My Comfortable Disease

I think I’m most afraid when I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Maybe you know the feeling. When you’re completely ready to go and kick another task to the curb, but there isn’t one. I’m talking about the times when you finish a large bit of work and you have that immediate high that you can accomplish anything. You know, a little smile of pride on your face? Like when you finish a stellar novel and you just want to dive right into a next one? But then I glance over at the shelf, and it’s empty. It was packed away, and stored long ago.

Maybe not.

I’ve been realizing this for quite some time, but I just don’t stop much. I see others crack open an import as they fire up the grill and throw on a game, or slide on over to a local pub to drink the night away with their co-workers and friends. But I’m always working on stuff. I bounce from fighting my gopher plaque (cute and cuddly little guys who need to relocate pronto, or just off themselves for that matter) to starting a book club to solving an intermittent vacuum leak in the column of an electron microscope, all in the span of a morning. But that just continues until I sleep. Sometimes into my sleep

Forgetting to eat is a hallmark too.

I miss so damn many meals from the thought process of just one more splice, or I’ll just get this next paragraph done. But then it’s three excitable pages written, or a garden trough entirely dug in front of the house before I know what happened. Look at the clock: 9pm. Great, I guess I’ll skip food. And then off to do laundry, or reorganize a bookshelf that well fall into disarray within the week. I’m not even mad about the work I have put on myself to do. It’s almost therapeutic. I’m just confused why I can’t really stop.

I decided to apply for an MFA program at Harvard earlier this week because, you know, I can’t apply for something easier. I need to keep throwing endless work my way. Seeking out struggle based off its difficulty. Probably one of the reasons there was no other choice of military branch for me than the Marine Corps. The hardest you say? Naturally, if it sucks the life out of you, I’ll probably sign up, if anything, just to say I did. I wish I was proud of being able to apply there and probably get accepted, but essentially, it’s just turned into another task. Another highway mile marker, but I don’t know where the highway is supposed to end. It’s dark, and roads are indistinguishable. Just a steady stream of jack pines flashing in the headlights, and the yellow dotted line on swaying blacktop, looking for an exit that doesn’t come. Couldn’t tell you its cardinal directions either. Phone signal died some time ago.

But there are these times, when it’s too late or too early, that I just run out. And then I’m afraid.

The worry of self-worth floods in. It digs a hole for the for the night, scraping fractured nails along my spine. I’m sure someone else knows that feeling. When you look into the mirror and nothing of value stares back at you. I think my greatest fear is disappointment. I know that I’m not disappointing to anyone, but my body doesn’t catch up with that. It remembers getting picked up in the dead of winter by police as it sat at two in the morning waiting for the non-existent bus to put its drunk self to bed. It remembers me failing out of the same Calculus course for the third time because I simply didn’t show up. It remembers letting overdraft fees stack up in fear of calling the bank and facing the mistakes.

And it doesn’t forget.

So, when the time comes to pack it in, and call it a good day, I can’t. I frantically look around for something I missed. I know in my heart that there was something, even a minor thing, but I’ll never find it. Like the perfect level of drunk that you falsely remember having at a party when you just started out binging like good college kids do. You spend three more years chasing that high only to be labeled an angry drunk, and never find it again.

Maybe you know that fear. The one telling you that you should be doing something, anything, to progress progress progress. That fear of the stagnancy and lockdown of character and mind. That creeping consideration that you could put in thirty thousand hours of work and still be gum in the sand.

Or maybe not.

E. E. Cummings tells us “Progress is a comfortable disease.”

Have I become comfortable in my ceaseless pursuit to prove my worth?