And it might just be my lady hormones talking, but when you’re engulfed by a PMS-provoked volcanic eruption of emotion, it’s hard to discern what’s reality and what’s your reproductive system punishing you for going through another month without getting a bun in your oven.
You may or may not have read about how my mom broke her heel back in June. It just hit me right now that it’s September now, and June officially qualifies as “a while ago” even though it doesn’t feel like it. Aside from a few sun-soaked, delicious moments, summer was a blur of homebodying and grocery shopping. But my mom’s been up and walking around on her injured foot for about a month now. Her progress has been slow (her physical therapist is a bitch, and my mom’s fully committed to the glass-half-empty approach to her gradual recovery), but she’s been back at work getting used to being a mobile person again.
Things at home are starting to get back to normal, except I feel like I can’t remember what normal was. I hate how dramatic and whiny that sounds, as if my mom’s heel fracture and subsequent surgery turned my world upside-down when there are people contracting Ebola and having their iClouds hacked, but this is my life, my blog, and my baggage, so yeah shit got a little chaotic for me even if it didn’t tip the Richter scale of Horribly Awful Things That Could Happen in a Person’s Life (my precious nudes are still safe).
Now that I’m no longer the go-to person for everything that goes on at my house, I can’t remember what my routine was before I took on all that responsibility. I try to think back to May, before my mom fell and the flurry of doctor’s visits began, and I honest to goodness cannot recall what I was doing then, and it makes me feel like an absolute crazy person. What time was I waking up each day? I recall doing Jillian Michaels workout DVDs in the morning… HOW? I was writing blog posts pretty regularly before work… When? I simply cannot remember of my routine from three months ago. Is that of concern?
You know how when you move a table or your couch to do some deep cleaning (read: a thorough search for a lost remote), and you try to get the furniture back in the same exact position it was in before, with its little feet in the existing indentations in the carpet? I feel like I can’t find my carpet indentations. I’m in the wrong place, askew, trying to settle into hostile berber carpeting with no success.
Most overwhelmingly, I feel completely and totally exhausted—mentally and physically. I didn’t exactly take the best care of myself during my mom’s recovery interlude. My diet wasn’t the best, I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and I skipped the gym more than I should have. I’m wondering if perhaps the stress of DOING ALL THE THINGS for the past few months is finally catching up with me now that things are getting back to normal. It’s a weird feeling trying to remember what it was just like just being regular Katie. Like Taylor Swift in her music video for “Shake It Off,” I feel like I can’t find the rhythm.
This weird disruption from my routine is coming at a really bad time, because I’m simultaneously having one of those icky 20-something phases during which you feel like a TLC-level scrub in terms of what you’ve accomplished in your life. This phenomenon is usually accompanied by crippling feelings of inadequacy, the verdict that your lack of equity is more embarrassing that your pathetic Instagrams, and the assumption that your engaged and/or pregnant acquaintances must be laughing about how ringless and childless you are while they perfect their wedding and nursery boards on Pinterest.
At any rate, I’m trying to get back to being myself. I miss my old routine.
Has some life event ever completely thrown you off? What helps you get back in the swing of things when you just feel like taking a sleep sabbatical?
(PS: I just learned that you can remove carpet dents by putting ice in them? And I’m like, don’t they usually just go away after a little vacuuming and patiently waiting a few days?)
