it's not Monday but I can still be mentally ill (mim #1)
an attempt to start
In the fortnight since I proposed to explain my way out of anxiety/depression by sharing tortured prose, I have been traveling– to Morocco, Gibraltar, and now south Spain. While much of this is spent chatting with the boys and enjoying the occasional veggie tajine, I also catch myself disengaging now and then. For brief spells, I stare into the Spanish boulevard, the passing multitudes, or just off into space, until a concerned friend calls me back.
Nine times out of ten, I’m thinking of the past. I’m reliving my job in Washington DC and how lonely it got on the days my crush didn’t reply me (or I didn’t text, because I thought she wouldn’t reply me). I’m watching the last time someone cried into my arms. And cursing how I was the cause of that. I’m considering how my semester - heck, my entire life at Duke - might have been different, richer, more stimulating, if I had the benefit of hindsight. I’m trying to process and learn from my past “mistakes”… fearing that I’ll come to regret my life choices today, too.
Is this what vacation is like? I wonder. Processing recent memories, indexing the intellectually rich and emotionally heavy ones, and coming to a fuller and more together-ish version of myself? Apparently, that’s what sleep enables the brain to do: parse and store experiences in long-term memory. Move on from the past, ready itself for the new day, you know?
In My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, the depressed protagonist believes that by sleeping endlessly, she will be reborn a new person, freed from everything holding her down. Funnily, I relate to this right now. All I want to do is sleep and be reborn, but my sleep is absolute shit, and the sleeping pills I got prescribed (Trazodone) aren’t working at all. When I get back to Duke, I’m going to ask my doctor for some of the “real stuff”. Thank you Ottessa Moshfegh.
All I want to do is sleep and be reborn, but my sleep is absolute shit.
For now, maybe vacation is sleep. And if so, I suppose it’s good that I’m doing this reliving-all-the-disasters-of-college-thing, my brain doing what it can’t do at night, in the middle of the Plaza de España.
I just wish it didn’t have to be in full view of my crabby wakened self.
Yay so glad to read this—MIM #1 finally dropped! Thanks for writing David. I'm totally with you on vacation-as-Sleep: after being too tired to dream the entire semester, I started dreaming again (and in color!) about 2 weeks after the semester ended. (I recently had a terrifying dream about stealing a book from the Admin Office and escaping on a zip-line. Probably also my way of processing regret from the past, somehow. If only we had the benefit of hindsight, indeed!) Enjoy friends and Morocco! <3 Have a restful time!!