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| Laundry Pins by d o l f i . |
…it’s neverending, and everytime you look away for just one moment, more of it appears, and I don’t quite know what to do about it right now.
Also, our washing machine seems to be broken. If I try to do anything else than hardcore 60 degrees washes, it takes twice as much effort as usual to get the wash done as the machine insists on stopping mid-cycle and needs manual restarting.
Since we got married this summer (which was lovely! I highly recommend a huge wedding and overspending on a pointless yet gorgeous gown), I’ve had what I thought were post-wedding blues, but I now realise it could be more than that.
I think I’m suffering from a midlife crisis.
Which is of course stupid since I could still be considered to belong to the early 30-something group, but still.
As I drove to work today, I was listening to Sheryl Crow, whose CD album «The Globe Sessions» randomly resurfaced when I was clearing out some boxes from moving before Bolle was born (see how stuff never gets done).
And I thought back at the time when I first listened to that album, all the hopes and dreams I had, all the things I was going to achieve and do, most of which weren’t clearly formulated, but I knew they were out there, even as I experienced the heartaches and emotional rollercoasters of youth.
I wanted to get away, to be out there, where things happen, to meet the world head-on, and, you know, become something more than I was.
And now I have. Qualification in hand, wife to a lovely man, mothering a lovely toddler (lovely despite her favourite word being «NO»).
But somehow this just makes me depressed.
It’s a bit like reaching your horizon and finding that it’s a wall instead.
I thought reaching this point would give me a new perspective, something else to chase. I never realised it would be IT.
I never wanted to be one of these people who spend their evenings in a sofa watching TV.
So we don’t have a TV service, but I sit in our sofa. A lot.
It depresses me, and I’m not sure why.
Part of me tells me this is what adult life is like (when I think back at my parents, that’s all they ever did in the evening, possibly interspersed with some knitting on behalf of my mum), and I should just deal with it.
Part of me knows it’s not forever, the toddler years will pass and soon I’m free to do whatever I please again, I can run down the street to the arthouse cinema and waste the rest of the evening drinking flavoured coffees and dissecting the cinematography with a friend, I can go away on romantic weekend breaks at the seaside where the air is fresh and the breakfast cooked for me, I can sleep all night and stay in bed all of Sunday reading a novel and discussing it with someone else who also read it when I get to work on Monday, I can spend all of Wednesday morning shoe shopping in empty malls, and wax my legs in private.
But mostly I feel that I just have to come to terms with the fact that this is how my life is now. Living in the future or in the past is completely unhelpful.
I’m not living in a metropolis where exciting foreign foods and new acquaintances and career opportunities wait around every corner, no longer a small fish in an ocean of like-minded people, where I can pick and choose people who are interested in what I’m interested in, who speak my language.
I’m a foreign species even though I’ve returned home. People talk about what happened on TV last night and what their neighbour did with their secretary, they are not interested in the wider world and barely know it exists. I’ve voluntarily chosen to come back, I just didn’t know how hard it would be to adjust.
I’m so dissatisfied, so bored, so restless, it sometimes feels like my head will implode or I’ll scream. Which is completely uncalled for, with every moment of the day being filled with some chore or conversation or dirty nappy. But this is what it feels like.
Like the feeling of looking at a pile of laundry which inexplicably appearing and waiting to be dealt with, while you were off daydreaming.