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.