Moron, at the very least

I've lately been settling into my life in a way that sometimes sends me into a panic. Panic brought on by contentment? I'm a walking oxymoron. Or moron at the very least. It's just that  I've grown so accustomed to whatever the opposite of contentment is...malcontent discontent, agitation, that looking around me instead of looking over and above me is having a strange effect. I am not used to not wanting more. I guess my subconscious is dealing with these calm waters by inventing things for me to be anxious about. This morning, in the middle of fretting about something that literally had no consequence whatsoever on my or any one else's life, I stopped myself. I was in the car at a red light and I just turned up the music and sang along and blocked out whatever it was (I totally remember what it was but it really is so stupid that I can't be bothered to relate it) and got to work, feeling really good.

Yet I distrust good feelings, rare as they are and even typing this, I grow frustrated and just how stupid I am sometimes. I tend to go from feeling good, to feeling distrust about feeling good, to feeling bad about not just feeling good, to your everyday standard stasis of existential dread. Right now I still feel really good but I had to blog about how I am not enjoying feeling good. Sigh. I'm okay with being a neurotic person; I just hope I'm at least a little bit amusing about it.

And so my brain has arrived in a place that looks not unlike the aftermath of every New Year's Eve party I've ever attended: everywhere there are clues that I had fun at some point but all I'm left with is a feeling that I should be ashamed, that I've said or done something embarrassing, some unease with unknowable origins. Because how can I just feel good without paying for it? What sort of unsettled thought will visit me any moment now? Is this residual Catholic guilt or does everyone feel this?

Every morning lately, I wake up with determination. I will get X, Y and Z done today and I will be able to file it away inside the COMPLETED folder. I will have a long day full of sunlight. But then I get out of bed and see it is still dark out, still time to meditate on things rather than do them, still time to sleep. I want to feel spring but I find myself fighting the faint echoes of winter in an involuntary, truly irritating way. And because I am still thinking, thinking, thinking instead of DOING, I'm starting to let the sound of my own wheels drive me crazy. I'm ignoring my contentment and instead projecting imagined agitation onto the world around me, seeing patterns and connections in the utterly arbitrary. On Monday I awoke to to light flurries falling from the dark sky. Simultaneously, there were birds chirping. The world had been reborn into daylight savings time just one day before. The days are prepared to be longer but the morning is so black...

I'm comforted that sometimes I can find "proofs" of identity crisis in nature.

I spend an unhealthy amount of time wishing we could will things into being, speed them along somehow. I'd have finished my novel (or started it in earnest).I'd be settled and really feel and appreciate it, just because I wanted to be. I'd have my days organized and to do lists with guaranteed completion or my money back. And Persephone, would have come back up weeks ago because we've all just missed her so much around here.