This has been an odd few months. I feel like things have been going well. I’m not quite living the dream but quite frankly I don’t have any dreams. I have no worries and that’s fine. And yet, when I sit down and ask myself some simple questions about my mood as I did for the October newsletter – how am I feeling, and why? – I find my answers don’t seem to take much of my daily experience into consideration. I’m starting to understand what it’s like for people who can’t manage their mood through their decisions alone. I’m finding it to be a jarring revelation.
How am I feeling, and why? Not well and not sure. I’ve been in a similar place before but back then I knew exactly why. Things weren’t easier in those days. I felt bad because I was injured, I felt bad because I got sacked, and I felt bad because my mom died. Always, though, I knew what was going on. I felt there was a certain benefit to understanding the cause of my mood. When things happened, I felt them, and I tried to do the next right thing. When I was out of work for two years, I felt pretty lousy most of the time, but it never concerned me. Things were going badly, so shouldn’t I have felt bad? I just focused on doing the next right thing.
It’s been a little different lately. I have no sense of how I’ve arrived here. It’s kind of like waking up with no recollection of falling asleep. When did I give up? I’m simultaneously dealing with the mundanely familiar while in the back of my head I’m untangling a knotted mess. What just happened? I’ll never know for sure, or so it seems, but I must admit in spite of myself that thinking through the problem has been interesting. I’d always thought managing my mood was just a matter of doing the next right thing. If you’d asked me in August, I would have specifically identified changing jobs. I would have explained that I expected my new job to help with the stress I’d struggled with throughout the spring. I expected that changing jobs was the next right thing. Today, I feel much better physically but the underlying unease of spring has lingered. Whether or not a change was the next right thing, it obviously wasn’t the only thing.
I sense a missing link, a missing piece that I need to understand my mood. There’s darkness where I think it is hidden. It’s the same darkness I descend into each night, eyes dreamlessly shut, and when I wake the space between my mood and my actions has grown slightly wider. Each morning, I face the same questions. Why do I expect my actions can improve my mood? Why today, when yesterday's actions had no effect on my present mood? Won't I feel tomorrow like I feel today? Each night, I return with no answers, and hope the questions were rhetorical. The next right thing to do is look for the missing piece but I don’t know how to look in the dark.
Through others, I’ve seen illuminating glimpses. We cross paths, our shared journeys obscuring different destinations, our hidden tickets prophesying the inevitable. September was full of these moments, like headlights briefly reflecting off of signposts, but as I blinked each moment had passed. These moments came as I caught up with old friends. I read once that we miss our old friends the most when we see them but I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t understood that we miss our old friends when we see them because it’s when we see them that we acknowledge what’s changed and what’s gone. They, too, have lost something in the dark. They, too, are searching without light. They are strangers to me. How terrible to lose people into themselves, to see them pulled under by their own current, to greet an impostor like an old friend. It’s perhaps worst of all when I glimpse a spark, ever so briefly, and like I’ve just woken from a dream I try to note it before I forget. I wonder if some part of my mood isn’t explained by these recognitions. I wonder if each time I glimpse a hand reaching out, I remember that no one swims out of the undertow.
I don’t mind talking to strangers and they don't mind talking to me. Our updates are collections of compromises. We don’t talk about our dreams. We gave up on our dreams. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about giving up. We gave up on it. We don’t talk about the darkness, the darkness we all share. The darkness waits for me each night. When it’s ready, I give up and I’m pulled under and I search again. I can't wake up until I find one dream. I want to wake up but I just need one dream. It doesn't need to be a good dream. A dream doesn’t need to be good. A dream doesn't need to come true. Dreams can change, they need to change. We can dream again. We need to dream again. We’re all between dreams. We’re all waiting to dream again.
