Fridays Suck
12.12.08
I hate Fridays. Fridays are the day on which all of the tension and exhaustion and stress and lack of sleep and disappointment of the week comes crashing down on me and as I drive home from work I have to concentrate extra hard to make sure that I don’t veer off the road or something. There is tension in the back of my head, the right side right where my neck meets me head and my jaw aches. My back is all twisted and out of sorts from sitting sideways at my desk so that my computer monitor doesn’t face the entire office. I get home and want nothing more than to sleep for a hundred years, but the gym closes at 7:45 on Friday nights and so what I try to do is to find a way to gather some scrap of energy to allow myself to change and get over to the gym because inevitably I’ve skipped more times that I find acceptable during the week either because I had a fever or my period or a family night or there was a birthday or whatever. And if I can find that little bit of energy to get over there, I push push push through the workout, wanting nothing more than for it to be over and done with because it is no longer enjoyable but a chore to get done because the rest of my life feels riddled with requirements and should dos and so working out has become something I have to stretch to do.
And so today I came home with a lot of pain in my right side. I had polarity work done at work today, which is energy work. I was upset because I had been expecting a massage and ended up getting polarity done and it wasn’t at all what I wanted. There were other little things throughout the day that built up – crap with health insurance, feeling like I’m doing a job that I am not getting paid for, long boring meetings and the like. By the afternoon I was dragging and in pain. It was to the point where I took painkillers. I probably could have survived without them, but I really really wanted to get to the gym and so I thought “may as well take them in hopes of it helping me later on today.” Then I even left work a little early in hopes of being able to have an extra moment for myself before going to the gym.
It is now 6:06PM and while I know that if I were to jump up, change and rush over there right this minute, I could get in my workout. But I’m tired and frustrated and so so so angry at feeling this rushed and unable to do what I want to do that I can’t even do it. I started to write last night about how I miss France and as I lay here in bed hate hate hating that I can’t even find the energy to go to the gym and that I have no desire to go to the pot luck at Cinizia’s tonight, I thought about how different my life in France as and how I miss it.
I think what I miss most is that France was this space in my life in which it was totally OK and easy to make myself the number 1 priority the majority of the time. It was such a luxury to be able to think of me, my wants, my needs, my emotions, my time, my goals, and my happiness first almost always. I guess maybe it spoiled me. But it seems so wrong to me that my life should consist of spending more time doing things that I would not actively chose to do if I really felt like I had the choice. And it pisses me off to think that this is what it means to be an adult and to be grown up. And I know know know that in some ways I am playing the victim and that I do make choices and decisions and that it is up to me to prioritize things, but when student loans and rent and bills have to be paid, when a lease has been signed, when there are people you love who want and need you in their lives, when there was only one job interview and lucky that job was offered to me, it doesn’t feel much like there’s a whole lot of room in there for constructing the life that I want. And maybe I am just giving up too easily or being far too stubborn about the things that I want. But even so, I could not help but start to cry as I lay here tonight thinking about how I couldn’t even just go for a walk, just a simple walk today. All of the “exercise” I got in my life today consisted of me walking around the Head Start. On an average day in Paris, even if I did not find the time to take a walk for the sake of taking a walk, I got in at least 45 minutes worth of walking through the city, up and down stairs in subways and at school.
And now I’m at that place where I feel so much anger and frustration churning inside of me that I need to do SOMETHING to get rid of it. But I am so tired and at a loss as to how to deal with it that I can’t figure out how to even get out of bed to deal with it. And no, I am not on hormones and no, I am not pmsing and no, I am not sick. I want to break something.
One of my gripes living here is that I feel like I have no friends of my own or life of my own. Tonight I have been invited to Cinzia’s for a potluck. Cinzia taught ESL with me and potentially could be my very own friend. I have no desire to go. In fact, I actively do not want to go. So the one time something of my very own presents itself I can’t even figure out how to want to participate.
Living here makes me feel so crazy. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. I know staying in France would have been hard in its own right. I mean, I think about that every time I start to miss it. I pull out my list of reasons why it’s really OK that I’m here not there - my list of why it would have been hard and not the same and not satisfying and not what it was had I stayed there – finding a job, finding a place to live, working out visas, not having the same social network, being far away from home, not having furniture, etc. In the end it doesn’t help to think about those things. In the end I still miss my life there. I still miss the city and how it felt to spend hours upon hours wandering through the streets, usually the same route over and over and over again but sometimes a new path, a new back road, a different turn, or just noticing something that I’d passed a million times and never seen before.
Sometimes I think I am meant to live a really solitary life. Human relations exhaust me and I feel like I’m not really equipped to maintain really close relationships with people, or at least not to do so for extended periods of time in one place. Sure being far away and alone has its drawbacks, its moments that don’t feel so great and are hard. But life is like that no matter what. You can be in a room with the people who know you best and who love you more than anything and still feel like complete and utter shit. You can be there with them and have them holding you and telling you it’ll be OK, listening to you, supporting you and doing everything in their power and more to make you feel OK or to let you feel what you’re feeling and STILL you can feel like shit. It happens with our without witnesses, and sometimes I think that maybe for me what works best is being on my own and being OK with it for the majority of the time and then when I’m not so OK with it, just going through that and coming around to the other side of it.
Of course I’m not actually going to act on this. I’m not going to become a recluse or a hermit lost somewhere in the streets of Paris though that seems like exactly what I want the freedom to have right now. I mean, I guess being on my own just feels like so much freedom and coming back into a situation where I am more actively involved with people I love feels like losing a lot of that freedom. And it feels like such an awful awful thing to say – that being with those people who love me and who I love is stifling and holds me back so I don’t say it. And I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that it brings about a really unique set of challenges for me and it really overwhelms me and I feel ill equipped to deal with them.
Did I write about the family night on Monday night in which we talked about stress management? Did I talk about how part of the info packet had a worksheet about transitions? Did I mention that I realized that these past six months of my life have included at least four transitions that are a lot bigger and more major than I had ever really realized? It’s hard for me to give myself the time and space to deal with them. It’s strange because last year in France (and when I lived in Dijon as well), I learned to be super compassionate and kind towards myself. I learned how to set outside of myself and take care of myself how I would take care of a friend. I learned to let go and to lower the bar and that it’s fine to not live up to all of the expectations that I set for myself.
Those were all strategies and ways in which I was able to cope with the challenges in my life – transitioning and acclimating to living in a different country, on my own, and such. Now here I am hit with all of that (yes, even acclimating to living in a different country and going through culture shock counts) and I feel like my body is in constant rebellion and like I am never doing enough or doing it right or balancing or showing up for people or showing up for myself and I let it get so big and impossible that its crippling to the point where I get home from work on Friday evening with one single goal – to go to the gym- and I end up in bed feeling angry with myself and my life. And it doesn’t seem to even matter anymore or to work anymore to tell myself that its really fine and that I need to be kind and compassionate to myself, that one night of being less active than usual won’t kill me and that I need to rest and relax. Those thoughts that used to work seem to just make me remember all the other nights I’ve had like this here (and maybe in reality they are not as many as they seem in my worked up mind right now) and then I start thinking about how many more there are to come.
One major strategy that I think has worked wonders since the end of high school has been writing and maybe I need to come back to that and be more intentional about that these days. Walking and going to the gym, of course, were other huge de-stressing techniques. Of course now they only seem to add to the sense that I am overextended, overwhelmed, overly obligated and incapable of figuring out how to balance my life. But maybe if I take more time to sit and write I’ll be able to readjust my life in a way that makes sense and allows me to feel like I am living up to my own expectations, meeting my own needs and being the person that I want to be both for myself and for the people in my immediate day to day life (and really there are only a few of those people and even then it seems to be way more than I can handle – I really should become a recluse).
