wink     ; )

Little Steps

Alex says:

I've not slept even six hours a night in the past week. This is a mild, continuously-compounding sleep deprivation which does not keep me from doing anything, exactly, but is present in everything I do. It feels like there is a large vase in my head made out of heavy, clear glass. I can feel it begin to topple slowly as somebody begins to explain something to me, or as I am trying to expel a sentence from my mouth, and there is a heavy, sleepy, rolling-dizzy feeling in my temples and the backs of my eyeballs that spins my thought around until I am not longer sure what direction I had intended it to go in.

I've felt this way a lot in the past few weeks, but she describes it better than I do.

At the end of this round of clusters, my exhaustion was pervasive. My mantra became "little steps...little steps". Every normal sized task seemd overwhelming and the only way I could even attempt them was to break them down into tiny bits and tackle them one at a time. Things as simple as going to the bathroom had to be broken down into 1) put down Spark, 2) walk down the hall, 3) enter bathroom, 4) pee. All the while I would have to give myself a constant stream of encouraging chatter lest I give up and collapes in a heap.

I'll grant you one thing about clusters, they certainly make you feel like your life is epic. Every ordinary thing becomes a giant obstacle and every daily difficulty becomes an epic struggle. You may lose all sense of perspective, but nothing is boring.

(Of course, as with all who find themselves in true epic circumstances, you find yourself wishing you were not in epic circumstances at all and normal drudgery seems like the most attractive thing in the world. How ironic then that in my case it is the routine that seems epic and all I'm really wishing for is for the routine to seem boring again.)

- wink [June 21, 2004 12:50 AM]