Mind games
It’s hard to write when your mind is busy. Writing is a disciplined art form, and while I find myself constantly thinking about what I want to write next, finding the time to sit still with my computer requires the perfect balance of an uncluttered house and an uncluttered mind, two things that rarely align. As an accomplished overthinker, extreme empath, and one who battles anxiety, living in the time of COVID-19 is challenging at best. The weeks leading up to the decision of whether to send our children back to school was wrought with intense angst, and then the weeks leading up to school starting were even more so. Add to that then the current political climate, and it’s enough to send me over the edge. As are thoughts of black people being killed for no reason, detention camps, natural disasters, hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths, the unemployment rate, families with food insecurity, climate change, and, and, and……
I had a game on my phone, one where you find missing objects in pictures. It was a magical escape from reality, a beautiful distraction from feeling. Here was a place I could succeed, where I was in control of the outcome. If I find that vase, or that bird or that croissant hidden among the serene landscape, I have accomplished something. I hide in the bathroom with my phone, searching for objects rather than pulling the laundry from the dryer. I search for objects while the kids read, while we watch tv, while I’m waiting for that pot of water to boil, and before falling asleep at night. I sit down to write. I play a quick game before I begin. I never begin. If I fill my blank spaces with the game, I don’t have to feel, don’t have to think. Frustrated with myself, I delete the game. “Not feeling” is the tactic I’ve employed for the past two years after the death of my mother. I stay so busy that I can’t think about it, because when I do, it’s too much. I don’t know where to put the pain. It’s never the right time to let it out. It will engulf me. I don’t want to scare my children. I don’t have the time to sob for an hour. I have things to do. I avoid deep personal conversations with friends. I avoid sitting still. Maybe while the kids are in school, maybe when I’m taking that hour drive by myself, maybe while I go for a walk I can let it out; but I can’t just turn it on when I want to. It comes at me at the most inopportune times, times when I have to quash it down so I don’t embarrass myself: checking out at the grocery store, while reading a book to my son, at school drop off, when a particular song comes on, when I smell Christmas, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies….
This one hits hard. My mother and women’s rights are as intertwined as RBG and women’s rights in my mind. The depth of my sadness at Ginsburg’s passing, intermingling with the loss of my mother and the fear of what’s to come is amalgamated into a messy tangle of indescribable emotions. I am defeated.
And finally, I cry. And I write.