Things Fall Apart/Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Well, I almost made it through this semester without a breakdown.

Ten weeks in, I can remember feeling like a breakdown was coming.  I remembered what had triggered my breakdown during fall semester, which I calculated to have been only 8 weeks in.  "I'm past due," I joked to Anne-Marie.  And then the breakdown didn't happen.  I got it together.  Even after I cried during my defense, I picked myself up and got back to work.

Yesterday the breakdown happened.  Tears, picking on Billy, feeling sorry for myself, the whole deal.  I don't know if it is better or worse that I hadn't seen it coming.  In retrospect, I can see exactly why this train was coming off the tracks.

I began my week by reading all of Beloved in a single day.  Not a good way to start your week.  Not only is it 300+ pages, it's an emotional workout that you shouldn't try to perform all at once.  There are moments in the book where you really would be wise to set it down, walk away, and let it simmer.  I couldn't.  (You should read it, though.  It's as good as everyone says.)

I haven't been exercising.  I haven't had time.  I'm not going to bother digging up the old blog entry, but I am about 95% sure I said something along the lines of "I should always make time for running" when I did this to myself last spring.  But I let it slip again.

I haven't been blogging.  I've only been writing in complicated academic sentences.  (And a lot of them.  I've written 9,000 words since Wednesday morning.)  Blogging is good for me because it forces me to stop and look back on something that has happened.  I'm a pretty reflective person anyway, but I'm also a writer, and writing is the best way of reflecting I've found.  Everything moves by me too quickly if I don't stop to write about it.  Also, blogging helps me feel connected to people outside my state, outside my house, and outside my brain.  I think about you guys as the audience of this blog- I'm not just writing for myself.  And it is delightful to get comment notifications popping up in my email box that say people are interested in the reflections I've performed.

I haven't been cleaning.  I let all this stuff pile up around me, and I don't take the time to put it all away, and it causes me psychic anxiety that I don't actually acknowledge.  But it's there.  When things are cleaned up I can breathe easier.  I can find things easily.  And I can't get angry with myself or Billy about them not being cleaned up.

It takes 30 minutes to get in a good workout.  It takes maybe 30 minutes to write a blog entry.  In 30 minutes, I can get a lot of mess put away.  So why don't I do it?  I've been at this two years.  You'd think I'd have figured out how to carve out these 30 minuteses for myself, but I still get to this point in the semester where I'm swamped and I forget how important it is to do these things.  I forget that they actually help me do better all those things that are swamping me.

I haven't yet figured out how to keep things from falling apart.  But I do know how to gather them up and put them back together.  I'm starting the morning with this blog entry.  I'm going to get my hair cut.  I'm going to the gym afterward.  We're going to plant a tree in Pop's yard.  And then I'll get to you, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

(Things Fall Apart is a novel by Chinua Achebe that describes how, well, things fall apart for an African tribe once colonists arrive.  He's borrowing the line, "things fall apart," from a "The Second Coming," a Yeats poem which says "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."  The Yeats poem concludes with the lines "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Earlier in the week I devoted much of my time to explaining how I believe that in Joan Didion's essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she proposes that writing is a way of trying to rectify the falling apart Yeats describes in his poem and she describes in her essays.  Here's to hoping she's right.)