There’s a game that needs to be played every morning.
When my alarm goes off, or my eyes peep open, I remember where I am. My brain does the same thing every morning: Childhood bedroom? No. Notre Dame dorm room? No. Room in our house in Denver? No. Apartment? Yes. Which one? Uh… not Palm Desert, not North Hollywood… Vienna. Oh, shit! I’m in Austria!
Every morning.
Then I lie in bed and try to think of all the good things that are going on in my life. I do this because I can feel the dread on the floor next to the bed, waiting for me to roll over and look at it. When I wake up there are a few seconds of neutral before the tendrils of despair creep up from under the bed and hover on either side of me. I rush through all of the good: made it to Europe, have a residency permit, paid this month’s rent, have groceries.
Then my mind shifts and the tendrils slither on top of the covers. Ate too much bread yesterday. Student loans still deferred. Things didn’t work out with that guy. 31 years old and I have more debt than I’ve ever made in a year. No auditions coming up. Summer opera was canceled last week, again. Might not be able to afford next week’s voice lessons. City going into a lockdown in two days. Birthday coming up — without Mommy.
There it is. There’s the thing. The tendrils curl around my neck and limbs and I remember that Mommy is dead, gone from this life and into the next, and I will not hug her for decades. The despair sits close on my body, intimate and cold, and I have to steel myself to get up. I become hard. My movements are mechanical. Pee, brush teeth, make coffee. Get through it. A balloon popped somewhere and out flew the delight. Now all I have is duty: to my body, to my scheduled obligations, to my dreams (which I can say out loud but frequently don’t understand anymore). I move out of habit, because the other option is to lie in bed and let the tendrils fester.
Sometimes, I get lucky. I beat the tendrils out of bed. They slither behind me but I manage to make it to the toilet, the sink, the kitchen and my desk before they can pin me. I open up the window shades and smile at the blue sky and wonder why coffee is so consistently delicious over here. I congratulate myself on purchasing the overabundance of flowers and plants that keep dying and getting replaced. I thank the housing gods that I landed here, in Chiara’s bright, airy, beautiful apartment. I feel excited about writing and singing and Creating.
They might win. I’ll sit down at my laptop and feel the tendrils wrap around me, tattoos of reality pinning me in emotional first gear. This work is silly. German is hard. I’m bored, fat, and poor. Everything today will be hard.
But sometimes I win. I bat the despair down. I fling it off my limbs. I put on my tennis shoes and run out the door and up the road, forcing them to trail me until they give up.
My tendrils of despair grew out of grief, exacerbated by lightly (but firmly) medicated anxiety. Maybe yours grew out of depression, divorce, job loss, or loss of another color. I think most of us have a few that poke around each morning. These are the weeds of life.
I cannot anticipate how a day will go. There is no fool-proof system for keeping the tendrils of despair trimmed. The game begins every morning before I open my eyes. But I like to think that this exercise is a form of training. Every day I get up, I’m growing stronger. Every day spent carrying these tendrils, spun like seaweed around my body, is a day my body moves despite them.