Happy Fun Cog

Today was one of those days where I feel like I'm the guest, not the owner, of my mind. We got a good chunk of snowfall in Boston, enough to justify working from home. I was very much looking forward to being at home, to staying in my PJ's all day and mixing in some reading and writing with my work.

However, as things often are when I'm alone with my thoughts for a prolonged period of time, my mind quickly became Buddha's monkey, climbing the walls, screeching, flinging poo, and so on. I found it impossible to concentrate on anything, quickly falling into a patter of manic distraction interrupted by minute-long bursts of beseeching myself to be focused, to be present, to do something with my time. I was pretty much unsuccessful and wasted the day, both in terms of work and in terms of my personal use of time; the only thing good to come out of it was an understanding that, while my motivations or lack thereof were unclear to me, I did know the best thing to do, which was to give myself forgiveness and patience.

Finally, almost 7 hours later, my head has cleared, and now I see the problem: when I'm away from work or my daily routine and have lots of good thinkin' time on my hands, I panic because at a very deep level, I'm trying to avoid thinking, trying to avoid a certain level of self-realization. Speaking of self-realization, I should also note that this is not a new epiphany for me, but rather something I come upon every once in a while like a drunk who staggers into a church, prays for and receives sobriety, then walks out the door towards his new life only to be drawn irresistibly into the first bar he sees until he staggers out again... and here we are.

And I think this is one of the reasons that I'm addicted to my job, as miserable as it makes me, and it's one of the reasons why my attempts to figure out grad school or some new way of living my life have always fizzled out; because if I put myself in situations where my ability to think, feel, and realize, are optimized, then I will inevitably confront that which I've spent so many years avoiding, that which makes it hard for me to breathe when those brief moments when I actually feel in touch with my emotions. And that confrontation, or rather the specific lack of that confrontation, has defined a great deal of my life, so naturally the thought of dealing with it scares the shit out of me on pretty much all levels of consciousness.