It's the life that I choose
07 January 2011 12:29 PM Categories: Quotidian existence | Insomnia
Oh, I have friends (most of whom don't read this blog), but they are scattered. Even my local friends, women that I meet for dinner or drinks intermittently, I barely see. I don't talk on the phone except to my parents, my husband, and one good faraway friend. I don't often make plans to have coffee or tea with anyone. Once a month, there's the writing group. I interact with other parents, usually on a surface level. But otherwise? It's email or Facebook, the Round Robin. It's the blogging world. The occasional play date. That and conversation with my husband, though that is affected by illness (his, mine, the kid's) and by my sometimes abnormally early bedtime.
Middle-of-the-night thoughts are uniformly dark. I didn't wake up thinking about my glorious online life. I woke up thinking about my isolated existence, about how my husband needs more of an outside life, about how I must do something now about my fucked-up self. I thought about how I would jettison the modem, to end my dependence on online forums. I thought about how that would effectively end much of my communication with anyone. There was a brief moment of positivity when I remembered that I was once a lurker. No more. I am now a faceless participant!
I give my fucked-up self a lot of pep talks. ("There's no need to be so fucked up! You have a good life. You are a social animal, really!"). I berate her ("Why are you so goddamned obsessive? Stop it already!"). I sometimes soothe her with acceptance ("Oh, it's ok. What is normal anyway? Would you really want to be normal?"). These internal monologs are worse in the winter, the time of gray skies and sickness. I am even less social in winter -- come April, everything opens up and I'm a gadabout, or what amounts to a gadabout for a generally solitary person.
These were don't-go-back-to-sleep thoughts. I moved to the downstairs bedroom, thought more about my life, about how I would feel in the morning. It's a good life, but one in which I could reach out more, have more nights out with friends, more phone conversations. I picked up the book I'm rereading, Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and immersed myself in her strange existentialist life, barely fictionalized, the one she chose to live, deliberate, measured, ordered, perpetually deferential to Sartre.
Who's to say what's normal?
Image: This is how I look to my computer most of the time: unshowered, my teeth (hidden here) unbrushed, my hair uncombed, though I admit I choose a flattering light and angle, to spare you my baggy eyes. (And Anne -- I am wearing pajamas, or mainly pajamas, since I have to put on some normal clothes to walk the dog.) After I finish this post, it's off to get cleaned up before picking the boy up from school.
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