I find myself utterly exhausting. Do you ever feel that way, tired of being you? Not that I’d want to be anyone else, but it would be an impossible delight to try on other people like shoes. By early afternoon I’m tired of my own head, which quite like my hair sits like an almost explosion, tightly wound up in an undone bun. My neck must be the strongest part of my body, I have no idea how it doesn’t snap under the weight of all that goes on up there. I often return to my invention of a machine that would essentially detach brain from body for a few hours. I could float off physically without the many mental boxes I open and close with insane ardor. Quit caffeine, they say. Nope, I say. Exercise intensively, they suggest. I already do. Yoga, maybe? No thanks, walking 15 minutes to a white washed studio to roll around on a matt doesn’t make me feel any calmer. In fact, more anxious if anything. Do I smell bad to the person 5 inches from me? Why is the dude with the dreadlocks staring at me? Did I wear the leggings with the hole in the crotch again? These are the very un-tranquil thoughts that rush through my head whenever I awkwardly try to hoist my body into a downward dog. Give me 3 cups of coffee and a sprint run that leaves me so limp I physically lack the oxygen to use my brain at all. It’s the closest I’ve come to that machine I dreamt up. This is why I love books so much too, a few thousand words on paper pages and my hyper brain settles into analyzing a story other than my own. Truth be told, I still keep a highlighter and pen handy whenever I read, even at 3 am in bed because I’m obsessive about good quotes and underlining words I don’t know. Recent vocabulary discovery: discombobulate; to confuse or disconcert. A perfect word that depicts precisely how I feel at 28. I am discombobulated, which phonetically sounds like the noise champagne might make as you fill a glass too quickly and it spills and drips onto the floor and your feet, which also happens to be another metaphor for the organ in discussion here: my brain. Messy, bubbly, outwardly optimistic but spilling everywhere it pops.
what i’m wearing: wacoal white lace pyjama set
& glasses usa aviator prescription glasses
I guess we all feel this way sometimes. My mind drives me crazy, especially when it wanders over to all the countless things I know nothing about and might not ever know. Last night I was in bed reading Caitlin Moran’s new essays, which are delightful by the way, if you haven’t yet discovered her I suggest setting her as one of your weekend plans. Anyway, she wrote a piece about Shakespeare, specifically a review of a documentary about him and suddenly I was overcome with angst because there is so much I didn’t know about the playwright. This dread re-directed my thoughts to history and there I was at 1 am clutching at my limited history book knowledge, overwhelmed by my own ignorance and unable to sleep because it had dawned on me once again that I am indeed absolutely clueless and any grand ideas I had about my intelligence are sadly delusional. Does that ever happen to you? One scrap of new knowledge presents a dozen closed doors I suddenly want to open. It is overwhelming; the information and it’s corresponding doors stretching before me is essentially infinite and yet my time is limited. There I am peeking out the frame of one door to see an endless corridor of them before me, and the lights are flickering because I have maybe 60 at most years left to open as many as I can. But, ofcourse I want to open them all ; every single one. My only conclusion as I restlessly tried to sleep was to surrender my job entirely to spend 14 hours a day reading instead, an impossible solution. I suppose there is strength in confronting our own ignorance but it can be a strain on the soul too. I often think I would have been better off working as a University professor of some sort but absolutely lack the credentials for such a profession. And then, all anyone seems to do is scroll instagram, watch netflix, no one else seems concerned with how little they know, instead flaunting the little they do. I engage in those distractions too, I too shout into the online strata, often fancying myself an inspiration to to other women, when really I know nothing. And it is this void of nothing that leaves me questioning everything. I distrust my own emotions, I approach my own thoughts with suspicion. How can I be convinced of anything if all I am truly convinced of is my own meandering bewilderment? Like I said, discombobulated. That is my word. That is me, the adjective that is Audrey.
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