I don’t often get writer’s block, but I think I got it today, in the sense that I’ve had this window open, staring at an unwritten newsletter, for about two hours. Now, that’s also because I kept getting distracted by stuff - which happens sometimes, as I have written about before and thus cannot write about again - and because I am extremely tired today, and feel like I’ve been tired for months. It seems that any day I don’t get 8 hours’ sleep I feel like crap the next day, which is deeply worrying and probably suggests I’m getting old. I also worry I’m getting old because I called my cat “Perry” on Saturday, which is the name of a cat that I had in London that has been dead for easily 15 years, maybe even more. Hell, I can’t even remember when he died.
I think a lot about how I’ve basically become this revolving door of tasks at the moment, partly because of the pandemic, but partly because my life has just become so crammed with stuff I have to do at roughly the same time every day, which seems to be me describing adulthood. I wake up, drink coffee, get child, feed child, go to work, go on calls, write Substack, play piano, get on bike, end work, get child, play with child, feed child, put child to bed, and then there’s a few hours of open time.
This isn’t me complaining - I love my kid, my life is good - but just how much of my schedule is so easily uprooted by one task taking slightly longer than usual. If I wake up 10 minutes late, my day feels like it’s rushed despite really nothing actually changing. If I get an unexpected, unscheduled interruption during work, I feel like a gun is to my head and I’m going to die. This is another thing that makes me worried about who I am, and whether I have some form of undiagnosed other problem other than my dyspraxia.
I think at some point in the next month or two my wife and I are going to find a way to get away for a few days, on our own, away from everything, and away from my scheduled tasks (with a family member who is vaccinated taking care of our kid). We’re lucky in that we have a home and stability and such, and I know 90% of parents have it harder than we do, but there is definitely a frayed edge of repetition happening, and an exhaustion that stems from not simply having to do stuff, but knowing you are going to have to do the same thing, in the same way, every single day without it changing, without it getting better or worse, without variety…I’ve literally written this paragraph before, but my brain has got to a point where it’s complaining in different ways about the same exact thing.
I don’t even know what I want anymore. I know that the moment I am able to regularly step outside the house I’m going to feel the urge to return to it, as everything outside of the house is hard and everything inside the house is controlled, organized…and one might say task-driven. I find myself craving getting on a long flight just because it involves showing my brain that the outside world is not its friend. I mostly just want to break up time again.
Anyway, I don’t know what to do, really. None of us do. At least our elderly relatives are getting vaccinated, and nobody I know has got sick for a while.
At least I was able to do an extremely good pork shoulder this weekend!