I’ve got a pretty good life, all told. In fact, I count myself just about the luckiest guy alive – good job, little work but tons of projects, lots of friends and dinner parties, a beautiful and amazing child, and a partner and lover so perfect for me she is literally the stuff my younger-years dreams were made of. A home people like to visit, that is welcoming and open and often full of laughter, learning, support, love. It really is more than I have ever imagined possible, so full of everything I wanted and much I didn’t even know I wanted til it was shown to me, til it was made possible. I, least of anyone, has any reason to complain, to whine, to wallow in self-pity.
And yet, there it is. That hollow feeling, that boredom, that emotional blank space, that feeling of being entirely disinterested, disengaged. Been with me for the last couple of weeks, and I’m having a hard time shaking it. And an equally hard time making any sense out of why, why now, why for?
I guess it’s all just part of the cycle – we have times of joy and celebration, times of excitement and creativity, times of anger, or sadness, or reflection, and times like this – times of pretty much nothing, that can be described only as ‘blah’. And those times look so different for each of us, as we feel them and deal with them in different ways. Me? As to dealing with them, I mostly just try to carry on, knowing that eventually they pass and I find my way to contentment again. How I feel them? That’s kind of an odd one. Like lots of folks, I just lose energy, lose interest in the stuff I ought to be doing while simultaneously spending a whole lot of time enumerating all the things I want to do and can do and that would, by the doing, pull me right out of this in a hurry. But also, I fantasize about going off the rails.
I think how great it would be to hit the bars and sit up all night drinking and smoking cigarettes. I think how much I want to be a part of the party scene, laughing and fucking and using all kinds of whatever. I imagine a whole other life, in which I’m a bit of an asshole, sitting in the dark and sneering with disinterest at the world around me, knocking back shots of rum. I want to walk away from responsibility and work and the realities of keeping a home together, to disappear with Megan into a place where all we do is party and play. And I know this ain’t where I am, and I know how fast that all gets really old, and I know how good I feel in my life as it is and how much less good it’s felt in earlier times. I feel guilty for my fantasizing and I tell myself to snap out of it and I beat myself up for not doing the things on my mind that I know will get me out of this place and I realize that this kind of state is not conducive to being a good partner or father and I try like hell to drive these things from my mind. But they remain, always there, always this imagined world where all there is is the pursuit of immediate gratification and that picture of cool I have carried around since I was a kid and never entirely goes away.
That is my state today. That’s been my state awhile, I suppose, but it’s only today I’m naming it, feeling it in any kind of coherent way I can understand and articulate. It’ll pass, I know. And sooner rather than later, I know, too. But it’ll be back, too, a regular part of the cycle of my emotional life, a familiar place I visit and have visited for a whole lot of years.
