November’s End
Only December to go to finish the year out! Hooray! I seriously hate this year. 2009 has been the suckfest of all my life. Oh, I know there may be worse times to come, but I don’t want to imagine it. I’m so sick of the holidays already, with all the cheer and the happy and family fun times, YAY! I want to enjoy it, and sometimes I do, but other times it makes me gag.
I read The Bell Jar today. Started it last night, really. I enjoyed it, very much in the same way I enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye, though I think today’s book was more pertinent to me. No real revelations, though. I can seriously empathize with mentally ill people, and there are times when I wonder if that just means I’m sick, too. So many conversations that I had with Lauren the week before he died, and me saying, “Me, too, I totally understand that!” and now I worry that there’s some hidden monster in me waiting to kill me. Especially on days when I just don’t want to get out of bed, when life just seems a dreaded chore, I worry. What would I do if something overcame me? Am I wired the same way?
Obviously, mental illness is on my mind, and the holidays, and so many other things. The parts of The Bell Jar I sympathized the most with, though, were the feminist portions, and the life decisions parts. Feeling paralyzed that one decision excludes all others is a very familiar conundrum to me. Right now I’ve got to choose something for survival that might throw me off a track that I was enthusiastic about, that I thought my whole passion was behind. Was it really? Was it driven out so easily because it wasn’t my passion, or am I just going through what all the books really say? Why don’t I believe that the books and the psychology apply to me? What is the right decision to make for my family? (What about the right decision for me? And why do I think to add that when I’m reviewing the blog post 10 minutes after I originally published it?)
Tomorrow it’ll be different, after the kids get up and get out of bed I’ll concentrate on them, and doing the laundry, and all the other steps that need doing. But now is the time I’m thinking and whirling in my mind and all I catch are shadows of what would have been if I weren’t such a dumbass and could figure it all out. And I don’t know what to do and I’m sick of not knowing what to do and I’m tired of walking into the other room to discreetly cry a few tears and then pull my hair down to hide my face behind.
So maybe the book did do me some good, and was cathartic, since I’m a wreck right now. I’m just going to revel in being free and having finished what I started.