my meat prison and me
I’m writing on the way to bring my dog Worm to a park where we have sessions with a professional dog trainer. This is our seventh. We’ve been putting it off the past three weeks because it’s been way too hot to meet up at our usual 10am, so he suggested we meet a few hours earlier. The sun is up but not punishingly hot at 8, but this time is also the median hour of the sleep schedule I keep these days.
I agreed anyway, thinking it would be a good reason to make myself go to bed a little earlier—lying to myself as usual, lol.
Worm sleeps in my bed with me, bracketed by my right hip and a long pillow. She settles in most easily when I’m next to her, which means I’m technically in bed by 11pm. But my brain is never off that early, and I’ve developed the bad habit of bringing my laptop with me when we settle in, sitting it on my head pillow and lying on my front. I stay like that for hours—neck, shoulders, and back be damned. (I know the consequences of these weird positions will catch up to me eventually, but for now, I’m twenty-five.)
I finally willed myself to sleep at 4:30, with alarms set for 6:30 to 7:30 in 5-minute intervals and a message to my best friend, fifteen hours behind me, to ring me in a few hours. I probably could have fallen asleep easily two or four hours before that time if I’d just shut off, but a girl’s gotta wait to be mind-numbingly delirious and hit a completely arbitrary standard of productivity1 before she can allow herself to close her eyes!
When you get to that level of self-inflicted exhaustion, you have to wonder why you do it. I couldn’t fall asleep right away—so scared I wouldn’t wake up to my alarms, so annoyed with myself that I’d let this happen again. I played my daily New York Times games, maxing out my daily two plays of Tiles, unsure of how to fix myself.
After I shifted for the -nth time trying to find a position that relieved the stiffness in my left shoulder, Worm lifted her head to look at me. I went to kiss her and pet her like I usually do, cooing for her to go back to sleep. She lets me get real close to her face—something we got her and her brother used to as puppies—and while I was face deep in the soft, fluffy folds in her neck, I felt her breath steady and sleepy on my cheek and somehow that fixed everything.
I’m home now and it’s not even 10am. The training went well and my shoulder still hurts. I’m freshly showered and ready to go back to sleep until noon.
I was supposed to start my clinical practice for my teaching licensure this month, but the learning center I was supposed to teach at can’t take me until September so I have a few months to kill. I’m honestly pretty thankful because I was NOT ready with my unit plan, and because I have a few loose ends to tie first—a comic to finish by June, some family stuff in August.
I think I’m scared of how teaching is going to impact my life—namely, my free time—and it's had an impact on how I'm living these days. While I’ve always been bad at sleep, my revenge bedtime procrastination seems more vicious now than before, as if I’m trying to savor this stretch of time as the last bit I have before I am a real, living, responsible person.
But I’m starting to think that the stresses of being a functioning adult might not be as bad what I’ve got going on now. I’m very lucky I can live like this for a bit, but I can’t lie: I am doing POORLY without a structured routine and real2 consequences for my actions, lol. I’ve been trying to “make the most of it,” and I’ve had lots of good days too, but I need to face facts. It’s important I record my most pressing neuroses like this so I remember that I have the tendency to succumb to the rot if left unaccountable, and don’t start getting wistful for it once I can no longer do it.
Still, even though it’s difficult, I would like to try to be a bit nicer to my body, which keeps chugging along quite well, despite the abuse I put it through.3 Lately I’ve been feeling like a brain that was simply forced to be housed in a flesh casing with stupid limits, and it truly sucks, to be this disconnected from yourself as a physical being. I have no idea where to start in rebuilding that connection, or at least making “taking care of my meat prison” feel somewhat less tedious than it currently feels. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears.
Last night, it was “finish changing all the links on your hobby site after you decided to suddenly restructure.”↩
Not just self-contained stuff like body aches and lack of energy, but things that affect other people. I’m still building up to caring about myself enough to see those as real things that need immediate addressing. Ack! That sounds so sad.↩
I’ve always been oddly healthy. Rarely sick, quick to recover, never injured, no cavities in years. I have got to figure out how to maintain this before my luck runs out, lol.↩