"i would like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof"

I've spent the past couple days perfecting this delightful mix of exhaustion and restlessness, each making its counterpart completely unsatisfiable. I don't rest well, I keep thinking I'm forgetting something vitally important, but being bonedeep tired makes me feel like I'm always dragging ass, no matter how much I try to self-motivate. I move seamlessly into my seventh week of a hacking cough, but at least it's calmed down enough that I can sleep lying down again.

Slipping slipping slipping. I'm surly and tired and want to schedule every minute and make lists about everything and I know even that won't keep me safe, but it feels like the only thing to hold onto. The beast's holiday recess tightfocuses the feeling I'm not doing enough. I have this week between Christmas and New Years and I need to be Doing Something With It.


I don't understand how people are good, functional people without this relentless nagging voice inside of them telling that

a) they should get off their ass and do something
b) the only way to make up for being a not-very-good person is to actively strive to be good
c) they are forgetting something really important and need to be trying to figure out and prepare for the next disaster
d) they need to be doing more, better and faster.

Part of the reason I want to get the mary oliver quote is because I don't believe it yet. I don't believe I do not have to be good. And my therapist pointed out yesterday that there's a spiritual element to Mary Oliver, so if her poems speak so much to me, maybe I do have a spirituality that I haven't really figured out yet. And, of course, the word spirituality gives me hives. I'm trying to find a framework to hang all my fears of mortality, all my beliefs about my inherent unloveableness and whether or not that really exists, all the answers to "what next?" and "why me?", all the ideas about fate and deservingness (I know there's a better noun, I just can't find it) and it seems unlikely to be a god that makes it all hang together.

I'm superstitious all over the place. I think the world is a mostly horrible place and I'm collecting all the bits of armor I can just to stay functional and grabbing all the pieces of happiness I can, however improbable.

On the map of my brain, there are shadowy here-be-dragons places and I'm equally likely to develop elaborate routes around them or flip over the rock and pin them to the ground until I learn something from the squirming, as if I could perform haruspicy on myself. I'm afraid of saying I'm happy, because I think as soon as I do, something will come in to spoil it. I'm afraid I'm too much, and I'm always in danger of overstepping my bounds, outstaying my welcome, like the world has a series of invisible fences that I can't find until I run into them.