Lately I’ve been dragging. I’ve got an ugh for everything.
“Ugh time to get out of bed. And it’s shower day.”
“Ugh time to get to work.”
“Ugh time to go for a walk. And I have to lug this heavy new camera with me. It’s so hot out.”
“Ugh time to make dinner. I’d honestly be fine with tortellini. Why am I making homemade butternut squash pizza?”
“Ugh time to practice my sax. Why does it have to be so heavy? Why couldn’t I have chosen flute, or tin whistle?”
“Ugh time to go for another walk. And it’s still so damn hot out.”
Everything is heavy and stuck. There’s no lift, no air.
Yes, I’m a depressive. I tend to see the dark side of things, the ughs. When I was a teenager, and still had so much to learn about my brain, I thought I needed to die. I thought that I was so flawed that things were hopeless. I couldn’t make friends, I was fat, my family was struggling, my ADHD made it hard to concentrate.
What I eventually discovered, through therapy and drugs, for a time, was that it all depends on your frame of mind. I’ve learned to make my way to the brighter side, with effort. I still think the way I did when I was 13, but I’ve developed a positivity system and bolted it on.
And it’s that effort that I feel so acutely these days. The force of will that takes “Ugh time to go for a walk” as input and produces me, walking, in the real world, despite my brain’s misgivings. That effort needs time to do its thing: If I start prepping myself an hour ahead of time, and I visualize myself outside, arriving at the woods, I’m more likely to find myself there when noon comes around.
In some ways this positivity/motivation scheme is a filter I layer over my negative thoughts. Like the non-Boston accent I layer over my innate Boston accent. I still think with dropped R’s and flattened vowels, but I’ve trained myself to pronounce things correctly when I speak, so that I can blend in. That accent system needs time to function, too—a very short, conscious delay. In conversation, it’s second nature for me to say “Carve the jack-o-lantern” like a normal person. But wake me up in the middle of the night and you’ll get “Cahv the jack-a-lanten!” All Boston.
A year from now I’ll be 63 and retired. Will this heaviness be gone? No. Will some of the things I count today as burdens turn out to be unacknowledged blessings? Probably. I won’t have the structure of a workday, but I’ll have wall-to-wall freedom to do whatever the hell I want. Will I say “Ugh” to most of it? Guaranteed. That’s who I am. But then I’ll do it anyway.
