The Shuffle

    For about a year now I’ve been trying to write my way out of my life, and into another one. It’s hard to explain what that means, really, in part because it means a lot of things. In some ways it means that I’ve been doing a lot of writing-as-therapy, which can be a good trick but also runs the risk of falsifying the self in the attempt to explain it; going to actual therapy has helped me understand that some of the stories I tell about myself are in many ways not true. In other ways it means that I keep thinking that being good at this can get me out of this interminable rut that I feel I’ve been in since — what? 2011? Jesus, that’s five years ago now. I lost the script in October of my first year of graduate school, so that would be 2011. Anyway, I’m less clear on how being a good writer was supposed to do this, other than that I keep thinking one of these days someone will notice I’m good at it and it will validate my entire existence, which of course is a silly and destructive thing to hope for. But there you have it. Stringing sentences together, at this moment in time, feels like literally the only thing in my life. The rest is flat, meaningless tedium. It’s driving me insane.

    The most recent bout of insanity started on Friday, when I spent the entire day sitting in a chair either watching basketball or playing video games, and then discovered (not surprisingly) that when night came around I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed for hour upon hour. I read for a while, I watched TV for a while, I stared at the ceiling and thought about my life (such as it is) for a while. Then, eventually, the sun came up. After some time there was really nothing to be done but get out of bed. So I got out of bed. Then, of course, I had nothing to do. So I went back and sat in the chair and played video games some more. Eventually there was more basketball on TV. I managed to go to the gym. And then it was night again, and once again I could not sleep.

    This is where it becomes completely clear that writing is not really a solution to most problems. At about 2 in the morning, going on 40 hours of constant wakefulness, I pulled out my computer and gave a run at writing about insomnia. The problem with insomnia, however, is that it doesn’t preclude the condition of tiredness — it just means that the body and / or brain (usually brain) will not shut down enough to allow for sleep. I managed to eke out a couple of paragraphs about why I think I can’t sleep (it has to do with an intolerance for silence) before I began to feel explosively, delusionally weird. I was having difficulty keeping track of what was real and what wasn’t. I got focussed on the name of a character from Parks & Rec: Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. It’s a funny name, and I sat in bed with my word processor open, thinking to myself, Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. Sometimes it made me giggle, and sometimes it made me feel weirdly lonely and sad. And then, abruptly, I became aware of how insane it was making me feel.

    And then the bottom fell out of my bed.

    I heard the sound of wood creaking, then splitting, and then the new bedframe I just bought collapsed on itself, sending me, the mattress, my pillows and blankets, and the cat plummeting to the ground, where we all arrived, more or less intact and healthy, with a thud. In another frame of mind I might have cried out, or tried to fix it, or something. Instead I just picked myself up, walked into the living room, lay down on the couch, and typed a status update on Facebook: Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. Eventually I managed to pass out for a couple of hours. Yesterday was an unfolding catastrophe of tiredness and irritability. I wrote a series of irate emails to Overstock.com, the company that sold me my bedframe, finally demanding that they give me $24.95 so that I could purchase an axe and dismantle the bed they sold me, in order to return it to them “in a similar package” to the one they sent it to me in, as per their request. They haven’t replied yet.

    I was hoping that sleeping better last night would solve a lot of this, but as of right now, that hasn’t been the case. The chief symptom of the brokenness in my life is loneliness, a loneliness that seems impervious to companionship or work, that feels like a thousand light years of steel between me and the entire rest of the world. And here again is the failure of my attempt to write my way out of my life: because my life consists largely of blank, flat aloneness, and writing is a solitary activity. If it can be done in company I’ve never figured out how. If it can seek friendship I’ve never seen it happen. It can’t fix your life.

    I try not to spend too much time wallowing in self-pity, both because self-pity is not a good look on a person and because I think wallowing in it tends to make it harder to wash off. But it can be hard when you wake up every morning and there’s no reason to expect that this day will be any different to the one that came before. I’ll be 36 years old in a couple of weeks, and my life makes no sense to me. I can remember when I was half this age, graduating high school, thinking I was looking forward to becoming an adult and figuring out who I was. I worry now that that’s exactly what happened, and what I’ve figured out is that I am a flat, dull person who simultaneously feels intense loneliness and finds most people completely intolerable to be around.

    Fuck. Sorry. I was gonna try to end this funny, but I failed. Now to go off to my shrink’s office and complain about stuff for a while.