Probably not my skull

A lesson of therapy is that you are not upset about what you are upset about. I did not learn this pithy statement in therapy. I stole it from a meme based on a tweet I saw on Tumblr, though I cannot promise my therapist did not mention it while I was resisting talking about my racing thoughts.

My insomnia cannot be caused by what it says. I am not sleepless because I made the mistake of presuming Amber intended a pile of discarded objects to go to the recycling depot free store. This included a cat toy placed there in hopes of coaxing our cat into playing with it.

I have an overwhelming dread about disappointing people, the curse of the former gifted kid. It eviscerates me when I assume I am doing the right thing beyond what was required, only to find out I've screwed up.

Amber had come home from work hours late, her eyes shining with tears wiped away a moment before in an effort at a brave face. The animal hospital worked her beyond tolerance, overscheduling and cutting her help. Monday will be worse. She complains a litany. I focus on her, encouraging her to coax it out. There is nothing I can do but help her purge. I cannot solve this for her.

We've both been unwell. Nothing worth more than lethargy, but enough to sour us. Without this, I would have the emotional resilience to handle Amber's angst and my having done the wrong thing.

I can feel my brain not working right, which does not help it to work better. Times when I could ordinarily get down a thousand words without effort have me feeling too lazy to touch keys. I feel this dull ache of wanting to use my fountain pens, their skritch on paper always an odd soothing. With a fountain pen, there is more of a sense of accomplishment. I actively resent sitting in front of a screen, indolent, as though my creativity is not allowed downtime.

I do not get writer's block. I do not cast aspersions on those who do. It sounds awful, having the paucity of inspiration. When I am not writing, it is not that I lack ideas. My brain is so exhausted and broken, keeping itself intact owing to inappropriate sleep, sickness, or mental illness. (Mental illness can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes, it gives me graphomania, and I can write 6,000 good words in a sitting, or the anxiety redirects to intricate solutions for plot entanglements.) My imagination bubbling, the words lining themselves up, and being unable to do anything beyond the automatic -- making dinner, exercising, watching a show -- revolts me.

Each time it offers threats it might be permanent. Then, for reasons I cannot always identify, it cracks. My brain works again, the backlogged words end up on a page, and all is right with the world. The urge to write when I lack strength is nasal congestion. Something is wrong with my head, pressure builds, and I struggle to breathe. If only something would change, some small break in the dam, I might return to what I was before, yet it feels eternal. Writing never does. I can write for hours and recognize minutes in my flow state. I don't miss the time that elapses. I see a story forming from nothing. I am not always sure what will come out, but I dive in full force. I don't yet care for an end, though I sometimes know where I'm going. I would rather write than make sense upfront for the sensation of the ink on the page or the piano quality of my keys clicking. There is something organic in that, watching my body go through the motions of its purpose, even if it is doing nothing else. I cannot indulge in this masturbation and think it will bring me the satisfaction of productivity, but it eases the tension of doing nothing.

The stress of my job beleaguers me, I know. They have laid too much on me suddenly because a colleague quit. They do not understand -- or do not care enough -- that overworking the remaining staff will have them putting in resumes elsewhere. This is bluster on my part. I enjoy having a job and paying my bills. I am satisfied moving thousands of dollars into different accounts and not being pained squirreling it away.

My brain is given to attaching to useless things, perseverating, and being upset about things that are not what upset me. I know this too. My mental and emotional resiliency takes a hit whenever my biology is off-kilter, something I can try to appease. Still, I cannot control all the stimuli that can provoke it.

It is the bullet time from The Matrix, an analogy I hope is not tired despite having just made it. I can slow things down because I have been in this situation before. I can avoid the triggers, my deviant thoughts, before they hit me. I am better at this, but I am not perfect. Some still nick me when I am not quick enough to slow the world in recognition.

I hang on, chiding away despair because these things have always gotten better in the past. I have learned I either adapt or the situation changes, so acting as though a present inconvenience is permanent is unnecessary. That does not mean my emotions do not overreact.

