I have spent the past week doing my own private equivalent of a marathon, insisting that I work as hard as possible in spite of being sick, while carrying with me a knot of tension on my back and shoulders about as thick and cumbersome as a mature oak tree. When this happens, sometimes I try to make myself believe that no harm will be done, but the truth is I think that I pace myself just so, in order that I tend to forget what happens next after an all-work-no-sleep-while-sick binge: I crash.
And crashing really takes with it the whole family.
This is also how one might identify manic-depressives. Crazy highs, deep lows. That’s not really me: I don’t have the highs. Instead I just feel like I’m trying to make it through some long underwater tunnel, and I figure if I go faster, I’ll get out sooner. Nope.
So what is the answer to this? Am I supposed to be breathing water? If I just relax and settle in, is this home now? Maybe so. Maybe I’ve adapted.
This week one of my children stayed home a total of three days from school. On two other days, he managed to make it, but he looked horrible. Today, he was home again along with his sick sister. I’m sick, too. We needed a caretaker, so my husband stayed home and even managed to do the slightest bit of paid work, while juggling all of us and our various whiny little needs. And so did I manage to do a slight bit of paid work, although I practically had to slap my hands to prevent attempting more.
I really like the work I do. I just wish I got paid for all the hours I put in, and the many more I could (or might, out of insanity) but don’t, because of guilt for already working too much. These days, “equitable pay” for a writer is sort of a curious joke anyway. And as I have been reminded by some in the field, as a blogger, it’s even more curious. Then again, there was some guy in California getting paid something in the neighborhood of $72,000 a year to blog. I like to write that off as “just those crazy Californians at it again.”
Here in the northeast, we like our bloggers poor and underfed, because it makes them wilder and less predictable. Pay them too well, and gosh, they might get complacent. In my case, the pay keeps me just on this side of the line, but always wondering if this makes any sense to keep doing. I try too hard, I tell myself. Then it’s, I’m not trying hard enough. Push, push! Write more and it will feel better. But then it doesn’t, because there is always so much more writing to do.
Oughtn’t a writer burrow into pillows and muse, and emerge to write about it later, spending weeks ruminating and creating, and then being paid millions for the brilliance of it all? Perhaps—I wouldn’t know—I’m in a different league, that of the addict-writer. The blogging life has a way of feeling a little like crack hits rather than a series of moody pamperings (although moody I am, and apparently, today, pampered)… each post is so live, so in-hand, so temporally electric, that I just can’t wait to post again, until I’m exhausted. And there are moments when I wonder why I do this when it can be so draining, and so little certainty about whether it means anything, or is headed anywhere good.
Being sick puts me in a funny frame of mind. And it’s February. One wants to think spring, but for some reason it’s as though winter has finally arrived here. So the sunlight has that essence of spring in it, that persistent shine and glow and increasing strength that can actually be a bit of an annoying glare (especially when one has not had much sleep, or can’t breathe from congestion). Yet the air is frigid and the wind brutal. Is that just another curious joke? I seem to be surrounded by them.
Anyway crashing is reminding me again to pace myself, go slow, maybe hold back some of my energy a little and keep it in reserve for… some other important thing I could be doing, like… parenting, or cooking, or arranging photo albums. Wait, I never arranged photo albums much. It’s the cooking part I used to do. Parenting, there’s no choice. Except today, of course. Today, I crash. Maybe I savor this, too.