Sparkling Isolation – Day 44

Adulting sucks.

Children have it made. Until a certain age, kids can say whatever they think about something and adults laugh or smile indulgently and call them “cute.” At a certain indeterminate age, however, society starts to teach us to edit. We are told what is “right” and “wrong” and what we should and should not say.

Now, after decades of being brainwashed by the system I have lost my ability to just say what I feel without editing myself. Welcome to the world of adulting. It sucks.

For instance, right now I would like nothing more than to climb on the roof of my house and shout out to the world about all the things I am thinking about the ‘higher ups’ of the company where I work. I would love to just pick up the phone and call certain people to tell them just how I feel. It’s nearly overwhelming.

Then the adult voice kicks in and I decide that staying employed with good health insurance is more important than speaking my mind. The concept of “golden handcuffs” is alive and well in my world and it makes me feel utterly powerless and disempowered.

I bring this up as a preamble to the idea of how I’m feeling today. The issues at work are a large portion of my feelings this week, but to be honest they are only part of it. Since the weekend I have had a strange problem with sleep. For nearly 40 days of isolation I have had no issues with my sleep patterns. Since the weekend, however, I have been waking up in the middle of the night every night – wide awake – with no explanation for why I am awake. My dreams have been bizarre and vivid, more than ever before. It’s exhausting.

I have this weird overwhelming feeling that something is “wrong.” Of course, it’s the truth, isn’t it? The entire world is going through a phase of “something’s wrong.” In my case, it’s more than the pandemic. It’s a personal malaise. I told someone today that I feel like my emotional and mental energy went from 75% capacity to about 40% capacity for no specific reason. It’s like a fog has rolled in over my life and everything is vague and somehow slower and darker than normal.

My memory is cloudy, my emotions are raw, and I feel as though there’s no point in anything I am doing.

The utter disregard shown to me (and others) by the “powers that be” at my job have only exacerbated this feeling of hopelessness. If the very people who should be supporting you treat you as though you are invisible and worthless, then that only makes everything else worse.

So today I feel tired. Tired and hopeless and – frankly – like I am utterly worthless and have no reason to keep trying to do anything constructive. It’s a sad, depressing place to be and I realize that in reality it’s all just a momentary feeling. But it doesn’t negate the fact that I feel so awful at the moment.

I wish I could just stop being evasive and shout out the specifics of why I feel this way. But, alas, adulting kicks in and my desire to remain employed with health insurance overtakes the desire to be honest.

As I said before. Adulting sucks.

It’s only Quarantine if it comes from the Quarante province of France. Otherwise, it’s just Sparkling Isolation.