I need to start work. But I should also tidy the kitchen and make myself breakfast, and the clean washing pile on the couch has gone from a hill to a literal mountain (the other day my 13-year-old neighbour hid inside it while playing hide and seek with my sons, and no one found him), and my kids are asking for more toast at approximately 12-minute intervals.
All those things seem equally important and urgent, and I know I need to have a shower before I do any one of them because my hair is a greasy slick and I’m still in my pyjamas, but somehow bathing has become an insurmountable obstacle; a literally herculean feat of strength and daring that I do not have the raw power for, let alone the skills and ability.
Every shower is like I’ve never had a shower before. A logistical marathon, performed naked at high temperatures — and then afterwards, oh god, I’m going to require socks and a clean shirt and my only good bra has been lost for two days now and the thought of wearing a sports bra again is just too much to bear.
And this barrier of the shower makes me feel like all the things sitting behind it are impossible, are slipping away faster than I can grab them, and if I don’t do all of them right now they’ll alll be lost forever because there is only ever “right now” and “idk but probably never”.
I have a lifetime collection of lost ideas and broken plans, and the dusty remains and shattered shards of all of them are littering the space between me and being clean and reminding me that — based on the numbers of things I’ve wanted to do vs the number of things I’ve actually done, averaged out across 43 years — I’ve never actually done anything. It all rounds down to zero.
And so I do nothing.
Or, more accurately, I look at Instagram and steal crunchy things out of the pantry, and feel increasingly more confused and frustrated and panicky.
Does no one else think this is the worst kind of bullshit? To be stuck down here in the muck walking the dog and making dinner every single day, while the limitless potential of an infinite universe dangles just out of reach and our frail human bodies barrel towards oblivion?
I have this recurring dream that I’m trying to get somewhere, but I can only move in slow motion. I try to run and it’s like my limbs are stuck in treacle, or mired in mud, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t make myself go any faster.
This one lifetime and this stupid linear timeline cannot possibly hold all the things I want to do and be and experience. I want to write books and raise my children and travel and learn to draw and knit cat socks and speak fluent Portuguese, but I also want to ride a horse and sword fight and stay at an inn on a dusty road and run a marathon and hike every trail and breed cats and build furniture with my hands and pierce my nose again and play tennis and do yoga and meditate and learn to cook Persian food and and and and…
And to do any of it, I have to have yet another fucking shower.