Existential Crisis

I told my boss today that I need to take a mental health day. She agreed eagerly and asked where I’d go and what I’d do. I paused and thought about it and I couldn’t think of anything. I can’t go to the beach… Excuse me, I WON’T go to the beach. Shopping in masks brings me no pleasure and being at home is an absolute nightmare. “Yeah, never mind.” She tilted her head to the side in some sort of sympathy motion and happily retracted her permission. I escaped into a bialy I made with the rest of the smoked salmon I bought over the weekend and tried to relish in the moment. I never get breakfast and this was a gift. I finished it too quickly and got sad that I didn’t have any more at home and tomorrow was only Wednesday. Food has been the only consistent warm hug I have had in a while and it’s wrapped itself around me so many times that it’s hung out of my clothes and exposed my once secret comforts to anyone who looks at me. I don’t really enjoy it as much, either. I eat it with the same involuntary reflex as I do with breathing or driving. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I put focus into it. Ever drive and then realize you aren’t even concentrating? It’s the same motion, the same routine, the same course and it’s just become involuntary? I’m on auto-pilot now. Nothing has intention or purpose. 

I used to tell my patients to always have something on the calendar to look forward to. My gigs to the keys each month were that for me. The drive. The one free meal. The walk to the stage right before we would start where everyone had gathered. It was a rock star moment. The drive back was always sad unless we were driving to a Sunday gig. We would complain about it, but I secretly loved it. I’m starting to think that’s not going to happen again. There’s nothing on the calendar. Even Fridays just mean I don’t have to come back here for two days; but I don’t even know if that’s good or not. I FaceTimed with some families and residents today. They all cried. All of them. I think they also feel like this is never going to end and they’re missing out on their loved ones’ lives and maybe won’t ever get to see them again. I feel bad for hating my life in my mind when all they wish is to be close to their loved ones and honestly, in this moment, I just want to be away from everyone.

I take some time to educate and fight with some daft retards on Facebook about empty hospitals and how this disease is a hoax. I hear the argument that kids are starving and we should re-open the world. I see a picture of a first-responder’s child who was murdered by this COVID beast. I think of telling these tools that maybe her uneaten lunch tray can now go to these kids. I think better of it. They’ll ignore that I am the ultimate food-sympathizer and my one role as a Jew is to ensure that everyone is fed… but opening commerce to feed them won’t mean that they won’t die well-fed and dead anyway because they stopped breathing after COVD took over.

I hear that my MusicCares grant came today. I rejoice in the small things. I have it better than most. I beat myself up for being exhausted and being sad. I speak to a friend and she recounts to me how she witnessed the aftermath of the death of a friend who died last night to alcoholism. I wonder if that’s how I’ll die, too. I imagine my family discovering me in my office after a few days. I think maybe I am drinking too much. Then I toggle with how I really want to go home and drink again.

I feel momentarily guilty for not thinking of home as a haven. My friends who live alone remind me that having children is a blessing. I see why they feel that way and in many ways, I do, too. I also see it as a burden. I am responsible for telling them everything will be ok. I am responsible for entertaining them and reminding them to maintain hygiene and step away from the screen and to vary their practice each day to reserve sanity. I am their venting boards. But I am also doing that during the day: being the mom to everyone else. I’m exhausted. I want to be alone. Everyone needs a piece of me and no one is refilling my bank and everyone is discussing how they’ve known me longer or have done more for me and should have more of me and telling me that giving my time and energy to anything but them is a waste. I am expected to be normal and function in NOT normal circumstances. I am depleted. I don’t want to go home, but even other people’s company also hurts. And for this, I feel guilty. My family is trapped there and they’ve made the best of it. I speak about them as though I am engaged in their lives, but even when I am there, I am escaped into some alternate form of reality like Facebook or Instagram and this, in itself causes more grief and anxiety. Silas thanked me for helping him gather celebrities to Zoom with his students and made a passing comment about being able to foster these connections on his own if he had only been on social media. He contemplates it for a second and I fear for him… getting lost into the artificial abyss of this alternate reality and then he thinks better of it. I exhale with relief that at least one of us will stay connected to the real world by being disconnected from this platform.

At home, Rosalind is Anne Frank, grasping at her pubescent changes that are evolving at a rate of a time-lapse video of a sky, changing colors from sunrise to sunset in a coke addict’s heart racing-pace. She’s a tom boy on Monday, she is interested in wearing my dresses on Tuesday, she is gender-queer on Wednesday, Thursday, she is a witch who needs to speak to the moon and charge her crystals, Friday she is anime-goth, Saturday she is an artist, Sunday she sleeps… all day, wakes up angry and speaks like a baby for the rest of the day. She pushes me away while screaming “come here.” It’s confusing and upsetting and suffocating and maddening and I so get it. I’m trying to hold space for her, but my own grief has made me vapid, translucent. She is desperate to emulate me. I’m working hard to make sure she doesn’t. My personal existence is exhausting and incredibly lonely. No one gets me. No one. I long for connection and isolation all at once. I’m starving and incredibly full and gagging for/on air. Not gasping, gagging. 

