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Not long ago, the doctor suggested I wear a heart monitor for 48 hours to make sure than an arrhythmia that I've been experiencing is nothing to be concerned about. He said they were probably PVCs or a "holiday heart." A holiday heart apparently occurs when a person drinks and eats more than they are accustomed to doing, typically over Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays. The afflicted person will feel a skipped heart beat, often followed by a rapid succession of beats.
Well, my holiday heart is considerably improved these days, perhaps because I've cut down a lot on the red wine -- an aggravating factor, the doctor says. But I've got another kind of holiday heart syndrome.
It always happens to me when I travel to visit friends or family. I look forward to the time away from my home and routine so eagerly; I picture it, fantasize about it, imbue it with idealistic images of interpersonal hear-to-hearts, wholesome outdoor activities, blissful leisure time with books, delectable and prolonged three course meals -- in short, a kind of honeymoon interlude to my daily life, made doubly wonderful because the people who relieve me of so much of the drudgery of my regular childcare duties-- my in-laws -- always relish the opportunity to do so and cherish every moment with my children.
But then, the time actually comes. I am thrust into it, and it is not wonderful, at least not in a sustainable way. I find that I am never really in the moment, that moment that I have imagined and savored so sweetly as a future promise. Instead, I am often irritable and at loose ends, not knowing what to do with myself. Plans are made each day, fun ones, like going to a beach, or sailing, or dune climbing, or going to a parade, a movie or some summer tourist attraction. Jeff and I usually visit a few of his friends. I like shooting the breeze with people I've missed over the year, feeling warm wind and sun on my face, eating good food, laughing, walking, and seeing the kids delight in every new scene. But after each event comes a kind of uncomfortable satedness -- physical and mental -- it's like my senses are overstimulated and I can't think clearly anymore. And in this blurred state of being that is somehow seductive, I want to keep going, keep filling myself with the freedom of being away and out of real-time existence. And so I will continue, but the more I abandon by daily rituals of diet and exercise and home maintenance, the more unhappy I become. Beneath the tightly stretched surface of my increasingly torpid body, I get more and more hopelessly depressed, and more and more spiritually nihilistic, until I eventually start shutting everything out and retreating into a kind of comatose state. And the days go on, the excesses continue to pile up and erode my base-line sanity, and I struggle to maintain a facade of gameness and competence.
By the end of it all, I am like a boil that needs to be lanced. I can hardly be civil to Jeff. Even the modulated tones of a normal conversation are like nails on a chalkboard, and I find myself wanting to cry a lot. I start sleeping into the afternoon, and then desperately making plans for new meds and a more rigorous course of counseling.
But here I am, in the middle of it. Surely there is a way to stop this downward spiral. I know it's about letting go of the future, being quiet within myself and within the moment, listening, and taking chances. I am going to make it through this holiday in better shape than I have in the past.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
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5 comments:
Oh, man. Every time you write about this topic you sound more and more like me. No kidding. I wish there were a way to put some of the stuff I've - um - well, it doesn't feel like it's stuff I've learned. It feels like stuff I've become because I finally got beat up enough.
I'll just give you this one tip. It came from my kids. "Pretend you're watching a movie." That's what they do in the most insane moments of the extended family insanity. It helped.
And it's the expectations that are getting you tangled up. The expectations that hope will change reality. And ... this is important ... it is in the "heart" that we feel grief. What you're doing is grieving a loss. It helps to articulate it, so it's good you wrote about it again. And it comes off in layers. So don't be too surprised when it shows again. The only way out is through. There is no way around.
Love what you can and relax enough to observe the rest. You're on the path to health. I can see it.
Thank you, Stephanie. The tangle of expectations, yes, and mostly imposed on myself by myself. You know what movie I'm going to imagine that I'm watching with myself as a character? "Easy Virtue." Have you seen that? I love the American woman. She's an inspiration.
Do you suppose these feelings are in part a legacy of your dance training - the need to be disciplined, controled, to know where each metaphorical foot is to be placed either because of years of training, muscle memory or the outside force of choreography - of others expectations as well as your own to deliver?
Letting go is perhaps not something truely in the lexicon of classical ballet - not in a life sense anyway. And to expect yourself after as many years of life spent dancing as not, to be able to alter the pathways to simple be in the moment is hard - all the more so because you have been trained to do as your body and mind tells you, and not to be able to brings on old voices calling for perfection, obedience, submission even, that used to mean suffocating a piece of yoursef.
Give yourself the same care and understanding you would give to another. You deserve that much - more actually, but small steps are a good start.
I totally relate to all of this. It is amazing how centering one's daily ways and means are; amazing how disoriented one gets without them. Especially with children, who function best (or function for US best) on a schedule. But you point to something deeper than having your children at large -- a sense that in your own being, apart from your daily routines, you can easily feel lost and despairing. I do not think this is so unusual. Think of all the great writers whose mental flights depended on rigid, predictable lives, or at least, traveling the same pathways over and over, painting the same scenes, now in this light now in another. Adventures of the soul, Eva. If you don't function well outside the pleasures of morning tennis and the modes and manners of home, then do not expect yourself to flourish and come to life outside them. Try to bring as many of your routines with you, and to take refuge in the mental world where, at the least, you can describe your pain vividly, and allow others to communicate with you in its light. It is a mark of your hopefulness that you always imagine such trips to promise halcyon delights. I do not think this is simply delusion. I think instead that what you relish and lay out for yourself in these moments is a kind of liberation which you (and maybe many of us) may only be able to experience in small doses. And so what? In the end, there is pleasure in "drudgery" -- in work, in labor, and in self re-creation -- too. (Which you consistently anatomize in this blog.)
Kate -- brilliant suspicion. Yes, yes, and yes. At the risk of being too abstract, I purposefully left out all the lingering neuroses that plague me from my past life in dance, because they are so bloody tedious, and I just can't bear to write about them sometimes. But oh, how I wish I were not so in their thrall.
And just to hear your commonsense reading of the situation -- that letting go isn't part of the "lexicon" of classical ballet -- is itself a freeing, a fresh perspective. Makes me able to be nicer to myself. thanks.
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