This Is The Noise That Keeps Me From Sleeping Right

I've given all I can
It's not enough
I've given all I can but we're still on the payroll...
--Thom Yorke

Some people's blogs and lives go through about as clincially as the six-month visit to the medic. They never get too high, they never get too low. I suspect they make great marriage partners, the kind that don't let the shit drag them down and don't lose sight of The Big Picture when the highs occur even while enjoying them.

I'm not one of those people. It's not in my blood; I feel virtually wired to be wired. I need my emotions for everything except big poker hands. Actually, I feel better that I am this way. Highs are meant to be ridden out, lows are too. That being said.

{Note to Future Self: sure, I regret this post there. At the time I needed it. So save it.}

I am coming apart like a baseball that didn't get the proper stitching. My throat is sore and filling up with phelgm. My back is screaming. I've got a headache that feels like a fat person sitting on the top of my head. What little bit of my room was still mine isn't mine anymore. For the past week I've done nothing but sit on couches, siphoning off sleep in 2-and-3 hour bursts while the rest of the family goes on with their lives. It's making me increasingly irritable, cranky, possibly insane. I have to push this all down, or did until I started this post.

My grandmother is getting better, I think. I hope. But I'm at a fine crossroads between selflessness and ego. I realize in the long-term she's more important, she needs the more help, she needs the bed and anything else I can give her because her tomorrows are even less promised than mine.

There's that.

But I can feel myself changing, and I feel powerless to stop it. My already infringed privacy is down to nothing; people shuttle out of the "my room" area every 4 minutes, roughly. I can't write anything of substance despite the free time I'm getting ideas in because I'm a spurt writer and need a block of time guaranteed without interruption (also why I'm such a night owl). I feel, physically, the worst I've felt in the past year, easy. It's been like being a firefighter who never gets a day off: every time the phone rings, every bump in the night, every call of a name and here's life or death and the path is you.

And what about the worst of it? What about all the suspicions by the time your picky mother finds a home with the full-service option it's going to be too late? What about all the misgivings you had about not finding a place when she started going blind last year turning into full-on regret? (Interruption. To wit.) What about all this so-called family camraderie that's suddenly sprung up--you think that's going to be there next week if this keeps? Next month? What happens if/when the worst happens? You think they lean on you now to cover the graveyard shift, what happens if IT happens? You're going to have to carry the weight, again. Times a billion. Everything you've started missing this week? Gone. You might never sleep right again. You might not see the outside world until it's your 10-year-reunion. Everything you started getting going before this happened is already beginning to stale off and fade into dull tableau; good luck getting them back. It's all going to end, and just get worse. You might not get out.

for a minute there, i lost myself