Life had a way of folding in on itself, unraveling in bizarre and beautiful patterns. You could watch and feel like you were a part of the fold or outside of it, not living but still alive. The pattern was both alluring and felt like a trap.

I found myself returning to old routines, the daily banal. Gone was any urgency or mystery in life. I couldn’t for the life of me swing a dumbbell or take to the trail, the most I could do was walk to the park, and when I did I often felt like I wasn’t there, coming to in a patch of woods surrounded by wild bushes and multicolored leaves, green, yellow and brown. The scent of whatever dead matter was in the air felt revitalizing and brought me to. But I had to tell myself to enjoy it.

I could breathe in a good lungful and come back to wherever I was, but soon I got summoned elsewhere. And I languished there in a foreign place, I brooded. It got so tiresome I began to resent myself.

For the past several years I haven’t worked a full-time job, but earned a full-time salary doing short-term contract work. I thought myself clever in fact, to do work that stimulated and stretched me and paid well, work that mostly required writing, that came in short clips of five weeks to three months, and reminded me of a college theater production. You get cast, quickly learn your lines, open the show, then tear down the set. There was a tendency to get attached and feel it would never end and then one day it just does.

I liked the sense of temporal commitment and the variety, the transactional vibe. It gave me a chance to reserve the identity I’d otherwise submit to a job. I hoped that “reserve identity” would hole up in a writing project but struggled to do both at the same time. I tried to bifurcate my attention but it all wanted to latch on to the paid work, and I obsessed over it.

By 7 pm I was getting sleepy and by 8 I was struggling to stay awake and by 9 I was out, so I could recharge and wake the next day by 5. I rose at 5 so I could sit in the dark for 45 minutes and write or think about writing, which isn’t the same thing at all.

The routine behavior had its perks but felt hard to change, being a routine. Mom complained of feeling overly habitual about doing the same things at the same time every day, like insisting on a particular route for a walk or the timeframe she bathed, the fact it seemed to be getting worse as she aged, to which I could relate.

When I started doing family therapy I learned about emotional regulation, a word I immediately understood but had never considered, which helped explain why so many of my parenting moments had gone so poorly in the past: I wasn’t regulated.

But there was some important connection between how I thought and behaved, how my moods factored into that, and how I spent my time every day. The way to normalize all that to a controlled, predictable outcome was to be regulated, habitual. The body seemed to like that and the mind, too. Research pointed to the benefits of regulating diet and sleep. It seemed like our pets operated the same way. They navigated meal time by an inner clock, circling three times before lying down to rest. I found myself circling too.

These life patterns, this notion of regulating my mind and moods, it felt important to my mental health but also a bit maddening, like I was caught in my own maze. It made me think of Ravel’s Bolero, that piece of swelling, ascending repetition. Had I heard he’d composed that toward the end of his life, and was losing his mind as he did so? Was it a reflection of his mental patterns collapsing, unfolding?

I was no Ravel. But I found myself governed by mental frequencies that made me wonder, was I alright upstairs? Or on a more positive note, what could I do with it?

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, identity