Brain damage in general is fun. I feel for Bruce Willis, I've said I have dementia for years, but a real diagnosis is scary. I'm seeing it everywhere now. I realized last night at Mines that nobody else seems to understand it the way I do. If you haven't been teaching the last two years, you have no fucking clue how bad it is. I'm directing a college show that is, for all intents and purposes, a high school show. Why? These kids lost two years of their lives, two important, developmental years, and their development is arrested at whatever age they were in March of 2020. I need a government grant to do the research and publish my findings that simply validate my observations and then I will be rich and I can stop teaching and watch 30 Rock reruns all day. So it tracks that my psyche ceased to grow or change after I left Littleton in December of 2019. I never dealt with that trauma, there wasn't time while I was doing nothing but trying to learn how to teach theatre online and then worrying about Jim's job and paying bills and then teaching hybrid, whatever that means, or trying to figure out livestreaming without any cameras or video equiptment, which I think I just misspelled, so really, I have no excuse for not being OK because I had two years "off", just suck it up, you're fine, it's fine, I'm fine, stop looking at me I'm fine.
My friends in Canada are relentless gardeners, they move the gardens around and build sheds and shelves. I told them that trait would be why they survive the zombie apocalypse : they'll have their own food. I do not garden, but Jim has guns. That is the difference between Canada and the US right there, isn't it?
Today's Depression Highlight: staving off tears alone in the office, listening to Zen music and contemplating eating either the banana or Atkins chocolate breakfast drink, because leaving the building to get food takes too much energy.
Remember when you were under qualified and really just wanted a shot, but knew your time would come because you were young and ready and willing and gung ho and believed all the crap Lin -Manuel spewed as Hamilton? I don't remember what that's like. I am now old and over qualified but too eviscerated mentally to give any energy to my jobs, which are plural because I'm overqualified and booked, but am royally failing at all of them. I spent all of my energy the last two years trying to keep employed, and what little energy I have left is buoying my students who are decimated emotionally, and too young to understand what has happened (see paragraph one). I just want to die, but I won't kill myself because I would devastate my family, who would blame themselves and I don't want that, I just want out. Where is my Opt Out form for life? I was talking to a former colleague who said he's never been this depressed, he would never kill himself but he wants to die...or maybe he didn't say that, it was subtext and I put it into text because that's where I am and brain damage is real. And I get it. Why can't a car just take me out on I70? Hello? It's a shit show out there, it's really not that hard, they're doing 80 in the breakdown lanes. Remember when Robin Williams declared "It's Road Warrior on the freeway!" Or Steve Martin shouted that the first day of spring was open season on the LA freeway. That's I70 daily. Weirdly, I take a different route to work because my nerves can't take it, but if I wanna get hit that's the way to play the odds. How funny. My anxiety won't let me end the depression. Fun Day. If I drew comics I feel like this would be a great opportunity to explore that idea. But I do not.
I would love to be a better writer, I know it's there, but getting past this garbage has been an impossible task. For five years I have attempted to dead lift this depression, but channeling Arnold and Sly has been unsuccessful. So I turned to Steve and Robin, who can find the true humor of the human condition so effortlessly, and failed at that. So.
And I can't talk about what's going on in my building, because that has historically proved to be a poor choice, but it is not helping my mental health in the least. I will say it is not personal this time, it's systematic. "The quiet racism of lowered expectations." Everyone from George Bush to Bill Cosby has been credited with that magnificent quote, in which I am now living.
OK, I will say one thing. A 60% does not equal a grade of "B".
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