A day survived
I just took the girls out to go for a bike ride with their grandfather. I’ve got a bad headache, I’m struggling to focus, and right now I just can’t manage to work.
It makes me smile thinking about how their grandfather said it would just be fifteen minutes, just taking them down to the river nearby where he’d ride with them.
The truth is, from the moment I woke them up, getting them ready, keeping them focused, cleaning everything that needed to be cleaned, transporting them, coming back home and dealing with the fact that he himself forgot his phone at home, it ended up taking me an hour, maybe more.
And beyond that, it drained me in a way that’s impossible to explain or make anyone really understand.
It’s something you eventually just give up on trying to share. But it still weighs on me, making it harder to do anything. So now I’m just sitting in front of the computer, scrolling through my notes or my work pages, trying to find a thread to pull, something to write about, but I already know most of this day is just going to survive. I’ll survive this day.
I feel it in the tiredness, in the stomach pain, in the headache, the complete inability to do anything. In a way, I’m really grateful I have some technical work to do. It doesn’t ask much from me mentally, I just need to do it. At least that means I’ll have something done by the end of the day.
But everything else... I think the rest of the day will just pass. In about an hour, maybe less, I’ll go pick up the girls. After that, it’ll just be surviving until tonight, when I can finally go to sleep.
The past few nights I tried to work late, staying up till three in the morning, trying to do things after I’d taken care of the girls, gotten them ready, cleaned them up, when they finally crashed on the bed shouting into the tablet with their friends.
But last night I couldn’t handle the pace anymore, and I doubt I’ll manage tonight either. So I guess I won’t really get anything useful done.
It’s made worse by the fact that I had to turn down some work a month ago, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. I wouldn’t have had the energy, and I was right to say no. I really wouldn’t have had the strength. But now I’m in this kind of condition where I’m not producing anything, I don’t have a sense or a timeframe for when I’ll start creating again.
Maybe in September. But I don’t know what that would even look like. I feel stuck in a kind of void, a void without much hope of being able to do anything that makes real sense.