Cody has adopted a uniform of underwear only. His Zoom class requires him to wear the school uniform. He wears only the top, rolls his eyes and pauses his Zoom to watch videos on his phone and then rips off the shirt when class ends to escape into GTA for the remainder of the evening. He is cursing and screaming and shooting. We scream at him for 30 minutes before he comes to the dinner table and shifts his gaze into his phone and eats like he is still in the throes of the game like a soldier in ‘Nam. He’s angry. Guns loaded. He speaks street slang to us. You can hear the guns going off in his head. He eats quickly and has to go back to battle. We tell him to ride his bike. He does and then comes back to battle. He’s skinny. He got taller. He calls me ‘midge (midget, because he is exactly one inch taller than me, punk). I roll my eyes at him. He smells. War is hard on teenagers. I can see that he has started to pick at his face like I did my whole life. I try to warn him not to. I know that won’t fix it. He inherited my neurosis. He’s so smart. He’s so disconnected. This new reality is crippling us all.

Baz is Chris Farley and fart sounds. He is also in battle. Fortnite. He screams “ballsack” and “buttcheese” every few minutes- whether it’s a scream of exasperation or name calling or a nervous tick. He still showers, sometimes. He stopped brushing his hair and it’s matted. I try to brush it -now and then- to his protest. He says he “likes it that way.” Food is his comfort. He asks for second helpings of everything. He eats every meal as though it has been centuries since he has eaten. It’s ravenous and inhaled and ends abruptly. He avoids eye contact. We force hugs on him and he pushes us away and then crawls into bed to snuggle because he craves closeness. He used to ask every day what our plans were, what we were doing for the weekend. He stopped asking. He knows.  

We used to have ducks. It was a funny backdrop to our little farm. This invasive species was all named and welcomed to our grassless, beat up yard- once used as the garbage can for school kids who gave us the remnants of their potato chip bags and candy wrappers on their way home. It is now clean of refuse and grew a small swimming pool we got for the ducks. We even bought food and made little nests for them. This week, they stopped coming. They’re gone. Sometimes Silas sits outside and waits for them. His morning routine of feeding the forgotten rabbits also included cleaning out the pool the ducks used to shower and shit in… and suddenly they’re gone. Watching him wait for them is another heartbreaking piece to this story that’s stuck in samsara.

Admittedly, I’ve escaped seclusion to record. I don’t have it in me. I don’t feel creative. Everything is on auto-pilot. Nothing sounds good. It’s like COVID has indirectly robbed me of all sensations: taste and smell… all of them, and I don’t even have “it.” My music partner is alone all day and is eager for attention. Chatty and energized, manic. I’ve collected droplets of stress throughout the day and am saturated, heavy. I don’t have much left. I want assurance, space, hugs, understanding… but everyone’s plate is full. I come and he has advice, wants to talk about things that don’t matter to me, are not interesting and I don’t have the energy to be polite anymore. I want a soft place to land, but I am met with critique and judgment and then told I am the one who is doing that. I’m gaslit and angered and over it. One drunken remark, and I’m derailed. I sit and collect my thoughts and my silence is mistaken for harping on one matter over another. I’m not. It’s just heavy and blank and cloudy in my head. I’m getting my weakened mind pounded into the pavement by someone else’s clouded judgment. I can’t hold it with everything else. I think I’m doing a lot. It’s not enough. I leave and escape into a bottle. I sleep. The only thing that brings me comfort. I dream. I wake up too soon and desperately plea with a snooze button to let me go back. It’s relentless. It’s not letting up. I get up. I barely dress and throw fuel into a bag. I drive for what seems like forever and wonder what the point is anymore of all of this. Is this how so many experience life? Was my life truly extraordinary before? I listen to the advice to rest and use this time to create my opus. Write a book. Finish the album. But, I’m pulling this 12 ton weight behind me and it’s so heavy that I can’t make it. I try, I’m pulling, but I get two steps in and collapse with exhaustion. Exhaustion from lack of exertion and yet everything takes it all out from me.

I sit at my desk and try to ignore the knocks. I eat Easter candy like its popcorn and think about all the sick and the dead. I toggle between Facebook and Instagram like a three-way conversation… putting the other on hold while addressing the other… Frantically searching for art, for answers, for serenity that never comes. I just threw out the Easter candy after writing this. It’s almost lunchtime, but I am not really hungry. I think that’s a good thing and maybe I will lose weight, and then I remember it’s because I just ate. I eat lunch anyway, because the feeling of over-fullness and discomfort is at least a feeling and can even out this numbness. I’m drowning in fatigue. Messages and texts come in. I ignore them. I know who they’re from and what they’re going to say already. Not sure what day it is. Not sure it matters. Yeah, I have a lot to be grateful for. I’ve written it all down and counted it up and said grace.

I’ve never been a beach-person, but I could use an ocean and some place where there aren’t walls and fear and I can see the light and the hope. I feel like I get it now when someone says that they wish they knew when the last time would be to be with their loved one so they could have listened harder, smelled the air longer, and soaked in the moments deeper… Because if this is all that’s left… it’s not enough. It’s too much and it’s not enough. We worked so hard to have what we had and now, we will start over and fight to have some small piece of it back. I’ve seen such ugly sides to people. I’m so grossed out by so many people and circles. Parts of me want to have my life back and parts of me wants to run so far away from here and everyone that I’d never have to look back and remember that any of this happened. I’m conflicted and not feeling funny today.

Update: I retrieved the Easter candy.