got over what he had, and applying for jobs online, and stuck around the house.
I haven't been around anyone, let alone anyone sick.
And then there's the fact that Bastian is better as of yesterday. He's fine.
Doesn't show any sign of this cold, and usually if one of us is sick, the other comes down with it within hours.
Even Beard shows no symptoms.
So I have a theory.
I think this was my body's message to me to slow the fuck down.
I've been racing and freaking out ever since the election. I know it sounds like a cop out to blame that but I've never been this scared before, not even after 9/11.
I knew it that day, and I've felt it since, I just don't know how to make things better, and the powerlessness makes me psychotic.
I feel like as an individual it is my responsibility to stay informed. I feel like I need to be donating and marching and actively resisting, and every moment I'm at home with the baby feels like (and I can't believe I'm saying this) like an excuse not to.
Anyway...so I got sick.
I think my brain got so overwhelmed with fear and anxiety and impotence that it literally shut my body down.
And I am going to listen.
I'm signing off of social media for a while.
In fact, I'm signing off of media in general for awhile.
I'm still going to be informed, but I can't do my job, my incredibly important job of raising my son if I'm like this.
I'm still donating to planned parenthood, the aclu, the preemptive love coalition, and others.
I'm still going to be aware of my surroundings, globally and politically, but I can't do the fear mongering anymore. I can't exist inside a pool of panic all the time. It's literally breaking me.
So I'll still be here, off and on, but don't expect me to engage in too much hot rhetoric.
I'm going back to motherhood, writing, and general baddassery.
Now excuse me. I have a batch of shortbread in the oven and my son wants to play blocks with me.
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