My college kids are needy. The couple who do my work competently, as though they belong in an introductory college English class, make it easier. I still critique their work in microscopic detail. That is most of the actual teaching I can do. "Here are the multitude of ways you are unpracticed. Fix it." It is how I have learned, and, though I grant it may not be the ideal method for everyone, it is the only way I have at my disposal when they do not come to class each morning -- and they have made it there twice this semester.

The sensation of my failing brain frustrates me. I start to speak, and the words I mean evade me. I acquire a stammer which belies my usual eloquence. I see my stumbling within my head, but I can do little to correct it in real-time.

My favorite student asked me why I was there. It was the closest thing to a compliment he had given me. To him -- and he said almost as much -- I am brilliant, dedicated, and talented. Why waste myself in a place where I will never be appreciated and am barely needed? I told him it was twofold while not denying I was wasted. I do not pin much of my ego on being a good teacher for the adjudicated. I am a superb teacher in most circumstances, but most circumstances were not hiring, and they persist in not hiring. At this point in my career, I am skeptical about public schools. This is the most dysfunctional system in which I have ever worked. However, public school teachers dwell in different chaos, and I acknowledge they work harder for it.

I am a writer, as I tell my student -- not for the first time. William Carlos Williams was an obstetrician. Wallace Stevens was the vice president of an indemnity company. Charlotte Bronte was a governess and English teacher. And I worked as a teacher in juvenile detention. It will be fun trivia for my future biographers and listicle writer. Still, I hope they will have the sense to understand that the way it most contributed to my oeuvre was in allowing me to write and -- fingers crossed -- providing the setting for a horror novel I ought to be writing more intently.

Given how I do not mark this job as my purpose, any day I do not spend writing is more fatal. It is giving myself over to considering my keeping afloat with a steady paycheck and health insurance as something I am rather than something I do. I crave to write, even if it is for an audience humbler than the worst of my new math classes -- one which thinks calling me (a certified English teacher and prolific author) an incompetent math teacher is a cutting barb.

When my job stresses me such that I spend the rest of my day keeping my mental illness at bay rather than draining my fountain pen, it feels like I am losing this battle to an enemy for whom my defeat means nothing. Some of my colleagues are scarred and broken by having that one day here that crushed them beneath the gears. They go through the motions, handing out worksheets and playing movies, but it rendered them into apathetic state workers. Marking this as a day job rather than my career makes it tolerable enough that I still try to be as effective as the system allows. If I thought this was all I was, I would feed myself headfirst into the gears. That is the tragedy of hope. I still believe -- truly and fully -- that the exchange of forty hours a week (and not a second more) contributes to my life only because it keeps me financially solvent and provides startling anecdotes for the parties to which people no longer invite me.

I cannot say, on balance, that my mental health is worse because of this job. It introduces keen stressors when I must write up murderers for trying to jab me. Still, the fishhooks of poverty and the lye of a withering romantic relationship before I began working here provoked calls to the crisis hotline. My panic attacks are markedly fewer. I indulged in therapy for a year or so before she dismissed me for being boring/too practiced at evasion. I remain on a pleasant dose of meds. I have a few students here -- some of whom, yes, have increased the population of cemeteries -- whom I persist in liking and usually look forward to seeing. I cannot credit this place for mental health issues that existed unnamed in me for decades, even if I lose occasion hours of sleep because bureaucracy or students exacerbate symptoms.

I also hope that the system will see the utility of my old facility -- retained in pristine condition at taxpayer expense -- and reopen it, allowing my triumphal return to my classroom and children who are allowed to be so outside barbed wire fences. These kids only posture as murderers, their sentences fewer than three hundred days rather than three hundred months. (I have students with twenty-five-year determinate sentences, most of whom are more sedate than one might expect with the serial murder rap.)

My supervisor, with whom I've worked for over a decade and said I would follow into battle, had a stock lesson about the balance between liberty and security. My liberty would be as a full-time writer, but that would come at a great expense to my security. It would upend my middle-class existence and endanger Amber's happiness. I do not trust that I have a fanbase that would provide me with a tenth of my current salary. The most secure thing would be to persist as a state worker, keeping this unsatisfying job for the next twenty years until I can retire. Imagining that borders on the ridiculous, but that is how these things are done.

last watched: Killing Eve
reading: The Secret History of the World