On Thursday morning, I started seeing a new physical therapist (which, if I had more emotional energy, would have caused me a huge crisis this month, because my other PT that I was seeing for nearly a year was, I’m pretty sure, my actual guardian angel and the only professional who was of any help and comfort to me in the past two years, so losing her was sort of like losing another limb). While feeling around the knotted muscles along the right side of my neck, my new PT said, “This stuff tends to get worse when you’re tired and stressed. Are you… tired and stressed much, right now?”
I said, “I’m a teacher who’s in grad school and it’s December,” and she got it.
Through some really unfortunate fluke coincidences between various life, work, and grad school projects, I have been in Crisis Go Mode since the week before Thanksgiving. It turns out I’ve also had pneumonia for about that long (which I found out about last Sunday after a late-night visit to urgent care). I’ve been getting about 4 hours of sleep each night for the past month, and while that may be normal/doable for some superhumans, it is not normal/doable for me, and I’ve known for a while that it would catch up to me at some point. I just hoped that it would catch up to me next Sunday, once all of the end-of-semester business is taken care of for my job and all of my final essays, presentations, and exams are finished for grad school.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t wait that long.
I’ve known for the past several months that this last Thursday, 12/8, would be a long, rough day. It started with an evaluation with my new PT (again, an otherwise emotionally overwhelming thing, due to equal parts grief at losing my old PT, frustration at feeling like I’m starting all over again at the nearly two-year mark of the Medical Mystery Tour, and anxiety about seeing a new specialist because it’s always exhausting and frustrating to have to advocate for yourself in the medical world). Then straight to a slew of meetings at work, a potentially emotionally-fraught class period with my high school theater students (auditions for the spring play were this week, and everyone, understandably, has feelings), and (most drastically) the evening class where I would turn in my 18-page research paper on medieval cartography (which, because of afore-mentioned Crisis Go Mode, I wasn’t able to start writing until Monday) and present on it to the class for 15 minutes. I needed to be on the ball, and winsomely so, throughout the whole day, or everything would fall apart.
On my way to PT that morning, so tired I was absolutely not safe to drive, I began hearing the familiar barrage of anxious thoughts: something’s going to slip, you can’t handle this many things when you’re so tired, you’re spread so thin you’re not doing a good job at ANY of the things, why even bother, everything is doomed.
I’ve been working hard lately at not allowing those thoughts to go on for too long, because it turns out that they’re wildly unhelpful and lots of the time they’re also wildly inaccurate. But it occurred to me suddenly, while sitting at a stoplight, that even if they were true in this instance, there was nothing I could do right then to fix it. The only way through was forward, and if I was feeling too unconfident and tragic to charge forward for myself, then I should charge forward for the Laura who had gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before because she cared too darn much about medieval cartography (who knew?!) to settle for a sub-par paper. I said, out loud, “Show up for 4-hour Laura,” and the light turned green.
I wish I could say that my resolution to advocate so nobly for 4-hour Laura — poor sleep-deprived wretch that she is — was respected by the Fates, and that all of my efforts that day were met with success. Instead, somewhere in the afternoon, a line from The Two Towers popped into my head, and you know what, it’s a really fitting description of that day’s events: “An ill fate is on me this day, and all that I do goes amiss!”
It was actually fascinating how badly I did things as the day progressed. I don’t say this here from a place of sadness or a desire for pity: I mean it was truly fascinating. I’m a fairly self-critical person in general — I’m one of those chronic conversation-repeaters and I literally cringe when I think of something that I wish I had said or done better — but I have to say, even my worst visions of what the day would look like didn’t come close to how things went. I made unusually stupid mistakes on tasks at my desk, stuttered and brain-farted my way through the class I taught, nearly fell asleep in my grad school class while waiting for my turn to present, and then proceeded to have the longest-feeling 15 minutes of my life as I tried to talk about the thing I’d been living and breathing for the past week, but now suddenly couldn’t say anything intelligent about. (I knew I was in trouble when, thirty seconds into my presentation, I looked down at my paper notes and the nearby laptop keyboard [which ran my slideshow presentation] and couldn’t make sense of which was which, or why I had two things with letters on them in front of me.)
I had decided that I would show up for 4-hour Laura, but it turns out that it was 4-hour Laura who showed up for me. Literally no other version but my most stressed and sleep-deprived self could bungle things in such a masterful manner.
It was so ridiculous that I’m actually a little delighted by it, even though I do still physically cringe two or three times a day when I think about it. I haven’t had a public-speaking experience like that since, oh, middle school? And it’s funny, because I spend a lot of time and energy teaching high school students to be present and confident and awake to the needs of a given moment, and wow, I am still very much learning all of that myself.
But I also think that’s good. Prolonged situations like the ones on Thursday are embarrassing and unpleasant, but I believe very deeply what I tell my students: it’s okay to obviously struggle while attempting something you care about. One of the first bad ideas I try to dispel every year is the notion that being nervous means that you are somehow bad or weak. I think nervousness shows that you care: the care just gets channeled in an unhelpful way, and learning to channel it properly is a learned skill. How much of Thursday’s ridiculousness was due to nervousness/anxiety and how much was due to tiredness, I’m not sure, and I don’t really care. What matters to me is that I cared and tried and showed up all over again after every dumb failure of that day.
All this to say, it’s December, and whether you’re a teacher or in grad school or not, I’m sure you’ve got at least one thing on your plate that is threatening to send you into a death-spiral of anxious thoughts. And I just want to say, (first of all, good luck, and I hope everything comes up roses, and also): show up for the part of you that cares the most deeply. Whether you succeed or not, it isn’t a mistake to honor that person’s work.
Vagabond Homebody 