Very Bad Thing

Sure enough, yesterday evening I could not sleep. I lay awake until 4 a.m. and then finally did the Very Bad Thing: I picked up my phone and lay in my camping cot scrolling and scrolling until 7:30 a.m., and then sort of slept for 90 minutes, and then texted the friend I was supposed to have brunch with today and asked if we could reschedule. Then I slept until about 1:30 p.m.

The New York Times alters their content just often enough that one can scroll like that for hours and keep finding something new to read. Oddly, somewhere along in there, I came upon a first-person account by a woman who had had to decide whether to live somewhere more bucolic, which required leaving the job she loved, or whether to stay in the city. She and her family did actually move to the quieter place, after which buyer’s remorse almost wrecked her marriage, she wrote. She specifically mentioned the importance of having regular contact with random people as being salubrious for mental health. Aha! I thought. That settles it.

However, they went on to move back to the city, and finally back to the other place, by which time the writer had learned that encountering lots of weak connections was not actually essential to her mental health. She quotes Thoreau: “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”

When I got up this afternoon, I had the meal I refer to as breakfast, whatever time it may occur, and then I went out in the car to pick up a package and to go back to the grocery store, because I forgot to bring my empty water jugs yesterday. It was a stunningly lovely afternoon, with puffy white clouds against a brilliant blue sky.

I remembered something my sister once said, which is that I could buy the house and then sell the house. This is true.

After I got back from my errands, I went for walk. It was wonderful out, but the main thing I could feel was the persistent knot of worry in my stomach. I guess it’s time to abandon the idea that I’m a person in decent mental health. Based on my (nonexistent) training in clinical psychology, I would have to say I am awash in anxiety and depression, as I so often see in the charts of patients.

It is still my working hypothesis that I will depart from Michigan for the last time in mid-August, and that this is a pleasant vacation, and I have told my sister this, as I think it’s only fair to allow time for things to sink in and for any related process to occur.

I am periodically reminding myself that one day this whole horrible thing will be in the past. It feels literally harder than the illnesses and deaths of my parents.

I did a good thing this early evening, which was to have dinner without looking at my phone. For years, I ate without reading, but things got fuzzy during my parents’ illnesses. It takes me a long time to eat a salad, like an hour. Since my parents nearly always had the TV on (MSNBC), I decided it would be fine to eat my salad while watching TV rather than to go into another room and sit there by myself for so long.

I still eat breakfast without reading, but I look at my phone during dinner. (Lunch isn’t; if I had lunch, I would hardly be able to do anything other than prepare, eat, and clean up after meals.)

I thought it would be very difficult to sit on the deck for so long just eating (boring!), but it turned out to be delightful. The colors and smells and tastes and the feeling of the breeze and the sounds of Lloyd and his sister playing in their back yard were so vivid that it immediately seemed way more enjoyable than reading while eating. My compromise was to make a cup of tea for after dinner and look at the news while having my tea.

Tonight, I plan to put my phone across the room and use the alarm on a little freestanding clock.