Anyhow, this blog is not abandoned (yet!!!) but slow-rolling in the wake of some truly nutterbutter turns in life, most prominently the fact that rehearsals are eating most of my evenings and weekends. It's going well! But it's a lot, and even when I'm not in rehearsals, getting off book and keeping the bare minimum of Keeping Life On Track has prohibited much in the way of blogging.
But on this anniversary of the evening in which I galumphed into the world, I wanted to briefly say: my sense of time has gotten really nice again, and I'm glad about it!
At some point in grad school, I suddenly had trouble relating to time in the same way I used to. What seems screamingly obvious as a sign of anxiety in hindsight was, in the moment, totally inexplicable to me. (And maybe my partner? We will never know!) Oddly, the way I most clearly remember this manifesting itself was with regards to teevee. I have a technicolor-brilliant memory of more than one occasion where my partner and I decided to watch an episode of... something (I think it was usually Catastrophe but there were others in the mix too) and then I would abruptly decide I couldn't, or didn't want to, or something, and would go stress-sit in the other room, often trying and totally failing to focus on some kind of schoolwork while my partner watched the thing we were gonna watch together, alone, and probably had an extremely fun time doing so.
So, yeah, this, like so many other head-smacking "discoveries" after the fact (there's a photo of me from this time period in which I'm quite heavy and visibly depressed to a degree that boggles me as to why I couldn't figure out what was going on, except of course because of how this works) is a pretty obvious thing, but what's more surprising to me is how long that energy stuck around, manifesting in basically the same way. Even after finishing my dissertation, and my defense, I'd have evenings after work where I'd settle in to watch a movie, only to find myself nervously flipping through my phone or "doing work" on my laptop, multiscreening in some weird avoidance-therapy haze.
And some of this is straight-up seasonal stuff; not so much the cold of winter but the punishing gray gets to me, as I always realize around now, when the reemergence of the sun floods me with energy and hope and life again. But some of it was about unlearning the mind-trap of grad school all over again. Because, particularly absent the routine and short-term deadlines of coursework, grad school can be extremely good at convincing you that you should never be awake without frenetically getting work done. Colleagues will bluff and bluster about how busy they are, conferences will convince you that everybody else is making massive strides in comparison to your excruciating bellycrawl, and your increasing awareness of how little you know about the corner of the world you study will inflame your imposter syndrome to a truly wild degree.
For me, as someone who'd very happily spent much of my life relatively unhurried and free of the timecrunch variety of accomplishment-oriented ambition, this mindset crept up on me and totally blindsided me. It was compounded, at the start, by the belief that I had to succeed at this venture in a very specific way, not just because I'd landed on a career track, but because my partner was relying on me to do so. But as with most insidious habits/thought-traps, it found its way into my muscle memory well after that specific concern had passed.
In short, it's a habit I've had to unlearn, quite consciously, and imperfectly, but the great joy of today, this year, this moment, is that I am much closer to where I once took joy in being: happy to bask in the where-I-am-now instead of the what-should-I-be-doing or where-should-I-have-gotten-to-by-now. It helps immensely, of course, to be rehearsing a play and reactivating all the experimental and exploratory failure-muscles that need exercising, and the change in weather doesn't hurt. But I'm able, now, when I need to, to take a night to unplug, to simply read a book or watch a movie, by myself (it's always been easier in the company of friends and loved ones) without letting the anxiety-yelp of "look at your phone!" tripping me up.
OK! More to come soon - there are at least 2-3 more Japan posts coming before we even turn the corner into Mexico City yammering, and gosh by then I'll have been to LA too, and by the time that makes it into this space, probably New England?? And then nowhere else til 2020 except maybe filming a thing in Wisconsin, or a road trip to Minnesota, look, it's far less travel than I've historically done and I'm being very responsible, go back to bed.
