Late Night Feelz
G: These pheelings you’re about to encounter mostly belong to M. While they are not totally foreign to me, I don’t suffer in their wake like he does. Despite my best supportive efforts, M’s darkness irks me. Living with one’s partner’s melancholia really does feel like living with a third roommate. Usually, I’m at peace with M; it’s these late night feelz I find myself wanting to strangle. They’re not funny like sarcasm or sexy like cynicism. They show up uninvited and are really hard to talk to.
I know better. I go to school for this shit. I do my best to listen, not judge; to receive, not manage. I am constantly upgrading my masculinity to be more collaborative, more vulnerable, and more sensitive. Still, it’s easier theorized than done.
Even on good days when M, his pheelings, and I manage to all get along, I fall asleep feeling cheated. Since I feel like there is no room in the bed, my own gremlin sleeps in the closet with the vacuum cleaner at the end of the hall. And when he does get the rare opportunity to join us, he is - and understandly so - extremely pissed off.
M and I have discussed possible solutions, such as: separate beds for each other and our respective monsters, drinking less, and salt lamps. These dark pheelings are a work in progress in our relationship. This week M attempts to work through/with some of his demons.
I’d prefer to let mine out of the closet some other time.
M: I’m a werewolf after dinner. As daylight fades, my heart wanders and the abyss beckons me to it’s dark watering hole. G calls it my “witching hour.”
I guess, it’s true.
Most nights around 6PM I withdraw into a tunnel of doom. It doesn’t always last and I try not to let it affect G. But sometimes my feelings act up. Or they need to talk. It doesn’t help that G thinks they’re clinical and best ignored (G: Objection! Speculation). I’m not manic. I don’t have a chemical imbalance. I’m just frustrated; the books are closed on another day, my to-do list is still spilling forward and my body craves beer and a nap. Will I ever self-actualize or just get a beer gut? Will I ever achieve my potential or just sleep in? And what’s any of it worth? Isn’t it all just a hamster-wheel of banal busywork until obliteration? That’s what G thinks, anyway (G: Objection! Heresay).
In a way, it would help to know that G has problems, too. It would help to be trusted with his vulnerability. I feel so stuck in this dynamic of me being the domestic prince of darkness and him being the steady. I wish he’d open up to me more.
Mornings are a real gift. I need an hour to stare at a wall before I remember my name, but when I do, my cupeth of tea runneth over and I’m utter sunshine (absolute lie). As a teenager, every Saturday morning my dad would charge into my room, yank open the blinds and scream, “get up! get up! you’re pissing the day away!” While the ritual gave me the capacity to jump out of bed on a dime, it also gave me some pretty ingrained anxiety about productivity. I still wake up most mornings with dread: I haven’t done enough; there’s so much to do; I won’t be able to do it; I’m running out of time; I’m wasting my life.
These anxieties hold permanent residence in the background of my consciousness. I think they became particularly invasive when I stopped acting and turned my back on what had driven me forward for a long while. It was hard to find anything else as absorbing, as addictive as acting. And in the absence of that identity’s driving force, it was like someone turned up the volume on my internal clock. I became more still, more centered but also hyper aware of time’s twitches.
It’s helpful to remember that (for me, at least) anxiety about time and productivity is just a cardboard landscape, behind which a thicker, scarier wilderness lives. And that wilderness–maybe one of death, maybe one of meaninglessness–is the real terror. It’s the shit that I want to avoid looking at so badly that I’ll pile just about anything in front of it to distract me from it’s shadow; gardening, traveling, drinking, cats. But sometimes, it’s too seductive to ignore…
Yesterday, a bug flew in my fuckin’ eye at the garden and now I can’t sleep. And because I’m lying awake, I’m thinking about how I’m constantly avoiding the terrorizing thought that my life will not amount to anything significant–or at least, nothing significant in the way I wanted it to. And how that’s my own damn fault for not being able to see clearly and act on what I want.
And now, I can’t seem to let go of this sense that I’m losing something. Constantly losing something. Like, something is slipping away from me and with each passing day, it’s getting harder and harder to recover. And what am I doing about it? Mostly gardening. And so, I feel like there’s the me over here gardening and obsessively ordering from plant catalogues and then the me way back there like doing his hair in the mirror, being like, I’m totally going to be famous. And these are two utterly disconnected parts of myself, in a scenario where I’m missing the bit in the middle and fixated on what happened (or didn’t) back there when I was doing my hair.
Anyway, sorry for the late night negative feelz. Hopefully, your night is going better than mine / you’re profoundly unconscious. Hey, it’s a full moon! First one on summer solstice in more than 50 years.
If you need me, I’ll be outside howling.
Sleep tight.
