Swimming Solo

I was pretty much a single mom before the divorce, so being home alone isn’t really that much of a change. Generally, I like being alone.  I like to do solitary activities, like write or sew or read or Xbox.  I thrive on my own, kill my own spiders even.  I’ve never minded it at all.  When you have two kids, you’re never REALLY alone.  I can’t even pee without a child interrupting.  However, now that I send my kids to their father every other weekend, there are extended periods of time when it’s just me.  Uninterrupted.  

It’s overwhelming.  Mostly because my brain goes into hyper-drive.  I can’t stop thinking.  I used to have this annoying habit of visualizing the worst possible scenarios and then plan my reactions to them.  It was my way of controlling things, because we all know how much I love to control things. The funny thing is, it didn’t make me feel better at all. Now, I plan distractions.  So I won’t have to be at home with my head.  

I heard this article on the radio about busyness and how people who have some underlying unhappiness in their lives overbook themselves so that they’re always busy.  Being busy gives them a sense of importance and relevance.  It also gives them an out, in case they get invited to something they don’t want to go to, they have that excuse, “I’m just too busy” instead of just saying “No thank you”. 

I know that I’m doing this.  I have booked every free weekend until like November or something.  When I was dealing with depression, I never wanted to leave the house.  I wanted to curl up in my own little world and fester. I feel like distracting my unhappy feelings by being out and active is really the lesser of two evils.  I want to be out.  I want to talk and visit and socialize.  Not just because I love my friends or because I feel like I have a lot of missed opportunities to make up for, but also because I really don’t love thinking all those negative, pissy thoughts that swim around in my brain when I’m home alone.  

I don’t really know how healthy this approach is, though.  It seems to be the other end of the spectrum, where I used to dwell, now I distract.  Ideally, I’d like to be in a place where I don’t need distractions, negative or positive, in order to deal with my feelings.  I want to be able to feel sad and disappointed without it completely taking over my life.  I think it may be important to acknowledge those unhappy feelings.  It’s like they’re that bee that fell in the pool and is drowning and instead of picking it up or splashing it out, I just swim around it.  I don’t ever resolve the problem, though, and on my next lap, I’m going to see that damn bee again.  Bees maintain balance in our ecosystem.  We need them, dammit!  Even if they sometimes sting. 

The distractions are my excuse.  “Sorry, Mr. Bee.  I’m far too busy to deal with you today.”  The truth is, I don’t want to deal with it. I wish it weren’t there or even better, I wish someone else would just skim the pool already and get the bee out for me.  All this stressing about what I’m going to do about that fucking bee when I could have scooped it out right away and been done with it.  

It’ll happen again, I’m sure.  Bees fall in the pool all the time.  You’d think they’d find their water from a shallower source, but that’s a whole other analogy.  I guess it’s time for me to start scooping them out.  Let them dry their wings and fly away.  I can’t think of anything worse than an shitload of dead bees in the space where I swim.