Monthly Archives: March 2014

This is Your Brain on Boredom

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For 24 hours now, my brain has felt fried. Sizzled. Frayed. Dried out and ragged.

I have nothing to do at work except read the Internet. It’s overstimulating and exhausting to be bored, to stare at a screen and try to fill (or kill?) time. It’s such a waste, and I have half a mind to go home early so I can let myself cry, but I need the money and can’t waste the vacation hours.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me; it started when trying to book my Lonely Planet Alaska trip yesterday, which was like trying to put together a Chinese puzzle as I lined up flight times and ferry schedules, and crammed eight towns (with ten flights and two ferry rides) into a two-week trip. It was exhausting, but I figured it out and assumed that my brain would feel back to normal after a good night’s sleep. And I’ve been sleeping really well. But I woke up still feeling like I was wearing a too-tight swim cap on my head; all my muscles — my jaw, my forehead, the back of my head, my neck — feel taut. My eyes are dry. I thought maybe my glasses had been pinching me, that maybe this tension was external rather than internal. But as my day goes on, I feel myself deteriorating.

I visited the Genius Bar for my very slow, less-than-a-year-old Mac, and they couldn’t help me except to try “one more thing” that required me to leave my computer for four days, which I can’t do until Lonely Planet is due, four months from now. This situation threw me — the problem is that when I start to spiral, my resilience is low and situations that are fairly benign become giant, threatening to ruin my entire day and cause me to miss work.

And as soon as I feel weak and emotional, my head goes straight to “single for four years.” That repeats like a mantra, over and over and over, and I think about all the times I was dumped, the people who don’t love me back, the tragic flaw I must have, the beauty I lack, and my dwindling fertility and I erupt in a hot mess of failure and shame and start to cry, but have to pull myself together because I’m at work. The act of keeping myself together usually exhausts me to the point where all I can do after work is go home and sleep.

Three hours and twenty minutes of work left.

Running Is My Binding Agent, Running Is My Crack

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There have been a few times lately where I feel like crumbly cookie dough before you’ve added any liquid in. Maybe you’ve mixed the butter and sugar and flour, and even though pieces are sticking together it’s still kind of dry. Then you add in two eggs and suddenly you have perfect cookie dough before you, and your mouth is watering and you can’t stop yourself from eating it by the spoonful.

Lately, I feel like cookie dough before the eggs are added. Like I’m just barely held together. And somehow exercise has become my binding agent – running in particular. There’s a paragraph in the beautifully-written novel The Time Traveler’s Wife where Henry DeTamble explains how running can help keep him from disappearing into time, and that feeling has stayed with me since the first time I read it. He says, “Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will.” I understand what he’s saying. I don’t accidentally time travel when I don’t run, but when I do, the path before me is clear and certain. Everything comes into sharp focus; everything is held together. I picture the air around me as more clear, yet pressing against me on all sides, keeping me from crumbling. And there’s balance in motion – like riding a bike. You have to keep moving to stay balanced on a bicycle. Running keeps me balanced just like it keeps me held together.

I have had recurring calf injuries steadily for the past year, which means I’m not running as much as I want. Every time I feel my calf clench, I know I’m out for six weeks; it’s a slow build-up back to normal running. It’s infuriating not to run, because nothing can replace it. Certain forms of movement, like steep hiking and skate skiing, come close, but nothing holds me together the way running does.

When I examined the fury I feel at not running — and that’s how it feels, like fury — I realized that nothing gets me high like running. Nothing leaves my body and brain feeling so alive and strong and exhilarated and humming. And that fury at not being able to run, that powerlessness, that desire to just get out there and go — that’s addiction right there. I’m a total crack addict for running. I can’t imagine a life without it, but that future could certainly be out there. What would that future be like? Would I get through the withdrawal process and stop missing it, the way someone who hasn’t had a drink in 20 years doesn’t think about booze anymore? Would I become fat? I’d miss the running community – much like, I suppose, an alcoholic misses his drinking buddies. I’ve read that many long distance runners are former addicts and it makes sense. I’m addicted to endorphins.

So even as running is my binding agent, it’s also my crack. It’s what holds me together, but it keeps me wanting more. It leaves me crumbly and weak in its absence, and it beats up and injures my body all the while cooing buzzy endorphin lullabies.

I’m coming back from a calf injury and got to run two minutes/walk four minutes for 36 minutes today, out on a bright snowy spring trail in the mountains. It felt amazing. I can’t wait until next week when the ratio goes down to three minutes of walking.

On Feeling Things Hard

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Lately, I’ve been feeling my emotions very intensely. And I kind of like it. I know it’s weird to enjoy being slightly crazy, but I just love FEELING. I feel everything so much and so hard. But I think it can be a beautiful thing – to feel so overwhelmed by the beauty in the world (I get this feeling a lot in the mountains) and so sad by all the struggle (I get this feeling a lot while traveling in developing countries).

I can tell I’m feeling when the checkers at the grocery store make me cry – I just can’t handle seeing old men checking groceries on a Tuesday night. I want them home, with families, in a comfortable, cheerful house. Doing what they want to – maybe watching TV, or eating a home-cooked meal, or laughing with friends and family. Anywhere but being 65 and working at Fred Meyer. This has happened to me since high school. I remember crying at the 2am Taco Bell manager, a balding 40-something working the late-night drive-thru shift. I couldn’t think of anything sadder than being a middle-aged Taco Bell manager, dealing with drunk teenagers on a Saturday night. The pain of his perceived life completely overwhelmed me. It hurts so much worse when they are kind.

When I finally got on an anti-depressant when I was 24, that feeling went away. It’s not that I stopped caring, but I stopped noticing. It’s funny – I was so worried about going on an antidepressant, because before I did, I felt that the world was a sad, dark, damp place and that if I got on medication it would mask that. The world would still be sad and painful, but there would be a veil between me and it. Instead, when the medication started working, I thought, “OH, so this is what normal feels like.” And it was true. I still had emotions, but they were more appropriate. I would feel sad if something was sad, rather than completely covered in sadness, like it was a heavy ocean moving above me.

Now that I’ve started feeling that way again, now that when I notice the stooped man working in the electronics section of Fred Meyer on a weeknight and think of the free $50 gift card to Sullivan’s Steakhouse that I won just burning a hole in my wallet, and wondering when that man last enjoyed a nice steak dinner out, I wonder if the antidepressant didn’t cover up the sadness in the world. How could I have stopped noticing things like that? How could I be so self-involved as to go about my business, never feeling the sadness of other people’s worlds?

To be fair, a friend pointed out that many people find happiness and contentedness with their lives and their work, and that I shouldn’t assume they are unhappy just because they are bagging groceries on a Thursday night in the middle of winter in Alaska. That they may lead very full and happy lives, and maybe they want to be there. That may be true, but I can’t help thinking that if that’s the case, then they are just simply not aware of how much else is out there. Maybe ignorance is bliss after all.