People ask me about things and tell me things about the world and goings-on, looking for thoughts or opinions. Well, I haven't any.
I don't feel like an individual anymore. I feel like a manifestation of the intended fulfilment of everyone's needs. And failure is a loss of identity.
I go to church, but I don't actually go to church anymore. I stay in the hall during the service, then I go outside or to the classrooms afterward, when the hall fills with people for coffee hour.
I cannot abide people anymore. More people - more noise, more confusion. More needs, more demands. Too much.
The house is growing smaller for me. Fewer and fewer spaces I can bear to be in. I lost the fight with the bathroom today. So many things and all of them necessary - they've been driven out of other spaces by the unnecessary. They are so tumbledown and so crowded and so thick - in furstration I slammed open the door that is continually closing on me, injuring me, over and over. I slammed it open and wedged a tube of some foolish hair gel - whose? - under it to brace it open.
Later it transpired that this wedging bent the towel bar behind and caused the doorknob to make a hole in the drywall.
In a rental, this is disastrous.
I lose more and more habitable space. I'm down to just the living and dining room now. Sometimes I can sleep in the bedroom, but I can't tell how much of a horror the children are being, removed so far. In any case, I can't walk in there.
I can't turn around in the kitchen. I can barely wedge myself into the office. I injure my feet in the kids' room. Their bathroom makes me retch. There is too much traffic in the stairwell.
That's the whole house.
The spaces that have been mine are obliterated. No desk, no computer. I am perpetually disoriented. All the files are gone, the programs are gone, the sites, the designs, the addresses, the images, all gone.
Everything is shared, and shared so heavily. When finally my turn comes, I don't even know how to make use of it. Too many priorities, all at once. I seek escape. I read, a lot these days. I have lost track of time. Movies, always more movies and more books. The known and the knowable.
I can't even think anymore. An I'm supposed to be the one to do things. I am supposed to make the phone calls and look things up and write things and email things, and remember everything and prepare everything.
I am failing.
I love. I love a lot of people, family and friends. I don't want to let anyone down. I don't want to botch it for anyone. I love so much my precious beautiful family.
What am I going to do?
We want to buy a house. I cannot make the phone calls. Every day I decide to and then recoil in fear. The opportunities are going to melt away, and I cannot bear to pick up the phone. It's all I can do to answer it when it rings.
I keep getting drafted, and I keep volunteering because I seem to have become the only capable one. Prolem is, I'm not capable anymore.
I'm eroding into dysfunctionality. I will be useless soon.
