A Certain Kind of Way — And here's why

I’ve been feeling a certain kind of way* recently, and maybe you have too. It’s like my brain refuses to function, or refuses to focus, anyway. I sit down to get some work done and the minute I open up my email and all the other tabs and programs I need, a haze comes over me. It literally feels like whatever fluid my brain is floating in gets thicker. I can’t think. I can’t focus. I don’t remember what I need to do and trying to figure it out feels like trying to run through a pool filled with Jell-O. It’s… a little scary, if I’m honest.

I work from home and I get paid by the hour, so I have a few tactics I try to get my brain working again. I change locations. I change clothes. I turn off my time tracker and I get up and do something that needs to get done around the house. I intend to go on a walk one day. I attempt to read something unrelated. I set a timer and play a video game for twenty minutes, hoping that the top-level mental stimulation will allow the deep-level brain to start to churn away on its own as well, trying to hack my brain into some semblance productivity. I try to write about something else, about anything at all.

Sometimes these things work.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes I stare listlessly at emails until one offers an easy task and I do that task, hoping it’ll spark my brain back into life and work.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes I wish I could be a character in a Stephen King novel, before the horror really sets in, someone who has a brain, sure, but someone who also has a job doing some kind of manual task. It pays the bills, mostly, and it lets him think while he’s working. He can do the task at hand, and do it well, but all the while, his brain is chipping away at something else, some idea or problem (maybe even the problem of the monster his kid insists is in his closet, with frightening detail).

I realize those kinds of jobs do exist still, but they don’t pay the bills, or if they do, they leave me too exhausted to do anything else the rest of the time. And maybe that was truly the situation back in the eighties as well. I don’t know. But it feels like the world is different. It feels like the economy is different. It feels like there’s not a way for me anymore.*

Now, I do try to suck it up, buttercup. I do give myself some tough love and get off my ass and get things done. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I remind myself how lucky I am, and how many other people would kill to be in my position. Sometimes this works. Most often, it doesn’t. Tough love has run its course, I think.

Because I don’t need a reality check. I need a new reality.

I need a world where students aren’t detained and transported out of state for expressing their first amendment rights to protest. I need a world where people with tattoos supporting their brother with autism aren’t illegally deported to a foreign prison so terrible the president brags about it. I need a world where veterans get the care they need. I need a world with Social Security. I need a world with a Department of Education. Screw it, I need a world with National Parks. I need a world that’s not on the brink of collapse every two seconds.

I need so much more than this, of course, obviously. And nothing is guaranteed, and so many of the structures of our government don’t serve all of us or any of us well, and we can and should build better structures. There are so many ways we can provide for each other, so many ways we can make sure that everyone can sit under their own vine and fig tree, and I do actually trust the people of the United States to figure these things out together. Call me a sucker, but I think we can do this.

Because it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to feel this way. Things can change.

We can do this. Together.

*Yes, I have depression. Yes, I have seen a doctor about it. Yes, I’ve been to therapy about it. Yes, I have coping mechanisms. This is one of them.