A Sense of Pressure

050906 MP Tuesday, September 06, 2005; 11:11 AM  I feel a sense of pressure.   I feel a little overwhelmed.  I feel tired and depressed.  I feel as if I am on the edge—on the edge of exploding, on the edge of anger.   I am not happy or well and for no particularly good reason that I can readily determine.  I AM TAKING A BREAK TO WRITE BECAUSE I FEEL AS IF I must WRITE.   I FEEL DESPERATE.  Oh dear, those cap locks were not intentional but they may as well have been.  I suppose.

 

I love Keith and I am happy to be in a relationship with him, but at the same time, I feel as if somehow I am being lost.

 

He may well feel the same way.

 

I just read this morning that widowers tend to remarry within two years and those that do tend to be unhappy, because they need to talk about their dead wives and the new wives, for appropriate reasons, don't want to talk about the other women their husbands loved.   The lack of ability to talk about their dead wives and their grief is not good for their health.  They need to talk about it.   They need to discuss what happened and how they feel about it.

 

I believe this and I have upon occasion invited Keith to talk about Susan in the past, but he rarely does, and I can't blame him, because of course it upsets me terribly to imagine him loving another woman, being intimate with her and so on.   I don't even like to write about it.

 

I understand of course that he hadn't met me yet and he wasn't being unfaithful to me or anything, and I too had previous husbands.   And previous intimacies, of course.  But knowing that intellectually does not make it feel any better—it still hurts. I don't know why.  I hate for my hurt, my possibly unreasonable hurt, to hurt Keith.  If he needs tot alk, I wish he could—to a counselor, to a friend, or even to me—he would just have to approach it with care and caution.   He would have to preface his remarks by saying something like:  "I really need to talk about Susan, would you be willing to listen?"   And then to also listen to my own fears about it.

 

I keep taking deep breaths and sighing, as if there were something heavy weighing on me, but I don't know what it is.   There are a lot of little things, but I am not sure what is upsetting me so much.

 

Here are some things that are bothering me right now:

 

• The lack of progress on selling the Kimbrook house and settling the divorce and marrying Keith and getting moved to Detroit
• The fact that NO ONE (including us, Keith and I, the lawyer, Bruce and so on), seems to care or be making any effort at all toward making progress in this direction.
• My constant pain, my fibromyalgia and associated symptoms, my insomnia, my fatigue and tiredness, my grouchiness, irritability and on-edgeness.
• My lack of energy and motivation—I feel so depressed I don't want to do anything at all right now, and when I do want to do things, I don't seem to have any energy
• Old age ("and treachery")
• A heaviness of heart
• The fact that I am not writing or doing any of my creative work
• The loss of all my work on the hard drive of Dead
• The disorganization of everything, my inability to locate any of my stuff anywhere any more, due to the move in part, and my forgetfulness, and lack of organizational skills and energy and the fact that there is nowhere to put anything.  
• The increasing messiness of the Detroit house—it seems to be heading in the same direction as the Kimbrook house.
• Tension in the family, between Keith and Graham, Keith and me, Graham and me etc.
• An overall sense of impending doom (I tend to have an all or nothing attitude when I'm depressed and it seems like everything is bad).
• I feel as if I am just too fat and always getting fatter and there is nothing I can do about it.
• I feel as if I can't get enough air, as if things are closing in on me
• I'm worried about my mother, her health and happiness, her house, her estate, her car etc.
• I want to write, but now that everything is lost I feel as if I have to start all over from scratch and don't know where to begin.   It seems like a hopeless task.  Everything feels hopeless.
• I feel guilty for feeling this way in the light of the hurricane victims in New Orleans, the Tsunami victims, the starvation victims, the war victims etc.   The English bombing victims and the Russian bombing victims and all the other suffering people in the world—those with Malaria and tuberculosis and cancer etc.   I feel bad for them but I still feel bad for myself and I also feel as if I have no right to feel bad but I do.  AK

Well, I could go on and on, but I guess this isn't doing a bit of good.

I guess I will go out and walk around the block in the sunshine.  Maybe that will help.

 

 

11:51 AM even the sun through the window is cheering me--a little!

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary