Lorem Ipsum

This has been a rough week for several of my friends, for a variety of reasons. It's been a rough week for me, too, but I have no idea why.

I've been irritable and sad and exhausted and tense all week. Part of it has been tension over posting a couple of recent blog entries (and writing a few more along related lines that I haven't posted yet), part of it has been some conflict at work, part of it has been too little sleep (though that's both cause and effect), part of it has been residual tension over various other stuff lately, including too little social downtime in the past couple months. But most of it has been completely mysterious to me.

Wednesday night, I went to bed earlyish (for me) because I couldn't keep my eyes open, and then tossed and turned for an hour and a half trying to get to sleep, and then woke up five hours later with a song running through my head over and over, and then spent an hour or so nodding off and then waking up immediately with a start. Eventually I got back to sleep for another couple hours, but I was still tired, and didn't make it in to work on Thursday until very late; I probably should've just stayed home sick, but I had a bunch to do, and some errands to run.

And all week, I've been annoyed at myself for this. Look at your friends who are undergoing actual legitimate problems, I've been telling myself. You, on the other hand, have an objectively awesome life, and all the problems you have this week are tiny ones of your own manufacture. What the hell is wrong with you?

Last night I was sitting exhausted at the keyboard trying to decide what to do with the rest of the evening or whether I should just go hide in bed and try to sleep, and a friend linked to a blog entry that I had somehow missed: Feel the Fuck out of Those Feelings.

And it reminded me that after my father's death, I would occasionally have out-of-the-blue storms of emotion, sudden gusts of overwhelming grief or anger, and at the time I was okay with that, I just let it be what it was.

But these days, I don't feel like I have that excuse to just feel what I feel. So if I feel like I shouldn't be feeling that way, I get annoyed with myself and tell myself to stop.

(Though if I'm just in a bad mood, I don't feel the need to have A Reason for that; sometimes it just happens. But somehow if I'm feeling overwhelmed or stressed, I feel like it's not legitimate unless there's some particular cause.)

I'm sure there are contexts in which that kind of “just get over yourself” thing is good advice. But for me, right now, I think I need to remember the times when I was able to be gentler with myself, and to give myself some space and time to feel whatever it is that I'm feeling this week.

So to everyone who's having a rough week, for any reason or no reason, I offer sympathies and the hope that things will get better. And I hope that anyone relevant (including you) will be as gentle with you as you need (if that's what you need), and will give you the space to feel what you need to feel, whether or not you know why.