My Brain Is Tired
and other complaints
I’ve been having bad nights. An active shooter with a gun to my head. Driving for Uber as a single mother of two. I’m being chased. Standing in an open field in the path of a tornado. My dad dead on a fainting chair. My grandmother crying as I call 911. A murky pond filled with something sinister. Sharp glass pieces in my left hand. The doctors want to arrest me, so I flee. Bloody and confused. I’m about to be found out. I’m out in public without a mask—now there’s a price on my head. I’m a conwoman tricking a wealthy man into marriage. I’m living a lie and gambling with my life. Death everywhere. I wake up with a sick feeling in my bones, and drift back asleep to start again.
I could name it a nightmare, the classic bad dream. Or, I could name it a night terror, the intense, nondescript dread with which you wake up. Either would be a misnomer—it’s a mutt of both. And something else. I scan Google in a search for solidarity, but I know these dreams aren’t simply born of a pandemic. I’ve been here before. My subconscious is feeling nightmarish, I suppose. I make new bedtime rituals. Drops of lavender in a diffuser. A freshly cleaned room. A new sleep schedule. But I know that I can’t fix this thing so easily.
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How do you write about something that is everything. In all of its infiniteness, it is stripped of its meaning. I wonder how people feel with their little-a anxieties. A single thing, certain in its purity. I have anxiety about paying my mortgage. I have anxiety about a deadline at work. I have anxiety about my kids getting into a good college. The end. You can tease it out and examine it under a microscope. To have an anxiety rather than Anxiety. How sweet that definability must be. All of the grass here is overwatered and over-tended. It spills over into every other aspect of life. My cup runneth over—I’d rather have it half full.