Is it okay?
At what age does it stop being all right to give in to bad habits?
Tantrums?
Over indulgence?
Recklessness?
Selfishness?
Impulsivity?
I might have made up that last one. It might be impulsiveness.
I don't know that I care.
It's two days after halloween.
My stress levels are through the roof.
I've eaten at least a bag of halloween candy, and I am wired to the max on sugar.
I know I should be sleeping,
that I'll feel like an utter horrorshow tomorrow, but for some reason (anxiety), I can't settle down.
It used to be, when I was a teenager, when I got stressed out, I couldn't eat.
Food just didn't interest me.
I was too preoccupied with feeling all of my feels.
Now, when I am the most stressed out is when all of the cupcakes and wine disappear.
My skin gets gnarly, my hips get wide, and my fury at my lack of will power threatens to topple all the hard anti-negativity work I have done.
It's so ridiculously difficult to be a woman and deal with your stress healthfully.
We are told repeatedly to be more available, stronger, wiser, more capable, more resilient.
We are held up on pedestals one moment and torn down from them the next for the same behavior.
Many of us are struggling with serious issues, and it seems perfectly acceptable for the whole world to continued to demand demand demand the impossible, until we break.
I am in the final three weeks of my first semester of grad school, and it is really putting me through my paces.
I've put down 30,000 words of a novel, read 12 books since july, and written fifteen three page papers.
I have three more books, three more papers, and a thousand more words to put down before November 20th.
I am also working full time managing the bakery, and we only just surfaced from the impossibly crazy October Halloween Salem tourism gamut.
We have two weeks to gather our wagons, and then the same week that I send off my final papers for school, I begin an eleven day work week that includes the twelve hour work day before thanksgiving.
On top of this is my husband's birthday, which is the 20th of the month, and the preparation for our own wee little turkey day celebration.
I can't handle it.
I am so crispy I might snap in half.
But instead, I stay up late and look at the stars and stuff miniature sized candy bars in my face and wonder if I'll ever feel normal again. What normal even looks like.
Does normal wake up at six in the morning?
Does it do a half hour of yoga, shower, and then walk three miles to work?
Does it talk bakers out of recipe snarl ups?
Does it count money, help customers, run errands, call vendors, print invoices, field emails, solve customer situations, resolve scheduling conflicts, and jump on bar to make two dozen drinks when the barista suddenly flips her contact and has to run squealing to the bathroom?
Does it walk three more miles home, stopping at the grocery store to buy components for dinner?
Does it make dinner, read fifty pages, write more words, put in a squeak of effort with its partner, and then realize it's still ravenous and ugly and exhausted and doesn't know when it gets to finally let go and relax?
Does it cry on the floor of the bathroom because it just wants something to stop?
Somehow I don't think so.
What does your normal look like?
Is your normal heroic, tragic, humorous, wild, boring, child-filled, work filled, school filled, significant other filled, or something else entirely?
Is it empty?
Are you alone staring at the stars and wondering how in the flying fuck it can dare snow two days into November?
Are you up far too late on a Sunday night, lonely and wondering if you just tore out the front door and ran and ran and ran and never looked back would it be any better?
Me too.
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