Dispatch from the Darkling Plain
Feb. 25th, 2016 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraApocalyptic thunderstorms all throughout the night. BB’s apartment has skylights galore, so the night was one long son et lumiere.
Meteorologists tell us this is El Nino, not the end times. I’m not sure I believe them.
BB’s apartment is my dream living space – just this one enormous, well-lighted airy room:
I grew up in a NYC apartment, so, in some essential sense, houses with their small, compartmentalized rooms have always felt completely alien to me.
BB will be leaving his apartment shortly, and I will miss visiting him here.
###
Max called me Tuesday in a deep funk. Feeling overwhelmed by coursework. The natural response to feeling overwhelmed, of course, is to blow things off – which backfires since then even more work piles up till you get to the point where you can’t possibly cope with it.
I’ve been there myself. Sigh…
The most pressing looming horror was a paper due Friday, which he’d made very little headway on. So, I suggested brightly that he start working on it right away and that I call him at half hour intervals to check on his progress and give him a chance to vent periodically.
Which I did.
He said that it helped, but who knows if it did really. He could have been humoring me.
He also said, “But now I feel bad because I’m behaving like a toddler, running to his Mommy.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Don’t think of me as your mother! Think of me as another human being who happens to have an encyclopedic knowledge of you because I’ve been observing you closely since you were an infant!”
I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, but I tried to say it with enough conviction so that maybe he would believe it.
The boundaries between a mother and her children are extremely permeable.
What with the three-hour time difference between New York and California, I found that I couldn’t sleep when I finally went to bed. I was filled with anxiety. I was panicking. I would drift off and immediately become besieged with these vivid hypnogogic images – one time, soldiers were knocking on my door to arrest me and as I let them into the house, I knew the rest of my life would be a Winston Smith terror of screaming interrogations, incarcerations, and the final selling out of everything I valued; another time, I was floating on a raft in the middle of an ocean, knowing that I’d never be rescued and that the next three days of dehydration would be an excruciating ordeal of horror…
Not fun.
And the ensuing hours have not been fun either. Despite a very nice lunch and gossip session with Stephen yesterday who took me to a chi-chi French restaurant and listened with the greatest of interest to my rants about dead amusement parks.
I just feel like a tremendous failure. Possibly the biggest failure who’s ever been born on this planet.
…for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain...
I’m well aware that this is what psychologists might deem referred depression (if such a syndrome existed.) I’m reflecting what I’m imagining Max must feel.
But it feels awfully real to me.
Damn! I wish I had better psychic boundaries, was more impervious to other people’s emotions. The NYC subways are a particular ordeal for me when I’m in this kind of state because whammo! I’m instantly inside the head of every homeless person that I lay eyes upon, and the world is a truly ugly place when viewed from that perspective.
Shortly off to do lunch and museums with Alan. Hopefully, that will help me snap out of this.
Meteorologists tell us this is El Nino, not the end times. I’m not sure I believe them.
BB’s apartment is my dream living space – just this one enormous, well-lighted airy room:
I grew up in a NYC apartment, so, in some essential sense, houses with their small, compartmentalized rooms have always felt completely alien to me.
BB will be leaving his apartment shortly, and I will miss visiting him here.
###
Max called me Tuesday in a deep funk. Feeling overwhelmed by coursework. The natural response to feeling overwhelmed, of course, is to blow things off – which backfires since then even more work piles up till you get to the point where you can’t possibly cope with it.
I’ve been there myself. Sigh…
The most pressing looming horror was a paper due Friday, which he’d made very little headway on. So, I suggested brightly that he start working on it right away and that I call him at half hour intervals to check on his progress and give him a chance to vent periodically.
Which I did.
He said that it helped, but who knows if it did really. He could have been humoring me.
He also said, “But now I feel bad because I’m behaving like a toddler, running to his Mommy.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Don’t think of me as your mother! Think of me as another human being who happens to have an encyclopedic knowledge of you because I’ve been observing you closely since you were an infant!”
I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, but I tried to say it with enough conviction so that maybe he would believe it.
The boundaries between a mother and her children are extremely permeable.
What with the three-hour time difference between New York and California, I found that I couldn’t sleep when I finally went to bed. I was filled with anxiety. I was panicking. I would drift off and immediately become besieged with these vivid hypnogogic images – one time, soldiers were knocking on my door to arrest me and as I let them into the house, I knew the rest of my life would be a Winston Smith terror of screaming interrogations, incarcerations, and the final selling out of everything I valued; another time, I was floating on a raft in the middle of an ocean, knowing that I’d never be rescued and that the next three days of dehydration would be an excruciating ordeal of horror…
Not fun.
And the ensuing hours have not been fun either. Despite a very nice lunch and gossip session with Stephen yesterday who took me to a chi-chi French restaurant and listened with the greatest of interest to my rants about dead amusement parks.
I just feel like a tremendous failure. Possibly the biggest failure who’s ever been born on this planet.
…for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain...
I’m well aware that this is what psychologists might deem referred depression (if such a syndrome existed.) I’m reflecting what I’m imagining Max must feel.
But it feels awfully real to me.
Damn! I wish I had better psychic boundaries, was more impervious to other people’s emotions. The NYC subways are a particular ordeal for me when I’m in this kind of state because whammo! I’m instantly inside the head of every homeless person that I lay eyes upon, and the world is a truly ugly place when viewed from that perspective.
Shortly off to do lunch and museums with Alan. Hopefully, that will help me snap out of this.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-02-25 03:37 pm (UTC)And you're not a failure. You lived in New York City. Anyone who can live here and not go crazy is a success.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-25 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-25 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 01:50 am (UTC)Or maybe a business: Law School COACHING! :-)
no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 01:55 am (UTC)We went to the American Folk Art Museum in Lincoln Center, which had been run out of its midtown digs by the meanies at MOMA so that all its interesting outsider art (Henry Darger!) is being warehoused. Grrrrrr! I got so caught up in the injustice of it all that I forgot about being a mother. :-)
no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 08:25 am (UTC)Oh and congratulate your son on getting Anderson Varejao on his Golden State Warriors - A.V.'s a great guy, we're sorry to see him go.